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• 
  

• 
  Arte
  Arte (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne) is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts. Its facilities are located in Issy-les-Moulineaux, South of Paris and Strasbourg (headquarters) in France and Baden-Baden in Germany.
  Because it is an international joint venture (an EEIG), programs cater technically to audiences from both countries. This implies double-titling, opposite-language subtitling and dubbing, hosts speaking both languages alternately and generally two separate audio tracks (available through DVB-T, satellite television and digital cable).
  Arte began transmission in 1992, filling frequencies left unused by the demise of La Cinq, the first French commercial television network (created in 1986).
  Programs are created by Arte France formerly known as La Sept (theoretically La Société d'édition des programmes de télévision, but also a play on words, given that the name intuitively means the seventh network and indeed La Sept existed while the fifth network was still La Cinq; it made satellite television programs at the time) and by ARTE Deutschland GmbH, a subsidiary of the two main public German TV networks ARD and ZDF.
  
  wn.com/Arte
• 
  France
  France (English ⁱ/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] ( listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 sq mi).
  Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.
  
  wn.com/France
• Lycée Carnot
  The Lycée Carnot is a public secondary and higher education school located at 145 Boulevard Malesherbes in the 17th arrondissement, Paris, France. A prestigious Parisian high school, it is also known^{[by whom?]} as one the best classe préparatoire aux écoles de commerce. Some of its former students have been among the most influential personalities in the country, including Jacques Chirac, the former French President, and Pascal Lamy, the current^[when?] president of the World Trade Organisation.
  Coordinates: 48°53′02″N 2°18′27″E / 48.88389°N 2.3075°E / 48.88389; 2.3075
  
  
  
  wn.com/Lycée_Carnot
• 
  Lycée Henri IV
  The Lycée Henri-IV is a public secondary school located in Paris. Along with Louis-le-Grand it is widely regarded as one of the most demanding sixth-form colleges (lycées) in France.
  The school has more than 2,500 pupils from collège (the first four years of secondary education in France) to classes préparatoires (classes to prepare students for entrance to the elite Grandes écoles).
  Its motto is "Domus Omnibus Una" ("One House For All").
  
  
  Lycée Henri-IV is located in the former royal Abbey of St Genevieve, in the heart of the Latin Quarter on the left bank of the river Seine, near the Panthéon, the church Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, and the rue Mouffetard. Rich in history, architecture, and culture, the Latin Quarter encompasses France's oldest and the most prestigious educational establishments: the École Normale Supérieure, the Sorbonne, the Collège de France and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
  The abbey was first established in 506; it flourished as a consequence of royal patronage, becoming an integral part of the Sorbonne and housing a great library. The abbey was suppressed during the French Revolution and, in October 1796, the site became the École Centrale du Panthéon, the first of many public schools in France. The lycée has changed its name several times since its inception – École Centrale du Panthéon (1794–1804); Lycée Napoléon (1804–1815); Collège Henri IV,(1815–1848); Lycée Napoléon (1848–1870) and Lycée Corneille (1870–1872) – before its current name was settled on in 1973.
  
  wn.com/Lycée_Henri_IV
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  Lycée Louis le Grand
  Coordinates: 48°50′53″N 2°20′40.3″E / 48.84806°N 2.344528°E / 48.84806; 2.344528
  The Lycée Louis-le-Grand (French pronunciation: [lise lwi lə ɡʁɑ̃]) is a public secondary school located in Paris, widely regarded as one of the most rigorous in France. Formerly known as the Collège de Clermont, it was renamed in King Louis XIV of France's honor after he visited the school and offered his patronage.
  It offers both a sixth-form college curriculum (as a lycée with 800 pupils), and a post-secondary-level curriculum (classes préparatoires with 900 students), preparing students for entrance to the elite Grandes Écoles. Students at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand are called magnoludoviciens.
  Louis-le-Grand, founded in 1563, is located in the heart of the Quartier Latin, the traditional student's area of Paris. Rich in history, architecture, culture, this area is home to some of the oldest and most prestigious educational establishments in France including the Sorbonne and the Collège de France.
  Louis-le-Grand plays an important role in the education of French elites. Many of its former pupils have become statesmen, diplomats, prelates, marshals of France, members of the Académie française, and men and women of letters. "The Jesuit College of Paris", wrote Élie de Beaumont in 1862, "has for a long time been a state nursery, the most fertile in great men". Indeed Molière, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo are former students who became famous writers, and Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and Jacques Chirac, all presidents of the French Fifth Republic, spent time on the benches of Louis-le-Grand. Renowned foreign students of the Lycée include King Nicholas I of Montenegro and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal.
  
  wn.com/Lycée_Louis_le_Grand
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  Paris
  Coordinates: 48°51′24″N 2°21′03″E / 48.8567°N 2.3508°E / 48.8567; 2.3508
  Paris (ⁱ/ˈpærɨs/; French: [paʁi] ( listen)) is the capital and largest city of France. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region (or Paris Region, French: Région parisienne). As of January 2008 the city of Paris, within its administrative limits (the 20 arrondissements) largely unchanged since 1860, has an estimated population of 2,211,297 and a metropolitan population of 12,089,098, and is one of the most populated metropolitan areas in Europe. Paris was the largest city in the Western world for about 1,000 years, prior to the 19th century, and the largest in the entire world between the 16th and 19th centuries.
  Paris is today one of the world's leading business and cultural centres, and its influences in politics, education, entertainment, media, fashion, science, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities. It hosts the headquarters of many international organizations such as UNESCO, the OECD, the International Chamber of Commerce or the European Space Agency. Paris is considered one of the greenest and most liveable cities in Europe. It is also one of the most expensive.
  
  wn.com/Paris
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  University of Paris
  The University of Paris (French: Université de Paris) was a university located in Paris, France, and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid-12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250. After many changes, including a century of suspension (1793–1896), it ceased to exist in 1970 and 13 autonomous universities (University of Paris I–XIII) were created from it. The university is often referred to as the Sorbonne or La Sorbonne after the collegiate institution (Collège de Sorbonne) founded about 1257 by Robert de Sorbon. In fact, the university as such was older and was never completely centered on the Sorbonne. Of the 13 current successor universities, the first four have a presence in the historical Sorbonne building, and three include "Sorbonne" in their names.
  The universities in Paris are now essentially independent of each other, and some fall under the Académie of Créteil or the Académie of Versailles rather than the Académie of Paris. Some residual administrative functions of the 13 universities are formally supervised by a common chancellor, the Rector of the Académie of Paris, with offices in the Sorbonne. As of 2006, Maurice Quénet is the Rector of the Academy of Paris and Chancellor of the Universities of Paris. The Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of Paris is Pierre Gregory. Despite this link, and the historical ties, there is no University of Paris system that binds the universities at an academic level.
  
  wn.com/University_of_Paris
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  Vincennes
  Coordinates: 48°50′52″N 2°26′21″E / 48.8478°N 2.4392°E / 48.8478; 2.4392
  Vincennes (French pronunciation: [vɛ̃sɛn]) is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located 6.7 km (4.2 mi) from the centre of Paris. It is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Europe.
  The Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in Vincennes fortress in 1777, where he remained (mainly: he escaped for a little over a month in 1778), until February 1784, when Vincennes fortress was closed and de Sade was transferred to the Bastille. In 1929, the commune of Vincennes lost about half of its territory when the city of Paris annexed the Bois de Vincennes, a large part of which belonged to the commune of Vincennes.
  In 1849, a test was conducted on Claude-Étienne Minié's invention the Minié ball which would prove successful and years later be adopted by the French army. Vincennes was also the site of some famous European colonial expositions in the 20th century in which fairs were held to showcase artifacts from former European colonies.
  
  wn.com/Vincennes

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  Alain Badiou
  Alain Badiou (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ badju]  (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).
  Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Politically, Badiou is committed to the far left, and to the communist tradition.
  Slavoj Žižek has written of Badiou that he is "a figure like Plato or Hegel walk[ing] here among us".
  Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1957–1961). He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault, and published a couple of novels before moving to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969. Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l’Analyse. By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)", and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".
  
  wn.com/Alain_Badiou
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  Alain Resnais
  Alain Resnais (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; born 3 June 1922) is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.
  He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave or nouvelle vague, though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the 'Left Bank group' of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.
  
  wn.com/Alain_Resnais
• Alan Sokal
  Alan David Sokal (/ˈsoʊkəl/; born 1955) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University's Social Text.
  Sokal received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. He was advised by Arthur Wightman. In the summers of 1986-1988, Sokal taught mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas were heading the elected government.
  Sokal’s research lies in mathematical physics and combinatorics. In particular, he studies the interplay between these fields based on questions arising in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. This includes work on the chromatic polynomial and the Tutte polynomial, which appear both in algebraic graph theory and in the study of phase transitions in statistical mechanics. His interests include computational physics and algorithms, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for problems in statistical physics. He also co-authored a book on quantum triviality.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Sokal
• 
  Albert Camus
  Albert Camus (French pronunciation: [albɛʁ kamy] ( listen); 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay "The Rebel" that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.
  Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."
  In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.
  Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times". He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Camus
• 
  Alexander Bard
  Alexander Bengt Magnus Bard (born 17 March 1961) is a Swedish artist, music producer and writer.
  Bard was born Alexander Bengt Magnus Bard in Medevi, Motala Municipality, Sweden.^{[citation needed]} After he had completed his upper secondary education, Bard studied in the United States and in Amsterdam, Netherlands. While living in Amsterdam, he earned part of his living as a sex worker. Bard returned to Sweden to study at the Stockholm School of Economics from 1984 to 1988. In addition to his studies in Economics, he took a strong interest in Philosophy and Social Theory with the explicit aim of becoming a writer and lecturer.
  Bard has written three books on the internet revolution, collectively known as The Futurica Trilogy, together with media theorist Jan Söderqvist. Their first collaboration The Netocrats was originally released in Swedish in 2000, became available in English in 2003, and has since been translated to a further 16 languages with total worldwide sales exceeding 340,000 copies. The second book The Global Empire was originally released in Swedish in 2003, while the third installment of the trilogy The Body Machines was originally published in Swedish in 2009. These latter two works were released in English in 2012, completing The Futurica Trilogy, in which the authors present their philosophical vision for a global and increasingly virtual society, as a consequence of the interactive revolution.
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Bard
• Alexandre Kojève
  Alexandre Kojève (Russian: Алекса́ндр Влади́мирович Коже́вников, Aleksandr Vladimirovič Koževnikov; April 28, 1902 – June 4, 1968) was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on twentieth-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the creation of the European Union. Kojève was a close friend of, and was in lifelong philosophical dialogue with, Leo Strauss.
  Kojève was born in Russia to a wealthy and influential family. His uncle was the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, about whose work he would write an influential essay in 1936. He was educated in Berlin and Heidelberg, Germany. He completed his Ph.D., on the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev's views on the union of God and man in Christ under the direction of Karl Jaspers. Early influences included the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the historian of science Alexandre Koyré. Kojève spent most of his life in France, and from 1933 to 1939, he delivered in Paris a series of lectures on Georg Hegel's work Phenomenology of Spirit. After World War II, Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the chief planners of the European Common Market.
  
  wn.com/Alexandre_Kojève
• Angela Bulloch
  Angela Bulloch (born 1966 in Rainy River, Ontario, Canada), is an artist who often works with sound and installation; she is recognised as one of the Young British Artists.
  studied at Goldsmiths' College, London (1985–1988) and was included in the Freeze Exhibition, 1988. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, part of an all-female shortlist that also included Cornelia Parker, Christine Borland and Gillian Wearing (who won the prize that year). For the Turner Prize exhibition, Bulloch exhibited her playful artwork called Rules Series.
  Bulloch has used video, sound and light to explore pre-edited systems. Many of her works make use of biofeedback systems. Such as in her 1994 work Betaville, a machine painting vertical and horizontal stripes on a wall, was triggered whenever someone sat on the bench in front of it.
  
  wn.com/Angela_Bulloch
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  Antonio Gramsci
  Antonio Gramsci (Italian pronunciation: [anˈtɔːnjo ˈɡramʃi]) (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician, political theorist, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
  Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist thinkers in the 20th century. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership and he is notable as a highly original thinker within modern European thought. He is renowned for his concept of cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society.
  Gramsci was born in Ales, on the island of Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci (1860–1937), a low-level official from Gaeta, and his wife, Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932). Gramsci's father was of Arbëreshë, Albanian descent, while his mother belonged to a local landowning family. The senior Gramsci's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in Ghilarza.
  
  wn.com/Antonio_Gramsci
• 
  Antonio Negri
  Antonio Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.
  Negri is best known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia. As one of the most popular theorists of Autonomism, he has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
  He was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing terrorist groupRed Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), involved in the May 1978 assassination of Aldo Moro, two-time Prime Minister of Italy, and leader of the Christian-Democrat Party, among others. Voice evidence suggested Negri made a threatening phone call on behalf of the BR, but the court was unable to conclusively prove his ties. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing terrorism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
  
  wn.com/Antonio_Negri
• 
  Aristotle
  Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
  Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
  
  wn.com/Aristotle
• 
  Arthur Schopenhauer
  Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
  Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied. The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity, was the only way to attain liberation.
  Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein,Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Schopenhauer
• 
  Averroism
  Averroism is the term applied to either of two philosophical trends among scholastics in the late 13th century: (a) the Arab philosopher Averroës or Ibn Rushd's interpretations of Aristotle and his reconciliation of Aristotelianism with Islamic faith; and (b) the application of these ideas in the Latin Christian and Jewish intellectual traditions, such as Siger of Brabant, Boetius of Dacia, and Maimonides. The term was originally coined by Ernst Renan.
  Averroes at the time of Dante Alighieri was probably the most widely condemned thinker in the medieval Christian world... Averroism became virtually synonymous with atheism in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance . As an historiographical category it was first developed by Ernest Renan in Averroès et l'averroïsme (1852). Later historians applied the name to significant uses and expressions of elements of Averroes' doctrines and to the exegetical tradition of Aristotle by Jewish and Christian thinkers as it had come down through the Latin and Hebrew traditions. "Averroist" can therefore describe a range of positions, up to and including scholars interested in the historical phenomenon of Averroes' influence^{[citation needed]}.
  
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• 
  Avicenna
  Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Persian پورسينا Pur Sina [ˈpuːr ˈsiːnɑː] "son of Sina"; c. 980, Afshana near Bukhara– 1037, Hamadan, Iran), commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persianpolymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.
  His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650. Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).
  His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.
  
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• 
  Baruch Spinoza
  Baruch Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment^{[citation needed]} and modern biblical criticism, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely." Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
  Spinoza's name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means "the Blessed". Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.
  
  wn.com/Baruch_Spinoza
• Brian Massumi
  Brian Massumi (born 1956) is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987. He is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali's Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.
  Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with Hexagram: Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. They co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.
  Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department. Brian Massumi has taught and lectured internationally at Cornell University (2010),European Graduate School (2010), University of Helsinki/Turku (2009), Goldsmiths', University of London (2008) and University of California, Los Angeles (2000). In 2009 / 2010 Brian Massumi was a Senior Scholar in Residence at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
  
  wn.com/Brian_Massumi
• 
  Carl Schmitt
  Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 – April 7, 1985) was a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.
  Schmitt published several essays, influential in the 20th century and beyond, on the mentalities that surround the effective wielding of political power. His ideas have attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Étienne Balibar, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Gianfranco Miglio, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes, Gillian Rose, Chantal Mouffe, Eric Voegelin, Reinhart Koselleck, Álvaro d'Ors, and Paul Gottfried. Much of his work, especially from the Weimar period, remains both influential and controversial today.
  Schmitt, whose father was a minor businessman, was the son of Roman Catholic parents from the German Eifel region who settled in Plettenberg, Westphalia. He studied law in Berlin, Munich and Strasbourg and took his graduation and state exams in the then-German Strasbourg in 1915. He volunteered for the army in 1916. The same year, he earned his habilitation in Strasbourg. He taught at various business schools and universities - in Munich, Greifswald, Bonn, Berlin, and Cologne.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Schmitt
• Carmelo Bene
  Carmelo Bene (1 September 1937 – 16 March 2002) was an Italian actor, film director and screenwriter.
  In 1979 he wrote, in collaboration with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the essay "Superpositions".
  
  wn.com/Carmelo_Bene
• Carsten Höller
  Carsten Höller (born December 1961 in Brussels, Belgium) is a German artist. He lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Today, he also shares a house in Ghana with colleague Marcel Odenbach.
  Born to German parents working for the European Economic Community, Höller grew up in Brussels. He holds a doctorate in agricultural science, specializing in the area of insects' olfactory communication strategies, from University of Kiel; the title of his dissertation is "Efficiency Analysis of the Parasitoids of Cereal Aphids". Only during the late 1980s did he first begin making art. However, he has been working as a research entomologist until 1994.
  Höller came to prominence in the 1990s alongside a group of artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel who worked across disciplines to reimagine the experience and the space of art. In his work, Höller creates situations which question familiar forms of perception and allow exhibition visitors to experiment on themselves, often inviting the public's active participation in so-called “influential environments”. In their form, Höller's works are occasionally reminiscent of scientific laboratory arrangements, allowing the viewer to become the subject of an experiment. His work since the early 1990s has encompassed buildings, vehicles, slides, toys, games, narcotics, animals, performances, lectures, 3D films, flashing lights, mirrors, eye-wear and sensory deprivation tanks.
  
  wn.com/Carsten_Höller
• Charles Esche
  Charles Esche (born 1962, England) is a curator and writer. Since 2004, he has been Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. He is co-founder and co-editor of Afterall Journal and Afterall Books with Mark Lewis. Afterall is a contemporary art publication which was first launched in 1998 and is based at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.
  In 2011, he co-curated Strange and Close for CAPC, Bordeaux. In 2010, he curated U3, the Slovenian Triennale in Ljubljana. In 2009 and 2007 he was co-curator with Khalil Rabah of the 2nd RIWAQ Biennial, Ramallah, Palestine. In 2005 he was co-curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial with Vasif Kortun[1] and in 2002 the co-curator with Hou Hanru and Song Wan Kyung of the Gwangju Biennale[2], Republic of Korea. Between 2000 and 2004 he was the Director of Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden.
  His main work has involved working on the constitution of art institutions, most recently the museum but also the qualities of the art centre or biennial. His writings on institutional possibility and policy are useful aids to rethinking the relation between art and social change. A valuable book is the reader Art and Social Change published by Afterall and Tate Publishing and co-edited by Esche and Will Bradley. He also co-edited a reader called The Netherlands, for example with Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova for the 2007 Venice Biennale. He has written for many art catalogues and magazines and a selection of his texts was published in 2005 under the title Modest Proposals by Baglam Press, Istanbul in Turkish and English, edited by Serkan Ozkaya. In 2012 he received the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Esche
• 
  Dan Graham
  Born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942, Dan Graham grew up in New Jersey. In 1964 he began directing the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he put on Sol LeWitt's first one-man show, and in groups shows, exhibited works of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson. Like these artists, Graham considered himself a writer-artist, publishing essays and reviews on rock music, Eisenhower's paintings, and Dean Martin's television show. His earliest work dealt with the magazine page, predating but often associated with Conceptual art. His work often focuses on cultural phenomena, and incorporates photography, video, performance, glass and mirror structures. He has exhibited and realized commissions all around the world, including participation at numerous international group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1976, 2003, 2004 and 2005) and documenta V, VI, VII, IX and X (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992 and 1997). Major retrospectives of his oeuvre have been staged in Europe (2001–02) and in the U.S. (2009), showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Dan Graham lives and works in New York.
  
  wn.com/Dan_Graham
• Daniel Birnbaum
  Daniel Birnbaum (born in Stockholm, 1963) is the director of the Moderna Museet, the museum of modern art in Stockholm.
  Birnbaum studied at the Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin and Columbia University in New York. He obtained a Ph.D. from the Stockholm University in 1998. In 1998, he completed his doctorate in philosophy at the Stockholm University. Subsequently he became director of the Swedish “International Artists Studio Program” (IASPIS), a position he held well into the year 2000. Between 2001 and 2010, Birnbaum held the position of Rector at the Städelschule fine arts academy in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. During that time, he also served as director of Portikus, an exhibition space at the Staedelschule since 1987. In 2008, he was a member of the Turner Prize jury.
  In 2007, Birnbaum published ‘Teaching Art: Staedelschule Frankfurt am Main’ and has subsequently written on Olafur Eliasson, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cerith Wyn Evans and Paul Chan. His latest book is ‘Under Pressure’ (Frankfurt 2008). In addition to articles published in international art magazines such as Artforum and Frieze, he also produced a series of academic texts and translations on Novalis, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida and Thomas Bernhard.
  
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• 
  David Hume
  David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
  Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
  
  wn.com/David_Hume
• Douglas Gordon
  Douglas Gordon (born 20 September, 1966) is a Scottish artist; he won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the following year he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. He lives and works in New York.
  Gordon was born in Glasgow and studied art first there (at the Glasgow School of Art) from 1984-1988 and later at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, from 1988-1990.
  Much of Gordon's work is seen as being about memory and uses repetition in various forms. He uses material from the public realm and also creates performance-based videos. His work often overturns traditional uses of video by playing with time elements and employing multiple monitors.
  In one early work, Meaning and Location (1990), a passage from the Gospel of Luke is given with a comma in different places, thus subtly changing the meaning of the sentence. List of Names (1990-present) is a list of every person Gordon has ever met and can remember. One version of this is applied onto the wall of a stairwell in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
  
  wn.com/Douglas_Gordon
• Douglas Kellner
  Douglas Kellner (born 1943) is a “third generation” critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally^{[citation needed]}. In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by the forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle. He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes, and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society
  Kellner has written with a number of authors, including (with Steven Best) an award-winning trilogy of books on postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and in science and technology. More recently, he is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate what they term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy. Previously, Kellner served as the literary executor of the famed documentary film maker Emile de Antonio and is presently overseeing the publication of six volumes of the collected papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. At present, Kellner is the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
  
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• 
  Duns Scotus
  John (Johannes, Ioannes) Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (c. 1256 – November 18, 1308) was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was given the medieval accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.
  Scotus has had considerable influence on Roman Catholic thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being," that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate conception of Mary.
  Little is known of Scotus' life. He was probably born in 1265, probably at Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland. In 1291 he was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England. A note in Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, records that Scotus "flourished at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris in the Autumn of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with then Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with Philip the Fair of France, over the taxation of church property.
  
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• 
  Edmund Husserl
  Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (German pronunciation: [ˈhʊsɛʁl]; April 8, 1859, Proßnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire – April 26, 1938, Freiburg, Germany) was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic. Not limited to empiricism, but believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, he worked on a method of phenomenological reduction by which a subject may come to know directly an essence.
  Although born into a Jewish family, Husserl was baptized as a Lutheran in 1886. He studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl himself taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928. Thereafter he gave two notable lectures: at Paris in 1929, and at Prague in 1935. The notorious 1933 race laws of the Nazi regime took away his academic standing and privileges. Following an illness, he died at Freiburg in 1938.
  
  wn.com/Edmund_Husserl
• 
  Emmanuel Levinas
  Emmanuel Levinas (French pronunciation: [leviˈna, leviˈnas]; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher and Talmudic commentator of Lithuanian Jewish origin.
  Born into a Litvak family Emanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French orthography as Emmanuel Levinas) received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After the Second World War, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani", whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life.
  Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
  
  wn.com/Emmanuel_Levinas
• Eric Troncy
  Éric Troncy (born in 1965) is a French curator and Art critic who works and lives in Dijon, France, he co-directs the Contempory Art Museum, Le Consortium, in Dijon, Burgandy. He is co-founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art (1992–2000) with Nicolas Bourriaud, and of Frog Magazine (2008 - ) with Stephanie Moisdon.
  Born in Nevers, Troncy went to the famous Parisian art school, l'École du Louvre and then on to École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
  He is best known internationally for curating the trilogy Dramatically Different, Weather Everything and Coollustre, between 1997 and 2003, defined by Éric Troncy, as an "exposition d’auteur" (as one would say "un film d’auteur"), the exhibition is curated as a succession of scenes in which the actors and landscapes are the works themselves.
  The method is the same for all three exhibitions : a precise choice of works from over the last 40 years, some known to the public, others that have only been seen as reproductions, sometimes never at all, is presented in small assemblies, voluntarily narrative.' Presenting itself as a temporary collection, it also addresses questions on hanging and display.
  
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• 
  Ernst Cassirer
  Ernst Cassirer (German pronunciation: [kaˈsiːʁəʁ]; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading C20th advocates of philosophical idealism.
  Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After working for many years as a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he was elected in 1919 to the Philosophy chair at the newly-founded University of Hamburg, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Because he was Jewish, he left Germany when the Nazis came to power.
  After leaving Germany he taught for a couple of years in Oxford, before becoming a professor at Gothenburg University. When Cassirer considered Sweden too unsafe, he applied for a post at Harvard, but was rejected because thirty years earlier he had rejected a job offer from them. In 1941 he became a visiting professor at Yale University, before moving to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945.
  
  wn.com/Ernst_Cassirer
• Ferdinand Alquié
  Ferdinand Alquié ( pronunciation (help·info); born Carcassonne, Aude, 10 December 1906-Montpellier, 28 February 1985) was a French philosopher and member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.
  He taught at the lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the Sorbonne university. He was an instructor of Gilles Deleuze, who, according to Michael Hardt, charged him of drawing on biology, psychology, and other fields, neglecting philosophy. Deleuze said to his former teacher, "Your other reproach touches me even more. Because I believe entirely in the specificity of philosophy and I owe this conviction to you yourself."^{[citation needed]} Alquié also directed Deleuze's secondary thesis, "Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza." He has published many books about Descartes, Kant and Spinoza, as well as a book on Nicolas Malebranche. He was close to André Breton and wrote Philosophy of Surrealism (1955).
  He has often been considered as opposed to Martial Guéroult especially during a polemic about Descartes and also about Spinoza.
  
  wn.com/Ferdinand_Alquié
• Franco Berardi
  Franco "Bifo" Berardi (born November 2, 1948, in Bologna, Italy) is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist working in the autonomist tradition and mainly focusing on the role of the media and information technology in post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches.
  In 1962, at the age of 14, Berardi became a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation, but was expelled due to "factionalism." He participated in the events of May '68 at the University of Bologna, where he graduated with a degree in Aesthetics. During this time he joined the extra-parliamentary Worker's Power group. Berardi founded the magazine A/traverso in 1975 and worked with the magazine until 1981, when it reached its high point of publishing. He was also part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy, from 1976 to 1978. Like others involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, Berardi fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s, Berardi contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). During the 1990s, he published Mutazione e Ciberpunk (Genoa, 1993), Cibernauti (Rome, 1994), and Félix (Rome, 2001). Currently he is working with the magazine Derive Approdi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and of the telestreet movement, founding the channel Orfeo TV.
  
  wn.com/Franco_Berardi
• 
  Franz Kafka
  Franz Kafka (German pronunciation: [fʁants ˈkafka]; 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an influential German-language author of novels and short stories. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.
  Kafka was born to middle class, German-speaking, Jewish parents, in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.
  Most of Kafka's writing, including the large body of his unfinished work, was published posthumously.
  Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Prague (now the Czech Republic). His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer, and came to Prague from Osek, a Czech-speaking Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856–1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.
  
  wn.com/Franz_Kafka
• 
  Franz West
  Franz West (born 1947 in Vienna) is an Austrian artist.
  West studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Bruno Gironcoli.
  His art practice started as a reaction to the Viennese Actionism movement has been exhibited in museums and galleries for more than three decades. Over the last 20 years he had a regular presence in big expositions like Documenta and the Venice Biennale.
  
  The Baltimore Museum of Art with help from former Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Darsie Alexander, hosted the very first "comprehensive survey" to ever been done in the U.S. of Franz West's artwork which contained his latest artwork designed specifically for the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Igo and the Id. – which "consists of two configurations of rumpled, ribbon-like loops rising some 20 feet high. One is bright pink, the other neatly painted in blocks of green, yellow, blue and orange. Both have round stools projecting from the lower ends of the loops."
  West's artwork is made out of plaster, papier-mâché, wire, polyester, aluminium and other, ordinary materials. He started to produce paintings, but then turned to collages, sculptures, portable sculptures called "Adaptives" or "Fitting Pieces", environments and furniture – "welded metal chairs and divans, some minimally padded and upholstered in raw linen."
  
  wn.com/Franz_West
• François Tosquelles
  François Tosquelles (Reus, August 22, 1912 - Granges-sur-Lot, September 25, 1994) was a Catalan psychiatrist. He is credited as one of the creators of institutional psychotherapy, an influential movement in the second half of the 20th century.
  
  
  
  wn.com/François_Tosquelles
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  Friedrich Nietzsche
  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( /ˈniːtʃə/;German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtsʃə]; October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, cultural critic and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.
  Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be.
  
  wn.com/Friedrich_Nietzsche
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  Félix Guattari
  Pierre-Félix Guattari  Pronunciation (help·info) (April 30, 1930 – August 29, 1992) was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy. Guattari is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
  Guattari was born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, a working-class suburb of north-west Paris, France. He trained under (and was analysed by) the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s. Subsequently, he worked (until his death from a heart attack in 1992) at the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde under the direction of Lacan's pupil, the psychiatrist Jean Oury. La Borde was a venue for conversation among many students of philosophy, psychology, ethnology, and social work.
  One particularly novel orientation developed at La Borde consisted of the suspension of the classical analyst/analysand pair in favour of an open confrontation in group therapy. In contrast to the Freudian school's individualistic style of analysis, this practice studied the dynamics of several subjects in complex interaction; it led Guattari into a broader philosophical exploration of, and political engagement with, a vast array of intellectual and cultural domains (philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, architecture, etc.).
  
  wn.com/Félix_Guattari
• Gabriel Marcel
  Gabriel Honoré Marcel (7 December 1889 – 8 October 1973) was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and author of about 30 plays.
  He focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society. Though often regarded as the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, preferring the term Philosophy of Existence to define his own thought. The Mystery of Being is a well-known two-volume work authored by Marcel.
  In addition to being a playwright and philosopher, Marcel was also a music critic.
  Marcel was born and died in Paris. His mother died when he was young and he was brought up by his aunt and father. When he was eight he moved to Stockholm for a year where his father was Minister Plenipotentiary.
  Marcel obtained the agrégation in philosophy in 1910, at the unusually young age of 21. During the First World War he worked as head of the Information Service, organised by the Red Cross to convey news of injured soldiers to their families. He taught in secondary schools, was a drama critic for various literary journals, and worked as an editor for Plon, the major French Catholic publisher.
  
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  Gabriel Orozco
  Gabriel Orozco (born April 27, 1962) is a Mexican artist, who in 1998 was called "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984. He then continued his education in Madrid at the Circulo de Bellas Artes between 1986 and 1987. A constant world traveler since 1991, Orozco and wife Maria Gutierrez, along with their son Simón, divide their time between Paris, New York and Mexico City.
  Orozco's exploration of the use of video, drawings, and installations in addition to his photographs and sculptures, allows the audience's imagination to explore the creative associations between oft-ignored objects in today's world. His work permits a rarely allowed interaction between the artwork and the audience. For instance, visitors at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California could play a four person game of table tennis on Orozco's Ping Pond Table (1998). The work's center is a lily pond with four hemispherical ping pong table pieces arranged in a clover shape around it. At his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993, Orozco's Home Run piece featured oranges placed in the windows of adjacent apartment buildings. For the 1993 Venice Biennale, Orozco placed a shoe box on the floor of the Aperto. “What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again”. - Gabriel Orozco from an interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in the catalogue Gabriel Orozco: Clinton is Innocent. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
  
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• Georges Canguilhem
  Georges Canguilhem (4 June 1904, Castelnaudary, Aude – 11 September 1995, Marly-le-Roi) was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science (in particular, biology).
  Canguilhem entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924 as part of a class that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan. He aggregated in 1927 and then taught in lycées throughout France, taking up the study of medicine while teaching in Toulouse.
  He took up a post at the Clermont-Ferrand based University of Strasbourg in 1941, and received his medical doctorate in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Using the pseudonym "Lafont" Canguilhem became active in the French Resistance, serving as a doctor in Auvergne.
  By 1948 he was the French equivalent of department chair in philosophy at Strasbourg as well. Seven years later, he was named a professor at the Sorbonne and succeeded Gaston Bachelard as the director of the Institut d'histoire des sciences, a post he occupied until 1971, at which time he undertook an active emeritus career.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Canguilhem
• Gilbert Simondon
  Gilbert Simondon (October 2, 1924 – February 7, 1989) was a French philosopher best known for his theory of individuation, a major source of inspiration for Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler.
  Born in Saint-Étienne, Simondon was a student of philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem, Martial Guéroult, and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. He defended his doctoral dissertations in 1958. His main thesis, L'individuation à la lumière des notions de Forme et d'Information (Individuation in the light of the notions of Form and Information), was published in two parts, the first in 1964 under the title L'individu et sa génèse physico-biologique (Individuation and its physical-biological genesis) at the Presses Universitaires de France, while it is only in 1989 that Aubier published the second part, L'individuation psychique et collective (Psychic and collective individuation). While his main thesis, which laid the foundations of his thinking, was not widely read until it was commented upon by Gilles Deleuze and, more recently, Bruno Latour and Bernard Stiegler, his complementary thesis, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technical objects) was published by Aubier immediately after being completed (in 1958) and had an instant impact on a wide audience. It was only in 2005 that Jérôme Millon published a complete edition of the main thesis.
  
  wn.com/Gilbert_Simondon
• Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze (French pronunciation: [ʒil dəløz]), (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by some scholars to be his magnum opus.
  Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during World War II, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot. He also spent a year in khâgne at the Lycée Henri IV. During the Nazi occupation of France, Deleuze's older brother, Georges, was arrested for his participation in the French Resistance, and died while in transit to a concentration camp. In 1944, Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac, and Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers. Nonetheless, Deleuze also found the work of non-academic thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre strongly attractive. He agrégated in philosophy in 1948.
  
  wn.com/Gilles_Deleuze
• Gillian Wearing
  Gillian Wearing OBE RA (born 1963) is an English conceptual artist, one of the YBAs, and winner of the annual British fine arts award, The Turner Prize, in 1997. On 11 December 2007, Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
  Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham. She attended Dartmouth High School in Great Barr, Birmingham. She moved to Chelsea, London to study art at the Chelsea School of Art and later went on to Goldsmiths College.
  Her work was included in several of the shows which brought the Young British Artists into the public eye, including Brilliant!, held at the Walker Art Center in 1995 and Sensation, held in London in 1997.
  Wearing has acknowledged the influence of 1970s English fly-on-the-wall documentaries such as Michael Apted's 7-Up, and many of her works have a similar concern with discovering details about individuals. She has said "I'm always trying to find ways of discovering new things about people, and in the process discover more about myself."
  
  wn.com/Gillian_Wearing
• Giorgio Agamben
  Giorgio Agamben (born 22 April 1942) is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer.
  Agamben teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; he previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, Evanston, and at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. He also starred in the art-film-tract "Get Rid Of Yourself", contributing some of his perspectives to an analysis of the Black Bloc and anarchist participation in the G8 ministerial in Genoa, Italy which occurred July 2001.
  Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006.
  Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote an unpublished thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, although their political bearings were not yet made explicit. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agamben began to develop his second book, Stanzas (1977).
  
  wn.com/Giorgio_Agamben
• Guy Hocquenghem
  Guy Hocquenghem (3 December 1946 – 28 August 1988) was a French writer and queer theorist.
  Guy Hocquenghem was born in the suburbs of Paris and was educated at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the age of fifteen he began an affair with his high school philosophy teacher, René Scherer. They remained lifelong friends. His participation in the May 1968 student rebellion in France formed his allegiance to the Communist Party, which later expelled him because of his homosexuality.
  Hocquenghem taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes-Saint Denis, Paris and wrote numerous novels and works of theory. He was the staff writer for the French publication Libération. Hocquenghem was the first gay man to be a member of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), originally formed by lesbian separatists who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971. With filmmaker Lionel Soukaz (b. 1953), Hocquenghem wrote and produced a documentary film about gay history, Race d'Ep! (1979) the last word of the title being a play on the word pédé, a French slur for gay men.
  
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  Hannah Arendt
  Johanna “Hannah” Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world". Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.
  Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover), and grew up in Königsberg (the birthplace of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, renamed as Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.
  At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she was later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University.
  
  wn.com/Hannah_Arendt
• Henri Bergson
  Henri-Louis Bergson (French pronunciation: [bɛʁksɔn] 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.
  He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented".
  Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859 (the year in which France emerged as a victor in the Second Italian War of Independence, and in the month before the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species). His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish family background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous^{[citation needed]} Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
  
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  Henry Bond
  Henry Bond (born 13 June 1966) is an English writer, photographer and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene (Slavoj Žižek, series ed., Short Circuits, MIT Press, 2009), Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics.
  In 1990, with Sarah Lucas, Bond organized the art exhibition East Country Yard Show, which was influential in the formation and development of the YBA art movement; together with Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch and Liam Gillick, the two were "the earliest of the YBAs."
  Bond's visual art tends to appropriation and pastiche; he has exhibited work made collaboratively with YBA artists including a photograph made with Sam Taylor-Wood and the Documents Series, made with Liam Gillick. In the 1990s, Bond was a photojournalist working for British fashion, music, and youth culture magazine The Face. In 1998, his photobook of street fashions in London The Cult of the Street was published. His Point and Shoot (Cantz, 2000), explored the photo-genres of surveillance, voyeurism and paparazzi photojournalism.
  
  wn.com/Henry_Bond
• Ilya Prigogine
  Ilya, Viscount Prigogine (Russian: Илья́ Рома́нович Приго́жин, Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin) (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.
  Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Roman (Ruvim Abramovich) Prigogine, was a chemical engineer at the Moscow Institute of Technology; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. Because the family was critical of the new Soviet system, they left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and in 1929, to Belgium, where Prigogine received Belgian citizenship in 1949.
  Prigogine studied chemistry at the Free University of Brussels, where in 1950, he became professor. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded what is now called The Center for Complex Quantum Systems. In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
  
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  Immanuel Kant
  Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
  Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
  He stated:
  Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
  Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.
  
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• Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida ( /ʒɑːk ˈdɛrɨdə/; French pronunciation: [ʒak dɛʁida]; July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004) was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy.
  His more than 40 published books, together with essays and public speaking, has had a significant impact upon the humanities, particularly on Anthropology, Sociology, Semiotics, Jurisprudence, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies in general. His influence in the academe in Continental Europe, South America and all countries where continental philosophy is predominant, is enormous; becoming crucial in debates around Ontology, Epistemology (especially concerning Social Sciences), Ethics, Esthetics, Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Language.
  His work also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music and plastic arts. and art critics. Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes, and his work influenced various activist and other political movements.
  
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  Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (French pronunciation: [ʒak lakɑ̃]; April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the post-structuralist philosophers. His interdisciplinary work was as a "self-proclaimed Freudian....'It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian'"; and featured the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, identification, and language as subjective perception. His ideas have had a significant impact on critical theory, literary theory, 20th-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.
  Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic—his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929 and Lacan attended the Jesuit Collège Stanislas. During the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and quarrelled with his family over it.
  
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  Jason Rhoades
  Jason Rhoades (July 9, 1965 – August 1, 2006) was an installation artist who enjoyed critical acclaim, if not widespread public recognition, at the time of his death, and who was eulogized by some critics as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was recently celebrated for his combination dinner party/exhibitions that feature violet neon signs with African, Caribbean, Creole and hip-hop slang for the female genitalia. His work remains part of the permanent collection in the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, where he was a part of exhibit "Beg Borrow and Steal" at the time of his death.
  Rhoades received his MFA from UCLA in 1993 after studying at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During the time of his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute he was one of the founders of a movement called "Funk o' Metric", also known as FOM or FOAM. The members of this group included Peter Warren, Bill Becchio, Laurie Steelink, Sebastian Clough, and Marshall Weber, among others.
  
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  Jean Baudrillard
  Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ]) was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.
  Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought. He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University. There he studied German language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966. While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.
  
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  Jean Bricmont
  Jean Bricmont (born April 12, 1952, Uccle) is a Belgian theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. He works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations.
  He is mostly known to the non-academic audience for co-authoring Fashionable Nonsense (also known as Intellectual Impostures) with Alan Sokal, in which they criticise relativism in the philosophy of science. Jean Bricmont also collaborates with activist Noam Chomsky and campaigns on a variety of progressive causes.
  In 2005 he published Impérialisme humanitaire. Droits de l’homme, droit d’ingérence, droit du plus fort ?, published in English as Humanitarian Imperialism in 2006.
  In 2006, he wrote the preface to L'Atlas alternatif - Frédéric Delorca (ed), Pantin, Temps des Cerises [1]. He is a member of the Division of Sciences of the Royal Academy for Sciences, Letters and Arts of Belgium.
  In 2007, he wrote an article in French discussing the possibility of a US invasion of Iran. "Pourquoi Bush peut déclencher une attaque contre l’Iran"
  
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  Jean Hyppolite
  Jean Hyppolite (January 8, 1907 in Jonzac, France – October 26, 1968 in Paris, France) was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers.
  Hyppolite was a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure at roughly the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre. After graduation he embarked on a serious study of Hegel, teaching himself German in order to read Phenomenology of Spirit in the original. In 1939 he came out with his own translation and his commentary would later form the basis of the book The Genesis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit (published in 1947). After the Second World War, Hyppolite became a professor at the University of Strasbourg, before moving to the Sorbonne in 1949.
  In 1952, Hyppolite published Logique et existence, a work that may have had a seminal effect on what was to become known as Post-modernism. This book tries to correlate Hegel's Phenomenology to his Logics (longer and shorter). In doing so, it raises the questions of language, being, and difference that were to become the hallmarks of new French philosophy at the end of the 20th century. One excellent hint at the importance and centrality of this book is found in Gilles Deleuze's review of it. The translators of the English language edition of the text (SUNY Press, 1997) were thoughtful enough to bundle Deleuze's review at the rear of the volume.
  
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• Jean Oury
  Jean Oury is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst born on March 5, 1924. He is the founder and director of the psychiatric hospital La Borde clinic at Cour-Cheverny, France. He was a member of the Freudian School of Paris, founded by Jacques Lacan from inception until its dissolution. Along with François Tosquelles and Lucien Bonnafe he was instrumental in the creation of institutional psychotherapy whose therapeutic practices influenced Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and the later Anti-psychiatry movements of the 1960s.
  
  
  
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• Jean Wahl
  Jean André Wahl (May 25, 1888, Marseille – June 19, 1974, Paris) was a French philosopher.
  He was professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, broken by World War II. He was in the U.S. from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a Jew at the Drancy internment camp (north-east of Paris) and then escaped.
  He began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson and the American pluralist philosophers William James and George Santayana. He is known as one of those introducing Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s, ahead of Alexandre Kojève's more celebrated lectures. He was also a champion in French thought of the Danish proto-existentialist Kierkegaard. These enthusiasms, which became the significant books Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929) and Études kierkegaardiennes (1938) were controversial, in the prevailing climate of thought. However, he influenced a number of key thinkers including Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the second issue of Acéphale, Georges Bataille's review, Jean Wahl wrote an article titled Nietzsche and the Death of God, concerning Karl Jaspers' interpretation of this work. He became known as an anti-systematic philosopher, in favour of philosophical innovation and the concrete.
  
  wn.com/Jean_Wahl
• Jens Haaning
  Jens Haaning (born 1965) is an artist living and working in Copenhagen. His work addresses the issue of racism in Scandinavian society.
  He has exhibited extensively, e.g. Documenta XI, Kassel; the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul and Traffic at CAPC Museé d'art contemporain, Bordeaux. Previously Haaning has shown at Migros Museum, Zürich; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, ICA London, Le Consortium, Dijon; Biennale des Arts (Dakar, Senegal); De Apple, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju; Apexart, New York among other institutions. During the last couple of years Haaning has had solo exhibitions at San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, IAC Institut d'art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; Goodwater Gallery, Toronto; and Wiener Secession, Vienna.
  
  
  
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  John Locke
  John Locke FRS ( /ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
  Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.
  
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  Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas ( /ˈjɜrɡən/ or /ˈjʊərɡən ˈhɑːbərmɑːs/;German: [ˈjʏʁɡən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist, geographer and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of "rationalization" originally set forth by Max Weber. While influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and even poststructuralism, many of the central tenets of Habermas' thought remain broadly Marxist in nature. Global polls identified him as one of the leading intellectuals of the present day.
  
  wn.com/Jürgen_Habermas
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  Karl Jaspers
  Karl Theodor Jaspers (February 23, 1883 – February 26, 1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept this label.
  Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883 to a mother from a local farming community, and a jurist father. He showed an early interest in philosophy, but his father's experience with the legal system undoubtedly influenced his decision to study law at university. It soon became clear that Jaspers did not particularly enjoy law, and he switched to studying medicine in 1902 with a thesis about criminology. In 1910 he married Gertrud Mayer (1879-1974), the sister of his close friends Gustav and Ernst Mayer.
  Jaspers graduated from medical school in 1909 and began work at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg where Emil Kraepelin had worked some years earlier. Jaspers became dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness and set himself the task of improving the psychiatric approach. In 1913 Jaspers gained a temporary post as a psychology teacher at Heidelberg University. The post later became permanent, and Jaspers never returned to clinical practice. During this time Jaspers was a close friend of the Weber family (Max Weber also having held a professorship at Heidelberg).
  
  wn.com/Karl_Jaspers
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  Karl Marx
  Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.
  Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne, where he founded his own newspaper. In 1849 he was exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved, and also campaigned for socialism—he became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.
  
  wn.com/Karl_Marx
• Kathy Acker
  Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, and pornography.
  The daughter of Donald and Claire (Weill) Lehman, a wealthy Jewish family, Kathy Acker was born in New York City on April 18. There is some question as to her year of birth, however: the Library of Congress lists her birth year as 1948, a few sources have listed 1947, but most obituaries state that she was born in 1944. The pregnancy was unplanned, and Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Kathy was born; Acker’s relationship with her domineering mother even into adulthood was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, a union that Acker later characterized as an essentially passionless marriage to an ineffectual man, and Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather’s respectable upper-middle-class Jewish home on New York’s Upper East Side.
  
  wn.com/Kathy_Acker
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  Leszek Kołakowski
  Leszek Kołakowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈlɛʂɛk kɔwaˈkɔfskʲi]; October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century.
  "The three volumes progress chronologically from Karl Marx's lifetime to the years after Stalin's death. The third volume looks at what happened to Marxism in the twentieth century and makes a particular example of the career of Georg Lukacs - "Kolakowski does an even better job than Isaiah Berlin of showing how Marxism affected everything at the mental level."
  
  
  Kołakowski was born in Radom, Poland. Owing to the German occupation of Poland in World War II, he did not go to school but read books and took occasional private lessons, passing his school-leaving examinations as an external student in the underground school system. After the war, he studied philosophy at Łódź University and in 1953 earned a doctorate from Warsaw University, with a thesis on Spinoza. He was a professor and chairman of Warsaw University's department of the history of philosophy from 1959 to 1968.
  
  wn.com/Leszek_Kołakowski
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  Lewis Call
  Lewis Call is an American academic notable for being a central post-anarchist thinker. He is best known for his 2002 book Postmodern Anarchism, which develops an account of postmodern anarchism through philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and cyberpunk writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Call has written extensively on the intersection of post-anarchism and science fiction, covering philosophers and authors such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin.
  Call graduated with a B.A. from University of California, San Diego followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of California, Irvine, finishing his studies in 1996. His doctoral dissertation was titled, Nietzsche as Critic and Captive of Enlightenment. He is an Assistant Professor in the History Department of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where he teaches intellectual history, political economy and the history of network technology. Call also holds the position of Associate Editor of Anarchist Studies, an international journal of anarchist theory. He received the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the California Faculty Association (California Polytechnic chapter) in 2005, and his paper "’Sounds Like Kinky Business to Me’: Subtextual and Textual Representations of Erotic Power in the Buffyverse" won Slayage journal's 2008 Mr. Pointy Award for Buffy Studies Scholarship. Call is a dedicated practitioner of T'ai chi ch'uan.
  
  wn.com/Lewis_Call
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  Lewis Carroll
  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈlʌtwɪdʒ ˈdɒdʒsən/ CHARLZ LUDT-wij DOJ-sən; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (/ˈkærəl/ KARR-əl), was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand.
  Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. His mother's name was Frances Jane Lutwidge.
  
  wn.com/Lewis_Carroll
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  Liam Gillick
  Liam Gillick (born 1964, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.
  
  
  Liam Gillick graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1987 with a degree in Fine Art. In 1989 he mounted his first solo gallery exhibition, 84 Diagrams, Karsten Schubert, in London. Gillick has exhibited in galleries and institutions in Europe and the United States, many of which have been collaborative projects with other artists, architects, designers and writers. In 1991, together with art collector, and co-publisher of Art Monthly, Jack Wendler, Gillick founded the limited editions and publishing company G-W Press. The company produced limited editions by artists including Jeremy Deller and Anya Gallaccio.
  In the early-1990s Gillick was a member of the band Soho and is credited with providing samples during their live performances.
  Together with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Angela Bulloch and Henry Bond he was, "the earliest of the YBAs"—the Young British Artists who dominated British art during the 1990s.
  
  wn.com/Liam_Gillick
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  Louis Althusser
  Louis Pierre Althusser (French pronunciation: [altyˈsɛʁ]; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
  Althusser was a longtime member—although sometimes a strong critic—of the French Communist Party. His arguments and thesis were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the "cult of personality" and of ideology.
  Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism.
  Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. During one of his bouts, he killed his wife by strangling her.
  
  wn.com/Louis_Althusser
• Manfred Frank
  Manfred Frank (born March 22, 1945) is a German philosopher, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. His prolific work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His 950-page study of German romanticism, Unendliche Annäherung, has been described as "the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing study of early German romanticism" and "surely one of the most important books from the post-War period on the history of German philosophy." He has also written at length on analytic philosophy and recent French philosophy.
  Frank was born in Elberfeld, Germany, and studied philosophy at the University of Heidelberg under teachers such as Hans Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Ernst Tugendhat, and Dieter Henrich. After teaching at the University of Düsseldorf from 1971 to 1982, and at the University of Geneva from 1982 to 1987, Frank accepted a position at Tübingen in 1987. He is a specialist in the philosophy of literature.
  He is the author of a wide range of books published in German, French, and English, including:
  
  wn.com/Manfred_Frank
• Manuel de Landa
  Manuel De Landa, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is presently the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; a visiting professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles^{[citation needed]}; a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. He was previously an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and a lecturer at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. De Landa has a BFA from New York's School of Visual Arts.
  He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata on the other.
  
  wn.com/Manuel_de_Landa
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  Marcel Proust
  Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.
  Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris' then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
  Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith.
  
  wn.com/Marcel_Proust
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  Martin Creed
  Martin Creed (born 1968) is an artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, which was an empty room in which the lights went on and off.
  Martin Creed was born in Wakefield, England, and brought up in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied art at the Slade School of Art at University College London from 1986 to 1990.
  Since 1987, Creed has numbered each of his works, and most of his titles relate in a very direct way to the work's nature. Work No. 79: some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall (1993), for example, is just what it sounds like, as is Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1994). One of Creed's best known works is Work No. 200, half the air in a given space (1998), which is a room with enough inflated balloons in it for them to contain half the air in it.
  In 1996, Richard Long and Roger Ackling selected Creed to exhibit at EASTinternational.
  Creed is perhaps best known for his submission for the 2001 Turner Prize show at the Tate Gallery, Work No. 227, the lights going on and off, which won that year's prize. The artwork presented was an empty room in which the lights periodically switched on and off (frequency five seconds on/five seconds off). As so often with the Turner Prize, this created a great deal of press attention, most of it questioning whether something as minimalist as this could be considered art at all. Artist Jacqueline Crofton threw eggs at the walls of Creed's empty room as a protest against the prize, declaring that Creed's presentations were not real art and that "painting is in danger of becoming an extinct skill in this country". In 2006, Martin Creed presented an extensive exhibition with sculptures, videos and performances titled I Like Things with Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan.
  
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  Martin Heidegger
  Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976); German pronunciation: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."
  Heidegger argues that philosophy is preoccupied with what exists and has forgotten the question of the "ground" of being. We find ourselves "always already" fallen into a world that already existed; but he insists that we have forgotten the basic question of what being itself is. This question defines our central nature. He argues that we are practical agents, caring and concerned about our projects in the world, and allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself to us. He also says that our manipulation of reality is often harmful and hides our true being as essentially limited participants, not masters, of the world which we discover.
  Heidegger wrote about these issues in his best-known book, Being and Time (1927), which is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's influence is far reaching, from philosophy to deconstructionism and literary theory, theology, architecture, and artificial intelligence.
  
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  Martin Kippenberger
  Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 in Dortmund – 7 March 1997 in Vienna) was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.
  Kippenberger was "widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation," according to Roberta Smith of the New York Times. He was at the center of a generation of German enfants terribles including Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg.
  Kippenberger was born in Dortmund in 1953, the only boy in a family of five, with two elder and two younger sisters. His father was director of the Katharina-Elisabeth colliery, his mother a dermatologist. When Kippenberger's mother was killed by a pallet falling off a truck, he inherited enough money to live on. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg, where Sigmar Polke, despite not teaching him directly, influenced him. After a sojourn in Florence, where he had his first solo show in 1977, he settled in Berlin in 1978. In that year he founded Kippenberger's Office with Gisela Capitain, mounting exhibitions of his own art and that of his friends; became business director of SO36, a performance, film and music space; started a punk band called the Grugas and made his first recording, a single called Luxus, with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell. Leaving Berlin, originally for a long visit to Paris, Kippenberger spent the early 1980s as an active member of the Cologne art scene.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Kippenberger
• Maurizio Cattelan
  Maurizio Cattelan (September 21, 1960, Padova, Italy) is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite.
  Cattelan started his career in Forlì (Italy) making wooden furniture in the 1980s where he came to know some designers like Ettore Sottsass.
  He made a catalogue of his work which he sent to galleries. This promotion gave him an opening in design and contemporary art. He created a sculpture of an ostrich with its head buried in the ground, wore a costume of a figurine with a giant head of Picasso, and affixed a Milanese gallerist to a wall with tape. During this period, he also created the Oblomov Foundation. In 2009, he teamed up with Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to create an editorial for W Magazine's Art Issue. Subsequently, both started the magazine "Toilet Paper" [1], a bi-annual, picture-based publication.
  Cattelan’s personal art practice has led to him gaining a reputation as an art scene’s joker. In 1995 he began his line of taxidermied horses, donkeys, mice and dogs; in 1999 he started making life-size wax effigies of various people, including himself. One of his best known sculptures, ‘La Nona Ora’ consists of an effigy of Pope John Paul II in full ceremonial dress being crushed by a meteor and is a good example of his typically humorous approach to work. Another of Cattelan’s quirks is his use of a ‘stand-in’ in media interviews equipped with a stock of evasive answers and non-sensical explanations.
  
  wn.com/Maurizio_Cattelan
• Mazdak
  Mazdak (in Persian مزدک) (died c. 524 or 528) was a proto-socialistPersian reformer and religious activist who gained influence under the reign of the Sassanian Shahanshah Kavadh I. He claimed to be a prophet of God, and instituted communal possessions and social welfare programs.
  Mazdak was the chief representative of a religious and philosophical teaching called Mazdakism, which he viewed as a reformed and purified version of Zoroastrianism, although his teaching has been argued to display influences from Manichaeism as well. Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion of Sassanid Persia, and Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian priest, or mobed, but most of the Zoroastrian clergy regarded his teaching as a heresy. Information about it is scarce and little is known beyond what is listed below; some further details may be inferred from the later doctrine of Khurramism, which has been seen as a continuation of Mazdakism.
  Some sources claim that the original founders of this sect lived earlier than Mazdak. These were another mobed named Zardusht (of the same name, but not the same person as the founder of Zoroastrianism) and/or a Zoroastrian philosopher known as Mazdak the Elder, who taught a combination of altruism and hedonism: "he directed his followers to enjoy the pleasures of life and satisfy their appetite in the highest degree with regard to eating and drinking in the spirit of equality,to aim at good deeds; to abstain from shedding blood and inflicting harm on others; and to practice hospitality without reservation". This doctrine was further developed by the best known Mazdak, Mazdak the Younger, son of Bāmdād. At later stages the opposition to Mazdak blamed them for heresy and sharing women etc. which is not true. They are considered to be the first real socialists of human history who emphasized the community work and benefits for all.
  
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  Michael Hardt
  Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American literary theorist and political philosopher perhaps best known for Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000. It has been praised as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century."
  Hardt and his co-author suggest that what they view as forces of contemporary class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services (or production of affects), have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, published in August 2004, details the notion, first propounded in Empire, of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
  The third and final part of the trilogy, Commonwealth, appeared in the Fall of 2009.
  Born in Washington, D.C., Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources. Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated."
  
  wn.com/Michael_Hardt
• Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl fuko]), born Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and lectured at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Berkeley.
  Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, social anthropology of medicine, the human sciences and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential in academic circles.
  In the 1960s, he was associated with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. He also rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant. His project was particularly influenced by Nietzsche, his "genealogy of knowledge" being a direct allusion to Nietzsche's "genealogy of morality". In a late interview he definitively stated: "I am a Nietzschean."
  
  wn.com/Michel_Foucault
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  Miltos Manetas
  Miltos Manetas (born October 6, 1964 in Athens) is a Greek painter and multimedia artist. He currently lives and works in Highgate
  Manetas has created Internet Art as well as paintings of cables, computers, video games and Internet websites. His work has been collected by Charles Saatchi. He is also the founder of "Neen", an Internet-based art movement.
  Manetas presented the Whitneybiennial.com, an online exhibition that challenged the 2002 Whitney Biennial show.
  Born in Athens, Greece, Miltos Manetas moved to Milan at the age of 20. In 1995 he was included in Traffic, the survey exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud that helped to launch the Relational Aesthetics art movement.
  Manetas was categorized as one of artists of that movement in the catalogue of the Traffic show, and later, in Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics. But at this time, Manetas decided to change his approach to art, abandoning performance, objects and site specific installations, and he began making paintings about computer technology, exploring the possibilities of creating art by using video games and the Internet.
  
  wn.com/Miltos_Manetas
• Nancy Spector
  Nancy Spector is an American curator who is currently deputy director and chief curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth avenue in New York City. At the aforementioned museum she has organized exhibitions and retrospectives on or of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, Louise Bourgeois and most recently Maurizio Cattelan.
  Spector was adjunct curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and a co-curator of the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Spector has written catalogue essays for exhibitions on Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal and Anna Gaskell among others.
  
  wn.com/Nancy_Spector
• Nicolas Bourriaud
  Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art (1992–2000), and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from 1987 to 1995. Bourriaud was the Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art from 2008-2010 at Tate Britain, London, and in 2009 he curated the fourth Tate Triennial there, entitled Altermodern.
  Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics (1998/English version 2002) and Postproduction (2001). Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s. Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at CAPC contemporary museum [1] in Bordeaux.
  In Postproduction (2001), Bourriaud relates deejaying to contemporary art. He lists the operations discjockeys apply to music and relates them to contemporary art practice.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Nicolas_Bourriaud
• Pascal Engel
  Pascal Engel is a French philosopher, working on the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of logic. He was a professor of philosophy of logic at the Sorbonne, he currently works at the University of Geneva, where he collaborates with, among others, Kevin Mulligan. He is a member of Institut Nicod.
  
  wn.com/Pascal_Engel
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  Paul Ricœur
  Paul Ricœur (27 February 1913 – 20 May 2005) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such his thought is situated within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
  Ricœur was born in Valence, Drôme, France to a devout Protestant family, making him a member of a religious minority in Catholic France.
  Ricœur's father died in a 1915 World War I battle when Ricœur was only two years old. He was raised by his paternal grandparents and an aunt in Rennes, France, with a small stipend afforded to him as a war orphan. Ricœur, whose penchant for study was fueled by his family's Protestant emphasis on Bible study, was bookish and intellectually precocious. Ricœur received his bachelor's degree' in 1933 from the University of Rennes and began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1934, where he was influenced by Gabriel Marcel. In 1935, he was awarded the second-highest agrégation mark in the nation for philosophy, presaging a bright future.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Ricœur
• Peter Hallward
  Peter Hallward is a Canadian political philosopher, best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
  Hallward previously taught French at King's College in London, as well as Middlesex University, and is now at Kingston University.
  On 21 May 2010, the administration of Middlesex University suspended Hallward, along with Professor Peter Osborne, Christian Kerslake, and several students, pending an investigation into their involvement in the campaign against the decision to close the Department of Philosophy. Hallward, Osborne, and Kerslake were barred from the premises of the university, and forbidden to contact Middlesex students. These suspensions, along with the impending closure of the Department of Philosophy, have drawn international criticism from such scholars as Jean-Luc Nancy,Graham Harman, Gerhard Richter, John Protevi, and Étienne Balibar, institutional bodies including the Middlesex UCU, the philosophy faculty of Cambridge University, the American Philosophical Association, and the Parlement des Philosophes of Strasburg, and from political organisations like Abahlali baseMjondolo. On 8 June 2010, Kingston University announced that they would reestablish the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, formerly of Middlesex University, and employ Hallward, Osborne, Eric Alliez, and Stella Sandford, the four senior members of the Middlesex philosophy staff. Middlesex's MA and PhD students would also be able to transfer to Kingston.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Hallward
• Philippe Parreno
  Philippe Parreno (born 1964) is an Algerian artist and filmmaker, born in Oran, and currently living in Paris, France. Parreno's work primarily revolves around the interrogation of the nature of an image, as well as the modes of its exhibition.
  Parreno has had shows at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Kunstverein Munich and the Kunsthalle in Zürich, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA), the Walker Art Center (USA), the Centre Georges Pompidou (France), the Paris Museum of Modern Art (France), the Guggenheim Museum New York (USA), the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Kanazawa Museum of the 21st Century (Japan).^{[citation needed]}
  In June 2006, Universal International released a feature length documentary directed by Parreno and Scottish artist-filmmaker Douglas Gordon entitled Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait which premiered out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The film was inspired by Hellmuth Costard's 1970 film Football As Never Before about Manchester United legend George Best. Costard used eight 16mm film cameras to follow Best, in real time, for the course of an entire game against Coventry City and his film was screened by German broadcaster ARD in 1971.
  
  wn.com/Philippe_Parreno
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  Pierre Huyghe
  Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.
  Pierre Huyghe was born in 1962 and trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. In 2001, Huyghe represented France at the Venice Biennale, where his pavilion, entitled Le Château de Turing, won a special prize from the international jury. In 2002, Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum and exhibited several works there the following year.
  In 2006, Huyghe's film A Journey That Wasn't was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York, and at the re-opening of ARC/MAM and Tate Modern. In 2008, Pierre Huyghe became a professor of art and philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
  Pierre Huyghe is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery in both New York and Paris.
  Much of Huyghe's work examines the structural properties of film and its problematic relationship to reality. His work frequently mixes fact with fiction. In several projects, he has delved into the personal lives of subjects and actors in film.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_Huyghe
• Pierre Klossowski
  Pierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905—August 12, 2001) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus. Michel Foucault noted in a letter that Klossowski's book La Monnaie vivante is the most sublime book of our era.
  Born in Paris, Pierre Klossowski was the older brother of the artist Balthazar Klossowski, better known as Balthus. Their parents were the art historian Erich Klossowski and the painter Baladine Klossowska. His father, Erich Klossowski, was a German-educated Polish noble of the Rola coat of arms. His mother, Baladine Klossowska, was born as Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland). Although the family has denied any Jewish heritage, a Polish journal reported Baladine was born into an Orthodox Jewish family with Belarussian origins.
  When he was 18, Pierre was André Gide's secretary and worked on the drafts of Les faux-monnayeurs for him.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_Klossowski
• 
  Plato
  Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
  Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
  
  wn.com/Plato
• 
  René Thom
  René Frédéric Thom (September 2, 1923 – October 25, 2002) was a French mathematician. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory (later developed by Erik Christopher Zeeman). He received the Fields Medal in 1958.
  René Thom was born in Montbéliard, Doubs. He was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis and the École Normale Supérieure, both in Paris. He received his PhD in 1951 from the University of Paris. His thesis, titled Espaces fibrés en sphères et carrés de Steenrod (Sphere bundles and Steenrod squares), was written under the direction of Henri Cartan. The foundations of cobordism theory, for which he received the Fields Medal at Edinburgh in 1958, were already present in his thesis.
  After a fellowship in the United States, he went on to teach at the Universities of Grenoble (1953–1954) and Strasbourg (1954–1963), where he was appointed Professor in 1957. In 1964, he moved to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, in Bures-sur-Yvette. He was awarded the Grand Prix Scientifique de la Ville de Paris in 1974, and became a Member of the Academie des Sciences of Paris in 1976.
  
  wn.com/René_Thom
• Rirkrit Tiravanija
  Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.
  Tiravanija's installations of the early-1990s involved cooking meals for gallery-goers.
  Tiravanija's work has been presented widely at museums and galleries throughout the world including solo exhibitions at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2005); Serpentine Gallery, London (2005); Secession, Vienna (2002); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997). He has participated in such notable group exhibitions as the Sharjah Biennial 8, United Arab Emirates (2007); 27th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2006); Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, New York (2005), and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
  Tiravanija has had numerous solo shows including those at The Drawing Center, New York (2008), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999); Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan (2000); Portikus, Frankfurt (2001); Secession, Vienna (2002); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2003); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2003–04); and Gavin Brown's Enterprise (1999).
  
  wn.com/Rirkrit_Tiravanija
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  Roman Ingarden
  Roman Witold Ingarden (February 5, 1893 – June 14, 1970) was a Polish philosopher who worked in phenomenology, ontology and aesthetics.
  Before World War II, Ingarden published his works mainly in the German language. During the war, he switched to Polish, and as a result his major works in ontology went largely unnoticed by the wider world philosophical community.
  Ingarden was born in Kraków, Austria-Hungary, on February 5, 1893. He first studied mathematics and philosophy in Lwów under Kazimierz Twardowski, then moved to Göttingen to study philosophy under Edmund Husserl. He was considered by Husserl to be one of his best students and accompanied Husserl to Freiburg, where in 1918 Ingarden submitted his doctoral dissertation with Husserl as director.
  Ingarden then returned to Poland, where he spent his academic career after obtaining his doctorate. For a long period he had to support himself by secondary-school teaching. In 1925 he submitted his Habilitationschrift, Essentiale Fragen, to Kazimierz Twardowski at Lwów University (now Lviv in Ukraine). This thesis was noticed by the English-speaking philosophical community. In 1933 the University promoted him to professor. He became well known for his work on The Literary Work of Art.
  
  wn.com/Roman_Ingarden
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  Romanian philosophy
  Romanian philosophy is a name covering either a) the philosophy done in Romania or by Romanians, or b) an ethnic philosophy, which expresses at a high level the fundamental features of the Romanian spirituality, or which elevates to a philosophical level the Weltanschauung of the Romanian people, as deposited in language and folklore, traditions, architecture and other linguistic and cultural artifacts.
  The discussion concerning the existence of a Romanian philosophy has known three stages.
  Between the two World Wars, after the emergence of Greater Romania, Romanian national identity went through a crisis. Since it was not centered anymore on immediate political goals (national rights, independence, national unity etc.), the idea now had a more pronounced cultural character. Therefore, discussions of "national specificity" in historiography, literature and philosophy became very common. The first history of Romanian philosophy was published in 1922 by Marin Ştefănescu, proving that philosophical thinking in Romania had reached the level of self-reflexivity; in other words, it had become conscious of itself. The general conclusion of interbellum discussions, which involved almost every notable philosopher, was that there is a Romanian philosophy proper, with a distinct profile among other national philosophies. Constantin Noica, who became one of the most prominent Romanian philosophers, thought early on that Romanian philosophy is characterized by paganism, cosmicism (i.e. no acute separation of the world of the man from, transcendence) and determinism (or rather, "fatalism").
  
  wn.com/Romanian_philosophy
• 
  Sigmund Freud
  Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud's family and ancestry were Jewish. Freud always considered himself a Jew even though he rejected Judaism and had a critical view of religion. Freud's parents were poor, but ensured his education. Freud was an outstanding pupil in high school, and graduated the Matura with honors in 1873. Interested in philosophy as a student, Freud later turned away from it and became a neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, Aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy.
  Freud went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Though psychoanalysis has declined as a therapeutic practice, it has helped inspire the development of many other forms of psychotherapy, some diverging from Freud's original ideas and approach. Freud postulated the existence of libido (an energy with which mental process and structures are invested), developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so), discovered the transference (the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings based on their experience of earlier figures in their lives) and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awake the dreamer. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture.
  
  wn.com/Sigmund_Freud
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  Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.
  Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
  Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense" and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".
  
  wn.com/Slavoj_Žižek
• Stanley Rosen
  Stanley Rosen (born July 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he is currently Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His wide range of research includes metaphysics, political philosophy, and history of western philosophy.
  Rosen was a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he defended his dissertation on Spinoza in 1955. He was also a student of Alexandre Kojève. He did his postdoctoral work at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and became Evan Pugh Professor of philosophy at Penn State University and then Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He has held the Companys Lectureship at the University of Barcelona, the Cardinal Mercier Lectureship at University of Louvain, the Priestley Lectureship at the University of Toronto, and the Gilson Lectureship at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He served as President of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1991.
  Rosen's first two books, a study of Plato's Symposium and Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, represent his abiding concerns. On the one hand he continuously returned to the roots of the philosophical tradition, in particular to Plato, and, on the other, he thought through modern and postmodern philosophy by confronting their most powerful representatives. The most notable feature of this engagement was the justice done to the two main strands of contemporary philosophy, the analytical and continental movements, represented by their most influential members, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, as preparation for Rosen's criticism and positive proposals.
  
  wn.com/Stanley_Rosen
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  Steven Best
  Steven Best (born December 1955) is an American animal rights advocate, author, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. A writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education described him in 2005 as "one of the leading scholarly voices on animal rights."
  Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), formerly known as the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA). His academic interests are continental philosophy, postmodernism, and environmental philosophy. He is known for his post-structuralist notions of revolution, based equally in animal rights and sexual liberation. He is the editor, with Anthony J. Nocella, of Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004), which has a foreword by Ward Churchill, and the companion volume on revolutionary environmentalism, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006).
  In December 2004, Best co-founded the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which acts as a media office for a number of animal rights groups, including the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), though he has said that he is not himself an ALF activist. He came to public attention in 2005, when the British Home Office told him it intended to use counter-terrorist measures adopted in light of the July 2005 London bombings to prevent him from addressing an animal rights rally in the UK. Best responded by alleging that Britain was becoming a police state.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Best
• 
  Søren Kierkegaard
  Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (/ˈsɔrən ˈkɪərkəɡɑrd/ or /ˈkɪərkəɡɔr/; Danish: [ˈsɶːɐn ˈkiɐ̯ɡəɡɒːˀ] ( listen)) (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. He was also critical of the state and practice of Christianity, primarily that of the Church of Denmark. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.
  Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking, and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
  His theological work focuses on Christian ethics, on the institution of the Church, and on the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity. He wrote of the individual's subjective relationship to Jesus Christ, the God-Man, which came through faith. Much of his work deals with the art of Christian love.
  
  wn.com/Søren_Kierkegaard
• 
  Thomas Aquinas
  Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
  Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Aquinas
• Todd May
  Todd May (1955, New York) is a political philosopher notable for his role in developing, alongside Saul Newman and Lewis Call, the theory of post-structuralist anarchism. He is currently Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University and contributes to CounterPunch. His 1994 book The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism was the first to combine poststructuralist and anarchist thought, and he subsequently has published treatments of major poststructuralist philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. He serves as faculty adviser for several student-run political organizations.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Todd_May
• 
  Vanessa Beecroft
  Vanessa Beecroft (born April 25, 1969) is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.
  Vanessa Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models (often nude). At her performances, video recordings and photographs are made, to be exhibited as documentation of the performances, but also as separate works of art. The work and her conceptual approach is neither performance nor documentary, but something in between, and closer to Renaissance painting. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own ephemeral composition. The performances are existential encounters between models and audience, their shame and their expectations. Each performance is made for a specific location and often references the political, historical, or social associations of the place where it is held. Beecroft’s work is deceptively simple in its execution, provoking questions around identity politics and voyeurism in the complex relationship between viewer, model and context.
  
  wn.com/Vanessa_Beecroft
• Vincent Descombes
  Vincent Descombes (born 1943) is a French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is particularly noted for a lengthy critique in two volumes of the project he calls cognitivism, and which is, roughly, the view current in philosophy of mind that mental and psychological facts can ultimately be treated as, or reduced to, physical facts about the brain. Descombes has also written an introduction to modern French philosophy (Le même et l'autre) focused on the transition, after 1960, from a focus on the three H's, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger to the "three masters of suspicion", Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
  Vincent Descombes teaches at the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron, part of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He holds an appointment in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
  Vincent Descombes was a member of the French Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie.
  
  wn.com/Vincent_Descombes
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
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  Zygmunt Bauman
  Zygmunt Bauman (born 19 November 1925 in Poznań) is a Polish sociologist. Since 1971, he has resided in England after being driven out of Poland by an anti-Semitic campaign, engineered by the Communist government which he had previously supported. Professor of sociology at the University of Leeds (and since 1990 emeritus professor), Bauman has become best known for his analyses of the links between modernity and the Holocaust, and of postmodern consumerism.
  Zygmunt Bauman was born to non-practising Polish-Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, in 1925. When Poland was invaded by the Nazis in 1939 his family escaped eastwards into the Soviet Union. Bauman went on to serve in the Soviet-controlled Polish First Army, working as a political education instructor. He took part in the battles of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and Berlin. In May 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour.
  According to semi-official statements of a historian with the Polish Institute of National Remembrance made in the conservative magazine Ozon in May 2006, from 1945 to 1953 Bauman held a similar function in the Internal Security Corps (KBW), a military unit formed to combat Ukrainian nationalist insurgents and part of the remnants of the Polish Home Army.
  
  wn.com/Zygmunt_Bauman