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.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher. He is one of the most widely read living philosophers and one of the most controversial. He was born on 6 July 1946 in Melbourne, Australia. His parents were Austrian Jews who had escaped Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Three of his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. This family history shaped his lifelong concern with preventable suffering. He studied law, history, and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, then went to Oxford for his graduate work. It was at Oxford in the early 1970s that he began serious work on the ethics of how humans treat animals. His 1975 book Animal Liberation became a founding text of the modern animal rights movement. It has sold over half a million copies and has been translated into many languages. He has taught at La Trobe University in Australia, Monash University, New York University, and since 1999 at Princeton University in the United States, where he holds the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics. His appointment at Princeton caused controversy. Disability rights activists protested some of his views on severely disabled newborns. He has written or edited more than forty books and hundreds of articles. His most influential are Animal Liberation (1975), Practical Ethics (1979), The Life You Can Save (2009), and The Most Good You Can Do (2015). He co-founded The Life You Can Save organisation, which encourages effective giving to reduce global poverty. He is one of the founding figures of the effective altruism movement. He is still active in his late seventies.

Martha Craven Nussbaum is an American philosopher. She is one of the most influential and widely read philosophers of the past fifty years. She was born on 6 May 1947 in New York City. Her family was wealthy and Protestant, with roots in the American South. She later said her comfortable childhood made her acutely aware of inequality and the contingencies of privilege. She converted to Judaism in 1969. She studied classics at New York University and earned her PhD from Harvard in 1975. Her doctoral work was on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle. Classical scholarship has remained central to her work throughout her career. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and, since 1995, at the University of Chicago, where she holds a joint appointment in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. She has written more than thirty books and hundreds of articles. Her major works include The Fragility of Goodness (1986) on ancient Greek ethics, Women and Human Development (2000) on her capabilities approach, Upheavals of Thought (2001) on emotions, and Political Emotions (2013) on how societies cultivate good feelings. She has worked with the economist Amartya Sen on the capabilities approach to human development, which has influenced the United Nations Human Development Index. She has been a public intellectual throughout her career. She has written on women's rights, LGBT equality, disability, animal welfare, and the role of emotions in law and politics. She has received many honours, including the Kyoto Prize and the Berggruen Prize. She is still active, writing and teaching in 2026.