Hamid Dabashi

Frantz Fanon was a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. Fanon is known as a radical existential humanist thinker on the issue of decolonization and the... psychopathology of colonization. Fanon supported the Algerian struggle for independence and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. His life and works have incited and inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades. He is remembered as "a very soft man, very tender". Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French département. His father was a descendant of African slaves; his mother was said to be an illegitimate child of African, Indian and European descent, whose white ancestors came from Strasbourg in Alsace. Fanon's family was socio-economically middle-class and they could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, then the most prestigious high school in Martinique, where the writer Aimé Césaire was one of his teachers.
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Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher and Talmudic commentator of Lithuanian Jewish origin. Born into a Litvak family Emanuelis 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.
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Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault 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".
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Martin Heidegger ; 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 , 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 deconstruction and literary theory, theology, architecture, and artificial intelligence.
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