The Most Famous
PHILOSOPHERS from Australia
This page contains a list of the greatest Australian Philosophers. The pantheon dataset contains 1,081 Philosophers, 5 of which were born in Australia. This makes Australia the birth place of the 36th most number of Philosophers behind South Korea and Belarus.
Top 5
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Australian Philosophers of all time. This list of famous Australian Philosophers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Peter Singer (1946 - )
With an HPI of 62.96, Peter Singer is the most famous Australian Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 48 different languages on wikipedia.
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which argues the moral imperative of donating to help the poor around the world. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 Singer was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. In 2005, The Sydney Morning Herald placed him among Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a cofounder of Animals Australia and the founder of the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save.
2. Samuel Alexander (1859 - 1938)
With an HPI of 50.67, Samuel Alexander is the 2nd most famous Australian Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 25 different languages.
Samuel Alexander (6 January 1859 – 13 September 1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. He is now best known as an advocate of emergentism in biology.
3. J. L. Mackie (1917 - 1981)
With an HPI of 46.64, J. L. Mackie is the 3rd most famous Australian Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.
John Leslie Mackie (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered. His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982) has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen described it as "one of the most, probably the most, distinguished articulation of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century." In 1980 Time magazine described him as "perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers."
4. David Chalmers (1966 - )
With an HPI of 46.02, David Chalmers is the 4th most famous Australian Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.
David John Chalmers () is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block). In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment. Chalmers and David Bourget co-founded PhilPapers; a database of journal articles for philosophers.
5. David Malet Armstrong (1926 - 2014)
With an HPI of 45.88, David Malet Armstrong is the 5th most famous Australian Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.
David Malet Armstrong (8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014), often D. M. Armstrong, was an Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature. Keith Campbell said that Armstrong's contributions to metaphysics and epistemology "helped to shape philosophy's agenda and terms of debate", and that Armstrong's work "always concerned to elaborate and defend a philosophy which is ontically economical, synoptic, and compatibly continuous with established results in the natural sciences".
Pantheon has 5 people classified as philosophers born between 1859 and 1966. Of these 5, 2 (40.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living philosophers include Peter Singer and David Chalmers. The most famous deceased philosophers include Samuel Alexander, J. L. Mackie, and David Malet Armstrong.
Living Philosophers
Go to all RankingsDeceased Philosophers
Go to all Rankings
Samuel Alexander
1859 - 1938
HPI: 50.67
J. L. Mackie
1917 - 1981
HPI: 46.64
David Malet Armstrong
1926 - 2014
HPI: 45.88
Which Philosophers were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 3 most globally memorable Philosophers since 1700.
