Sages
Albert Camus｜阿尔贝·加缪
Albert Camus was a French-Algerian writer, philosopher, and journalist best known for his reflections on absurdity, freedom, revolt, and moral responsibility. Although often associated with existentialism, Camus resisted that label and developed his own account of the “absurd”：the confrontation between the human desire for meaning and an indifferent world. Works such as The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague explore how human beings might live with dignity without relying on guaranteed metaphysical answers.
Michel Foucault｜米歇尔·福柯
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work analyzed the relationship between knowledge, power, institutions, and subjectivity. He studied madness, medicine, prisons, sexuality, and governmentality, showing how modern societies produce categories of normality and deviance. Rather than treating power only as repression, Foucault emphasized how power also produces knowledge, identities, disciplines, and ways of seeing oneself. His work is foundational in critical theory, history, sociology, gender studies, and medical humanities.
Nicholas Mirzoeff｜尼古拉斯·米尔佐夫
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual culture theorist known for his work on visuality, representation, race, colonialism, and the politics of seeing. He argues that seeing is never merely neutral or biological; it is shaped by power, history, technology, and social organization. His idea of “the right to look” challenges dominant regimes of visual authority and asks who gets to see, who is seen, and who controls the meaning of images. His work is central to visual culture studies and contemporary media theory.
Aldous Leonard Huxley｜奥尔德斯·伦纳德·赫胥黎
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English novelist, essayist, and public intellectual whose work moved between literature, social criticism, mysticism, and the psychology of perception. He is best known for Brave New World, a dystopian novel that imagines a society controlled not through terror, but through pleasure, conditioning, consumption, and technological management. Later in life, Huxley became deeply interested in consciousness, spirituality, and psychedelic experience, especially in The Doors of Perception.
Eva Illouz｜伊娃·伊卢兹
Eva Illouz is a sociologist whose work examines emotion, capitalism, intimacy, modern love, and therapeutic culture. She is known for analyzing how capitalism shapes not only markets and institutions, but also private feelings, romantic expectations, self-understanding, and emotional language. In books such as Cold Intimacies and Why Love Hurts, Illouz shows how love and suffering are not merely private experiences, but are deeply organized by social structures, gender, class, media, and consumer culture.
Herbert Marcuse｜赫伯特·马尔库塞
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher and social theorist associated with the Frankfurt School and critical theory. He combined Marx, Freud, and Hegel to analyze advanced industrial society, repression, consumerism, and the possibility of liberation. In Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that modern societies often manage dissent by producing comfort, conformity, and false needs. His work became especially influential in the New Left and 1960s counterculture.
Jacques Derrida｜雅克·德里达
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction. His work challenged the idea that texts, concepts, and philosophical systems have stable, self-contained meanings. Derrida showed how meaning depends on difference, absence, delay, and internal tensions within language itself. Although often associated with literary theory, his influence extends across philosophy, law, political theory, psychoanalysis, theology, architecture, and cultural studies.
Martin Heidegger｜马丁·海德格尔
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work transformed twentieth-century philosophy, especially through his analysis of Being. In Being and Time, he explored human existence through concepts such as Dasein, being-in-the-world, thrownness, anxiety, authenticity, and being-toward-death. Heidegger’s work deeply influenced existentialism, hermeneutics, theology, architecture, literary theory, and psychotherapy, though his legacy remains ethically and politically contested because of his involvement with Nazism.
Patricia Gherovici｜帕特里夏·盖罗维奇
Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and author known for bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into conversation with gender, transgender experience, Latinx identity, and cultural politics. Her work challenges pathologizing approaches to gender variance and argues for a more ethically responsive psychoanalysis. In books such as Please Select Your Gender and Transgender Psychoanalysis, Gherovici shows how psychoanalysis can think seriously about desire, embodiment, language, and identity without reducing trans experience to diagnosis.
Régis Debray｜雷吉斯·德布雷
Régis Debray is a French philosopher, writer, and theorist associated with mediology, the study of how ideas, symbols, and beliefs are transmitted through material and institutional systems. Rather than focusing only on messages or meanings, Debray asks how media, organizations, technologies, rituals, and infrastructures allow ideas to survive and circulate. His work connects intellectual history, political theory, religion, media studies, and cultural transmission.
Hannah Arendt｜汉娜 · 阿伦特
Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist whose work examined totalitarianism, authority, revolution, responsibility, and the conditions of political life. Although she resisted being called a philosopher, her writings are central to twentieth-century political thought. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she analyzed how antisemitism, imperialism, bureaucracy, and mass loneliness helped make totalitarian rule possible. In The Human Condition, she distinguished labor, work, and action, arguing that genuine politics depends on public speech, plurality, and shared worldly engagement. Her later phrase “the banality of evil,” developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem, remains one of the most contested and influential attempts to understand how ordinary people can participate in extraordinary violence.
Judith Butler｜朱迪斯 · 巴特勒
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist best known for transforming contemporary discussions of gender, identity, power, and embodiment. In Gender Trouble, Butler challenged the idea that gender is a stable inner essence, arguing instead that gender is performative：it is produced and repeated through social norms, language, gestures, institutions, and everyday acts. Their work draws from feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and political theory, especially in conversation with thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Freud, and Lacan. Beyond gender theory, Butler has also written influentially on vulnerability, grief, violence, ethics, precarity, and nonviolence, asking how certain lives come to be recognized as fully human while others are excluded from public mourning and political protection.
William James｜威廉 · 詹姆斯
William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, often regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology in the United States and a central figure in pragmatism. In The Principles of Psychology, he explored consciousness, habit, emotion, attention, and the stream of thought with remarkable philosophical and observational depth. James also wrote influentially on religion, belief, pluralism, and experience. His work bridges psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and the practical question of how ideas matter in lived life.
B. F. Skinner｜B. F. 斯金纳
B. F. Skinner was an American psychologist and one of the most influential figures in behaviorism. He developed the theory of operant conditioning, arguing that behavior is shaped by its consequences, especially reinforcement and punishment. Skinner’s work shifted psychology away from introspective speculation and toward observable behavior, experimental method, and environmental design. His ideas remain central to learning theory, behavior modification, education, and applied behavior analysis.
Carl Jung｜卡尔 · 荣格
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Originally close to Freud, Jung eventually developed a distinct theoretical system centered on the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, dreams, symbols, and myth. Unlike Freud’s more conflict-centered model, Jung emphasized the psyche’s movement toward wholeness and integration. His influence extends beyond clinical psychology into religion, literature, art, personality theory, and popular culture.
Carl Rogers｜卡尔 · 罗杰斯
Carl Rogers was an American psychologist and one of the founders of humanistic psychology and person-centered therapy. He argued that psychological growth occurs most powerfully in relationships marked by empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. Rogers shifted the therapist’s role away from expert interpretation and toward a deep trust in the client’s own actualizing tendency. His work remains foundational in counseling, psychotherapy training, education, and theories of therapeutic relationship.
Irvin Yalom｜欧文·亚隆
Irvin Yalom is an American psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and writer best known for existential psychotherapy and group therapy. His work focuses on the fundamental concerns of human existence：death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Yalom writes in a highly accessible clinical style, often using case narratives to show how therapy becomes a space for confronting life’s ultimate questions. Books such as Existential Psychotherapy, Love’s Executioner, and The Gift of Therapy are widely read by clinicians and general readers alike.
Jacques Lacan｜雅克·拉康
Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who reinterpreted Freud through structural linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology. His famous claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language” placed speech, desire, and symbolic order at the center of psychoanalytic theory. Lacan’s concepts—such as the mirror stage, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real, desire, lack, and the Other—have had a major influence on psychoanalysis, literary theory, film studies, gender theory, and continental philosophy.
Sigmund Freud｜西格蒙德·弗洛伊德
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. He developed a theory of the unconscious, repression, dreams, sexuality, conflict, transference, and psychic development that profoundly changed modern understandings of the self. Although many of Freud’s specific claims have been revised or criticized, his broader insight—that human beings are not fully transparent to themselves—continues to shape psychotherapy, literature, philosophy, cultural theory, and everyday language.
Pierre Bourdieu｜皮埃尔·布迪厄
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist whose work analyzed how social inequality is reproduced through culture, education, taste, and everyday practice. His key concepts include habitus, field, cultural capital, symbolic capital, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu showed that what appears to be personal preference or individual merit is often shaped by social position and institutional power. His work remains essential for sociology, education, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical theory.
Frantz Fanon｜弗朗茨·法农
Frantz Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and anti-colonial theorist whose work connected psychoanalysis, race, colonial violence, and political liberation. In Black Skin, White Masks, he examined the psychological effects of racism and colonial domination on identity and desire. In The Wretched of the Earth, he analyzed colonial violence and revolutionary struggle. Fanon remains central to postcolonial theory, critical race studies, political psychology, and liberation-oriented clinical thought.
Didier Anzieu｜迪迪埃·安齐厄
Didier Anzieu was a French psychoanalyst best known for developing the concept of the “Skin-Ego”（Moi-peau）. He proposed that the infant’s experience of the skin, touch, containment, and bodily boundaries becomes a psychological model for the formation of the self. Anzieu’s work is especially important for understanding embodiment, early attachment, trauma, narcissism, and the relationship between physical boundaries and psychic boundaries.