Thinkers Timeline

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educator. He was one of the most important thinkers in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born on 20 October 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. He studied at the University of Vermont and then earned a PhD in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. He taught first at the University of Michigan. In 1894 he moved to the new University of Chicago. In 1896 he founded the Laboratory School there. This was a small school where his new ideas about learning could be tested with real children. During his Chicago years he became close to Jane Addams at Hull House. The two thinkers shaped each other's ideas about democracy. After a dispute with the university, he resigned in 1904. He moved to Columbia University in New York, where he stayed until his retirement in 1930. At Columbia he wrote most of his major books. These included Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and Its Problems (1927), and Art as Experience (1934). He travelled widely. He spent more than two years in China (1919-1921), where he gave famous lectures. He also visited Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. In 1937 he led a public inquiry into Stalin's charges against Leon Trotsky. He helped found the NAACP, a major American civil rights organisation. He wrote over forty books and around a thousand articles. He died on 1 June 1952, aged 92.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher. Many consider him the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna, Austria, into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a powerful steel industrialist. His mother was a gifted musician. The family home was visited by composers like Brahms and Mahler. Three of his brothers died by suicide. Ludwig was first trained as an engineer in Berlin and Manchester, where he worked on aeroplane design. While studying, he became fascinated by the foundations of mathematics. In 1911 he travelled to Cambridge to work with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who quickly recognised his genius. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought bravely and was decorated. While at the front and in a prisoner-of-war camp, he wrote his first book. That book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1921. He believed it had solved all the major problems of philosophy. He gave away his vast inherited fortune and became a primary school teacher in remote Austrian villages. He also designed an austere house for his sister in Vienna. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, having decided his earlier work contained serious mistakes. He spent the rest of his life developing a very different philosophy. He served as a hospital porter during the Second World War. He died of prostate cancer in Cambridge on 29 April 1951, aged 62. His last words to his housekeeper were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life.'

Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science and politics. He was born in 1902 in Vienna into a well-off, secular Jewish family that had converted to Lutheran Christianity. His parents loved books, and Popper grew up reading widely. As a young man he tried out many of the big intellectual movements of his time. He attended Marxist meetings, studied Freudian psychology, and worked briefly with the Adlerian school of psychology. He was struck by something that bothered him for the rest of his life. The followers of these movements seemed able to explain everything. Whatever happened in the world, Marxism, Freudianism, and Adlerian theory could fit it into their system. Popper began to wonder whether this was a strength or a weakness. He trained as a teacher and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1928. In 1934 he published his first major book, Logic of Scientific Discovery, which made his name in philosophy of science. As Hitler rose to power, Popper, with his Jewish background, knew he had to leave Europe. In 1937 he took a teaching post in New Zealand. There, during the Second World War, he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, his great defence of liberal democracy. In 1946 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He was knighted in 1965. He wrote on philosophy of science, politics, the mind, and many other subjects. He died in 1994 in London at the age of 92.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French philosopher, novelist, and feminist thinker. She was born in Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she came second in the national philosophy examination, beaten only by Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifelong intellectual partner and companion. She spent most of her adult life in Paris, writing philosophy, fiction, essays, and memoirs. Her most important philosophical work is The Second Sex, published in 1949, which is one of the founding texts of modern feminist philosophy. In it she argued that women are not born inferior but are made to be subordinate through social processes, cultural norms, and internalised beliefs. She was a committed political activist throughout her life, supporting Algerian independence, signing a petition supporting the right to abortion in France at a time when this was dangerous to do, and consistently speaking out on behalf of those without power. She lived by her philosophy: her own life, including her refusal to marry and her insistence on her independence as a thinker, was a demonstration of what she argued was possible.

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was a British philosopher. She was one of the most important philosophers writing in English in the 20th century. She was born on 18 March 1919 in Limerick, Ireland, where her father was stationed with the British Army. The family moved back to England soon after. She studied at Sydenham School in south London and then at St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1937 to 1941. At Oxford she earned the highest degree in classics and philosophy. As a teenager, she read herself into Catholicism and converted, against her Anglican family's wishes. She remained a devout Catholic for the rest of her life. Her religion shaped her philosophy but did not limit it. She was also ferociously independent. As an Oxford undergraduate in 1939, she co-wrote a pamphlet arguing that Britain's entry into the Second World War was not justified. She kept this position even as most of her country and family disagreed. In 1942 she moved to Cambridge to study with Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He became her teacher and friend. She was one of very few students he trusted. When he died in 1951, he named her as one of his three literary executors. She translated his major work, Philosophical Investigations, from German into English in 1953. This translation became the standard English version and is still read today. She married the philosopher Peter Geach in 1941. They had seven children. She held positions at Oxford for almost twenty years, then moved to Cambridge in 1970 to take the chair in philosophy once held by Wittgenstein. She was a striking figure: she wore trousers and men's clothes in an era when this was unusual, smoked cigars, and did not take her husband's name. She died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001, aged 81.

Iris Murdoch was an Irish-British philosopher and novelist. She is one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century. She was also one of the most successful British novelists of her time. She published 26 novels alongside her philosophical work. She was born in 1919 in Dublin, Ireland. Her family moved to London when she was very young. She studied classics and ancient philosophy at Oxford from 1938. The Second World War interrupted her studies. She worked for the British Treasury and then for the United Nations relief agency in displaced persons camps in Europe after the war. She saw the human consequences of the war directly. The experience shaped her later thinking about moral life. In 1948 she became a philosophy fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. She taught there for many years. In 1956 she married John Bayley, a literary critic. The marriage lasted until her death and was unconventional in many ways. She had several intense relationships with both men and women throughout her life, often while married. Her first novel, Under the Net, came out in 1954. The book was successful. She continued writing novels alongside philosophy for the rest of her career. Her novels are full of complicated relationships, moral struggles, and sudden surprising events. Some readers love them. Some find them odd. Her philosophical books include The Sovereignty of Good, one of the most loved short books in 20th-century moral philosophy. In the early 1990s, she developed Alzheimer's disease. The illness slowly destroyed her ability to think and write. She died in 1999, aged 79. Her husband John Bayley wrote a famous memoir about her decline.

Mary Midgley was a British moral philosopher. She is one of the most original ethical thinkers of the 20th century. She is best known for her work on animals, evolution, science, and what makes humans morally serious. She wrote in plain language for general readers as well as academic ones. She was born in 1919 in London. She died in 2018, aged 99. She was active and writing books well into her 90s. She studied classics and philosophy at Oxford from 1938. She belonged to a remarkable generation of women philosophers there, including Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot. They all attended Oxford during the Second World War, when many male students had been called away. The reduced male presence created an unusual opportunity. Together these four women, sometimes called the Oxford Quartet, would later help reshape Anglo-American moral philosophy. After Oxford, Midgley married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley in 1950. They moved to Newcastle in northern England, where Geoffrey took a teaching post. Mary raised three sons. She did not publish her first book until she was 59. Beast and Man came out in 1978. The book was a major statement on the relationship between human beings and other animals. It launched her late and remarkable writing career. From 1978 until her death 40 years later, she wrote book after book. She criticised what she saw as scientific over-reach by figures like Richard Dawkins. She wrote about ethics, religion, evolution, and the role of myth in scientific thinking. She became known as a sharp, clear, plain-spoken critic of bad ideas. She finished her last book just months before her death at 99.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. He studied physics at Harvard University and then became interested in the history of science: how scientific ideas had actually developed over time, rather than how scientists described the process. What he found surprised him. Science did not progress smoothly by adding new facts one by one. Instead, it went through long periods of normal work, interrupted by sudden, dramatic changes when the whole way of thinking about a subject was replaced. He described this in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. It became one of the most widely read and discussed books in the history of science. Kuhn spent his career at universities including Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His ideas changed not only how people think about science but how they think about knowledge and change in many other fields too.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a middle-class family. His father was a surgeon. He was expected to follow his father into medicine but chose philosophy instead. This caused serious tension at home. As a young man, he struggled with depression and attempted suicide at least once while a student. He studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the late 1940s, where his classmates included future major thinkers like Louis Althusser. After university, he worked in Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Tunisia before returning to France. He completed his doctorate in 1961. The thesis, published as Madness and Civilization, was the first of his major books. He held teaching positions at several French universities and in 1970 was elected to the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic institution in France. His yearly lectures there, now published in full, drew large audiences. He wrote a series of major books including The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976-1984). He was openly gay in a time when this was still unusual for a public intellectual. He was politically active, involved in campaigns around prison reform, gay rights, and opposition to French immigration policy. He died of AIDS on 25 June 1984 in Paris, aged 57. He was one of the first major public figures to die of the disease.

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He is best known for a way of reading texts called deconstruction. He was born on 15 July 1930 in El-Biar, a small town near Algiers, in what was then French Algeria. His family was Sephardic Jewish. They had lived in Algeria for many generations. French was the language spoken at home. In 1942, when Derrida was twelve, his life changed. The Vichy government in France had passed anti-Jewish laws. These laws reached Algeria too. On the first day of school that year, he was told he could not come back. He was sent away because he was Jewish. He did not attend school for a whole year. He later said this moment marked him for life. After the war, he returned to school. He read hungrily. He discovered Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Sartre. In 1949 he moved to Paris. After two tries, he got into the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. This is France's top university for philosophy. He met great teachers and students there. He also met his future wife, Marguerite. He published his first major books in 1967. There were three of them in one year: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. These books made him famous, first in France and then around the world. He taught in Paris and at many universities in the United States. He wrote more than forty books in total. He died on 9 October 2004 of pancreatic cancer, aged 74.

Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, literary theorist, and novelist. He was born in Alessandria in northern Italy and studied philosophy at the University of Turin, writing a doctoral thesis on the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. He then worked in Italian public broadcasting and as a journalist before becoming a professor of semiotics, the study of signs and meaning, at the University of Bologna, where he taught for the rest of his career. He was an enormously prolific scholar who published major academic works on medieval aesthetics, semiotics, the interpretation of texts, and the philosophy of language. In 1980, when he was nearly fifty, he published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, a detective story set in a fourteenth-century Italian monastery. It became an international bestseller translated into dozens of languages, and was followed by several more novels of similar ambition. Eco was unusual in being genuinely important both as an academic philosopher and as a popular novelist, and he saw these two activities as deeply connected: both were explorations of how human beings make and interpret meaning.

Kwame Gyekye (1939-2019) was a Ghanaian philosopher. He was born in Kumasi, Ghana, and studied philosophy at the University of Ghana and Harvard University. He taught philosophy at the University of Ghana for most of his career and became one of the most important African philosophers of the twentieth century. He worked on African philosophy, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of culture. His two most important books are An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (1987), which used Akan philosophical concepts to show that African traditional thought is a genuine philosophical tradition, and Tradition and Modernity (1997), which asked how African societies should think about the relationship between their traditional values and the modern world. He is particularly important for his idea of moderate communitarianism: a view of society that values community without removing the rights of individuals.

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was a Congolese philosopher, novelist, and linguist. He was one of the most important African thinkers of the late 20th century. He was born in 1941 in Likasi, in what was then the Belgian Congo. His family was Catholic and he was educated in Catholic schools. As a young man, he entered a Benedictine monastery in Rwanda and considered becoming a monk. He left the monastery after a few years but remained interested in religion throughout his life. He studied Romance philology and philosophy, gaining a doctorate from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium in 1970. He returned to Congo and taught at universities there. In 1979, he left Congo for the United States, unable to continue working under the Mobutu dictatorship. He taught at Haverford College, then at Duke University, then at Stanford. He wrote in French and English. His academic writing was deep and difficult. He also wrote novels and poetry that many readers found more accessible. His most famous book is The Invention of Africa, published in 1988. It changed how scholars think about African studies. He followed it with The Idea of Africa in 1994 and many other books and essays. He retired from Duke University in 2014. He died on 21 April 2025, aged 83, in North Carolina. His death was widely mourned across the African intellectual community.

Bernard Mullu Narokobi was a Papua New Guinean philosopher, jurist, parliamentarian, and poet, best known for developing the concept of 'the Melanesian Way' as a guiding philosophy for newly independent Papua New Guinea. He is one of the most important political thinkers the Pacific has produced. He was born around 1943 in Wautogik village in the Prince Alexander Mountains of what is now East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. The exact date is not known; he was born during the Second World War. His people were the Arapesh. His father Anton (also known as Kukum) Narokobi had been taught by Catholic missionaries and worked as a catechist serving Boiken and Dagua villages. His mother was Maria Mokoi. Narokobi was the second eldest of five siblings. His younger brother Camillus is also a lawyer. Narokobi left home in 1960 to attend Kerevat School in New Britain, one of the first government-run schools educating Papua New Guineans at high levels. He went on to study law in Australia and became one of PNG's first generation of indigenous lawyers. He served on the Constitutional Planning Committee that drafted Papua New Guinea's constitution before independence in 1975. With John Momis and others, he drafted the National Goals and Directive Principles and Basic Social Obligations that form the preamble to the constitution. He published Foundations for Nationhood in 1975 and his most famous work, The Melanesian Way, in 1980. He served as a Member of Parliament for Wewak Open from 1987 to 1997, three terms, and held senior positions including Minister for Justice. He was a strong supporter of West Papuan independence. His wife Regina died of breast cancer in 2007. He was serving as Papua New Guinea's High Commissioner to New Zealand at the time of his own death in March 2010. He was about 67.

María Lugones (1944-2020) was an Argentine-American philosopher. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and moved to the United States as a young woman, where she completed her doctorate in philosophy and spent her career teaching at Binghamton University in New York. She was a feminist philosopher, a Latina scholar, and a community activist who worked extensively with migrant and indigenous communities in the American Southwest. She is best known for two connected contributions to philosophy. The first is her concept of world-travelling: the practice of genuinely entering another person's world to see reality as they see it, which she proposed as the foundation of a loving and just way of relating across difference. The second is her concept of the coloniality of gender: the argument that the gender system as it now exists across most of the world was imposed through colonialism, and that many indigenous and non-Western communities had very different and often more complex and flexible understandings of gender before colonial contact. She died in 2020, widely recognised as one of the most important feminist philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Cornel West is an American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual. He was born in 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in a Black Baptist family in Sacramento, California. His father was a civilian air force administrator. His mother was a teacher and later a school principal. The Black Baptist church shaped him deeply from childhood. He has often said that his thinking grew out of three traditions: the Black church, the Black freedom struggle, and the love of music, especially jazz and the blues. West entered Harvard at sixteen and graduated in three years. He went on to do an MA and PhD in philosophy at Princeton, finishing in 1980. His teachers there included the philosopher Richard Rorty, who shaped his interest in American pragmatism. After Princeton he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, then Yale, then Princeton, then Harvard, then Princeton again, then Harvard again, and is now back at Union Theological Seminary as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair. He has written more than twenty books. The best known is Race Matters (1993), a bestseller about race, democracy, and inequality in America. Democracy Matters (2004) followed. He has been a constant public presence on television, radio, and stages around the world, mixing philosophy with political activism. He has been arrested in protests for civil rights and against war. In 2024 he ran for president of the United States as an independent candidate. He continues to teach, write, and speak today.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist. They are one of the most influential thinkers in the humanities in recent decades. They were born on 24 February 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio, into a Jewish family of Hungarian and Russian descent. Their parents were active in the synagogue. Several of their mother's relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. This family history of persecution shaped Butler's later concerns with violence, grief, and vulnerable lives. As a teenager, Butler started studying philosophy in a special class at their synagogue. This was in part a punishment for disruptive behaviour. The class, taught by a rabbi, introduced them to Jewish ethics and philosophical questions. They later studied philosophy at Bennington College and Yale, where they completed a PhD in 1984 on Hegel's influence on 20th-century French thought. They have taught at several universities, including Johns Hopkins, and since 1993 at the University of California, Berkeley. Their 1990 book Gender Trouble changed how scholars think about gender. It made Butler famous and controversial. They have since written many books, including Bodies That Matter (1993), Precarious Life (2004), Frames of War (2009), and Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024). Butler is also known for their public writing on politics, including on Israel and Palestine, the war on terror, and recent global movements against queer and trans people. They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns. They are still active, writing and teaching in 2026.