WDjuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
WSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English.
WElisa Brune was a Belgian writer and journalist. She held a doctorate in environmental science.
WJulio Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brazil. He is a retired professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brasília and former head of the department. Previously he taught in Argentina, at the National University of Córdoba, the University of Belgrano and then in Brazil at the Federal University of Santa Maria. Currently, he is a senior associate researcher, by invitation, in the Bioethics Doctoral Program of the University of Brasília. He is best known for his works on "negative ethics" and cinema and philosophy. Other areas of philosophy that he deals with are philosophy of language, logic and Latin American philosophy.
WFrançois-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocratic family from Brittany, Chateaubriand was a royalist by political disposition. In an age when large numbers of intellectuals turned against the Church, he authored the Génie du christianisme in defense of the Catholic faith. His works include the autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, published posthumously in 1849–1850.
WEmil Cioran was a Romanian-born philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and frequently engages with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. Among his best-known works are On the Heights of Despair (1934) and The Trouble with Being Born (1973). Cioran's first French book, A Short History of Decay, was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. The Latin Quarter of Paris was his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in seclusion with his partner Simone Boué.
WAlexandra David-Néel was a Belgian–French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet, when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet which was published in 1929. Her teachings influenced the beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the popularisers of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts and Ram Dass, and the esotericist Benjamin Creme.
WThéophile de Giraud is a Belgian writer, philosopher and activist of French language.
WGustave Flaubert was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
WEddie Collins, better known by his stage name Greydon Square, is an American West Coast hip hop emcee, producer and sound engineer from Compton, California. He is a former U.S. Army soldier and Iraq War veteran who is also an outspoken atheist and promotes discussion about it through music.
WYutaka Haniya was a noted Japanese author.
WChristian Johann Heinrich Heine was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of lieder by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine's later verse and prose are distinguished by their satirical wit and irony. He is considered part of the Young Germany movement. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities—which, however, only added to his fame. He spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.
WMarie Huot was a French poet, writer, feminist, animal rights and vegetarianism activist.
WEugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way.
WKim Young-ha is a modern South Korean writer.
WGiacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist, and philologist. He is considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the principals of literary romanticism; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition—of sensuous and materialist inspiration—has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century but routinely compared by Italian critics to his older contemporary Alessandro Manzoni despite expressing "diametrically opposite positions." Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative Papal States, he came into contact with the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and through his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era. The strongly lyrical quality of his poetry made him a central figure on the European and international literary and cultural landscape.
WAbū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī was a blind Arab philosopher, poet, and writer. Despite holding a controversially irreligious worldview, he is regarded as one of the greatest classical Arabic poets.
WPhilipp Mainländer was a German poet and philosopher. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main.
WMani, of Iranian origin, was the prophet and the founder of Manichaeism, a religion of late antiquity strongly influenced by Gnosticism which was widespread but no longer prevalent by name. Mani was born in or near Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Babylonia, at the time still part of the Parthian Empire. Six of his major works were written in Syriac, and the seventh, dedicated to the Sasanian emperor Shapur I, was written in Middle Persian. He died in Gundeshapur.
WMarcion of Sinope was an important figure in early Christianity. Marcion preached that the god who sent Jesus into the world was a different, higher deity than the creator god of Judaism. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, who he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus Christ. He published the earliest extant fixed collection of New Testament books, making him a vital figure in the development of Christian history.
WLeilani Maaja Münter is an American former professional stock car racing driver and environmental activist. She last competed in the ARCA Menards Series, and previously drove in the Firestone Indy Lights, the development league of IndyCar. She currently lives in Cornelius, North Carolina.
WMichel Onfray is a French writer and philosopher. Having a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist world view, he is a highly prolific author on philosophy, having written more than 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism.
WNina Carolyn Paley is an American cartoonist, animator and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, but most of her recent work has been in animation. She is perhaps best known for creating the animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, based on the Ramayana, with parallels to her personal life. In 2018, she completed her second animated feature, Seder-Masochism, a retelling of the Book of Exodus as patriarchy emerging from goddess worship.
WArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.
WRobert James Smith is an English singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. He is the only continuous member of the rock band The Cure, which he co-founded in 1976. He was also the lead guitarist for the band Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1982 to 1984, and was part of the short-lived group The Glove in 1983.
WDouglas Stanhope is an American stand-up comedian, author, political activist, and podcast host.
WFernando Vallejo Rendón is a Colombian-born novelist, filmmaker and essayist. He obtained Mexican nationality in 2007.
WOtto Weininger was an Austrian thinker who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1903, he published the book Geschlecht und Charakter, which gained popularity after his suicide at the age of 23. Parts of his work were adapted for use by the Nazi regime. Weininger was a large influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, August Strindberg, and, via his lesser-known work Über die letzten Dinge, on James Joyce.
WLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
WPeter Wessel Zapffe was a Norwegian metaphysician, author, lawyer and mountaineer. He is often noted for his philosophically pessimistic and fatalistic view of human existence—his system of philosophy in line with the work of the earlier philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, by whom he was inspired—as well as his firm advocacy of antinatalism. His thoughts regarding the error of human life are presented in the essay "The Last Messiah". This essay is a shorter version of his best-known and yet to be translated work, the philosophical treatise On the Tragic.