Alice O'Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-born American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, Rand achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. Considered one of the most important filmmakers of his era, Lynch was often called a "visionary" and was acclaimed for films often distinguished by their surrealist and experimental qualities. In a career spanning more than five decades, he received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2019. The adjective Lynchian came into use to describe works or situations reminiscent of his art, with the Oxford English Dictionary noting his penchant for "juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace".
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate.
Joel Daniel Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen, together known as the Coen brothers, are an American filmmaking duo. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Among their most acclaimed works are Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Terrence Frederick Malick is an American filmmaker. Malick began his career as part of the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers and received awards at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Venice International Film Festival, and nominations for three Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Cesar Award, and a Directors Guild of America Award.
Sir Christopher Edward Nolan is a British and American filmmaker. Known for his Hollywood blockbusters with complex storytelling, he is considered a leading filmmaker of the 21st century. Nolan's films have earned over $6.6 billion worldwide, making him the seventh-highest-grossing film director of all time. His accolades include two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award and two British Academy Film Awards. Nolan was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019, and received a knighthood in 2024 for his contributions to film.
David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
The Journal of Philosophy is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal on philosophy, founded in 1904 at Columbia University. Its stated purpose is "To publish philosophical articles of current interest and encourage the interchange of ideas, especially the exploration of the borderline between philosophy and other disciplines." Subscriptions and online access are managed by the Philosophy Documentation Center.
David Papineau is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught for several years at Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of Robinson College.
Bernard Elliot Rollin was an American philosopher, who was emeritus professor of philosophy, animal sciences, and biomedical sciences at Colorado State University. He is considered the "father of veterinary medical ethics".
The New German Critique is a contemporary academic journal in German studies. It is associated with the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. It "covers 20th century political and social theory, philosophy, literature, film, media and art, reading cultural texts in the light of current theoretical debates." The executive editors are David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen, and Anson Rabinbach.
David J. Kalupahana (1936–2014) was a Buddhist scholar from Sri Lanka. He was a student of the late K.N. Jayatilleke, who was a student of Wittgenstein. He wrote mainly about epistemology, theory of language, and compared later Buddhist philosophical texts against the earliest texts and tried to present interpretations that were both historically contextualised and also compatible with the earliest texts, and in doing so, he encouraged Theravada Buddhists and scholars to reevaluate the legitimacy of later, Mahayana texts and consider them more sympathetically.
Tom Lamar Beauchamp is an American philosopher specializing in the work of David Hume, moral philosophy, bioethics, and animal ethics. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University, where he was Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.
Valerio Mastandrea is an Italian film, stage and television actor.
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life is a 1995 drama film by the brothers Quay in their feature debut. Based on Robert Walser's novel Jakob von Gunten, the film stars Mark Rylance, Alice Krige and Gottfried John.
A list of books and essays about Michael Haneke:
Charles Randolph is an American screenwriter and producer for film and television. In 2015, he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay along with Adam McKay for co-writing The Big Short. In 2019, he wrote and produced the film Bombshell, which was directed by Jay Roach and starred Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie, and Nicole Kidman.
In ethics and other branches of philosophy, death poses difficult questions, answered differently by various philosophers. Among the many topics explored by the philosophy of death are suicide, capital punishment, abortion, personal identity, immortality and definition of death.
