David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist.
Derek Antony Parfit was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.
Genevieve Mary Lloyd, is an Australian philosopher and feminist.
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man (1978), when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.
Frances Power Cobbe was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, religious thinker, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading women's suffrage campaigner. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
Rational egoism is the principle that an action is rational if and only if it maximizes one's self-interest. As such, it is considered a normative form of egoism, though historically has been associated with both positive and normative forms. In its strong form, rational egoism holds that to not pursue one's own interest is unequivocally irrational. Its weaker form, however, holds that while it is rational to pursue self-interest, failing to pursue self-interest is not always irrational.
Val Plumwood was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist known for her work on anthropocentrism. From the 1970s, she played a central role in the development of radical ecosophy. Working mostly as an independent scholar, she held positions at the University of Tasmania, North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney, and at the time of her death was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University. She is included in Routledge's Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment (2001).
Women have made significant contributions to philosophy throughout the history of the discipline. Ancient examples include Maitreyi, Gargi Vachaknavi, Hipparchia of Maroneia and Arete of Cyrene. Some women philosophers were accepted during the medieval and modern eras, but none became part of the Western canon until the 20th and 21st century, when some sources indicate that Susanne Langer, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir entered the canon.
The Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford was founded in 2001. It is part of Oxford's Humanities Division. The faculty is located next to Somerville College on Woodstock Road. As of 2021, it is ranked 1st in the UK and 2nd in the English-speaking world by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, as well as 4th in the world by the QS World University Rankings. It is additionally ranked first in the UK by the Complete University Guide, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent.
Hilde Lindemann is an American philosophy professor and bioethicist and emerita professor at Michigan State University. Lindemann earned her B.A. in German language and literature in 1969 at the University of Georgia. Lindemann also earned her M.A. in theatre history and dramatic literature, in 1972, at the University of Georgia. Lindemann began her career as a copyeditor for several universities. She then moved on to a job at the Hastings Center in New York City, an institute focused on bioethics research, and co-authored book The Patient in the Family, with James Lindemann Nelson, before deciding to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at Fordham University in 2000. Previously, she taught at the University of Tennessee and Vassar College and served as the associate editor of the Hastings Center Report (1990–95). Lindemann usually teaches courses on feminist philosophy, identity and agency, naturalized bioethics, and narrative approaches to bioethics at Michigan State University.
Joan Callahan was a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, an institution where she taught for more than twenty years and served in a variety of roles, including as director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Callahan's research has focused on feminist theory, critical race theory, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and on the junctions of these topics.
Diana Meyers is a philosopher working in the philosophy of action and in the philosophy of feminism. Meyers is professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.
Eva Feder Kittay is an American philosopher. She is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (Emerita) at Stony Brook University. Her primary interests include feminist philosophy, ethics, social and political theory, metaphor, and the application of these disciplines to disability studies. Kittay has also attempted to bring philosophical concerns into the public spotlight, including leading The Women's Committee of One Hundred in 1995, an organization that opposed the perceived punitive nature of the social welfare reforms taking place in the United States at the time.
Samantha J. Brennan is a British-born philosopher and scholar of women's studies who is currently dean of the College of Arts and faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. She was previously a professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research at Western University, Canada. She remains a member of Western's Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the graduate faculty of the Departments of Political Science and of Philosophy. Brennan was Department Chair of Philosophy at Western from 2002 to 2007, and 2008–2011. She is a past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association (2017–18).
Rosemarie "Rosie" Tong is an American feminist philosopher. The author of 1998's Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, an overview of the major traditions of feminist theory, she is the emeritus distinguished professor of health care ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek is a Polish utilitarian philosopher and a university professor at the Institute of Philosophy at University of Łódź.
Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.
Feminist bioethics is a subfield of bioethics which advocates gender and social equality through the critique of existing bioethical discourse, offering unique feminist arguments and viewpoints, and pointing out gender concerns in bioethical issues.
