History of Western Philosophy #3

Jeremy Bentham is generally regarded as the founder of this hedonistic school of ethics which seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

This German idealist philosopher is known for his dialectical method, his 1807 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, and the formative influence he had on the author of Capital and The Communist Manifesto.

This German philosopher is known for his pessimism and for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation.

The liberal utilitarian philosopher and economist is known for his works Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869).

This 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian is generally considered the first existentialist.

This co-author of The Communist Manifesto (1848) and author of Capital (1867) had a major influence on politics, political theory, economics, and other social sciences that continues to this day.

This American philosopher and psychologist was one of the founders of pragmatism and is also known for The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

This 19th century German philosopher had a major influence on existentialism, post-structuralism, and other 20th and 21st century continental philosophical traditions, and is probably best known for his books Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality, and The Antichrist.

This 19th and 20th century German thinker was the principal pioneer of phenomenology, a method which seeks to study the phenomena of consciousness as they occur, independent of whether they have any external or objective existence.

This British atheist helped pioneer analytic philosophy along with Gottlob Frege and G.E. Moore, cowrote Principia Mathematica along with Alfred North Whitehead, advocated a single world government, and was an outspoken critic of militarism, imperialism, and censorship.

This author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) coined the term "language games" in the latter to describe how, according to him, the meaning of words and sentences can only be determined by understanding the rules of the discourses in which they are used.

In Being and Time (1927), this thinker, whose reputation was later tarnished due to his membership in the Nazi Party, rejected the Cartesian notion that people are passive spectators of an objective world and instead argued that humans have a unique mode of being in the world (Dasein in German) in which subject and object are inseparable.

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, this Austrian-British thinker argued that falsifiability is the criterion that demarcates genuine science from pseudoscience. Later, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, he criticized teleological historicism and three thinkers who he regarded as the most prominent teleological historicists in Western Philosophy.

While she has generally not been taken seriously by academics, this author of the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and the nonfiction works For the New Intellectual (1961) and The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) has been one of the most influential thinkers of the last century, especially in the United States.

This existentialist philosopher and author of The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949) had a close personal and professional relationship with fellow existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

This American philosopher is best known for his essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), wherein he challenged the analytic-synthetic distinction, which was the dominant epistemological position in the analytic tradition at the time.

Historians of philosophy classify this French-Algerian thinker who wrote The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Stranger (1942) as either an absurdist or an existentialist, depending on the source.

This American thinker is best known for A Theory of Justice (1971), in which, to illustrate his notion of justice as fairness, he posited a thought experiment known as the "original position" wherein people decide what kind of society they would want to live in if they didn't know their social position in that society beforehand.

This adjective, which the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard defined as "incredulity towards metanarratives," is today often used as a catch-all term for post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and similar philosophical approaches that came to prominence in France in the mid-20th century.

This French post-structuralist is best known for exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in works such as Madness and Civilization (1961), Discipline and Punish (1975), and The History of Sexuality (1976).

As a linguist, he is known for arguing that people are born with an innate and genetically determined language faculty. As a political theorist, he is known for his critiques of capitalism, U.S. foreign policy, and the news media and his advocacy of anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Throughout his works, including Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena (all 1967), this French-Algerian deconstructionist sought to challenge the prevailing assumptions underlying Western culture as he understood them.