Underground Thinkers, Living Edition
Same rules as the dead edition. No names you have seen on a bestseller list. No one whose ideas have been absorbed into corporate diversity training. No one with a Netflix special. No one whose Wikipedia page leads with a controversy rather than their actual work.
The specific difficulty with living thinkers is that the filtering mechanism is slower. Dead thinkers have already been sorted: the bad ones faded, the real ones persisted. Living ones have not been sorted yet. You are making a judgment call in real time, without the benefit of historical consensus. That is the point. These are bets.
Thirteen thinkers. All alive, all writing, all working outside the mainstream consensus of their respective intellectual cultures. France, America, England, Ireland.
France
François Jullien (born 1951): The Philosopher Who Uses China as a Mirror
Jullien is a sinologist who trained in classical Chinese because he wanted to see Western philosophy from the outside. Not to compare China and the West in some cultural-relativist framework. Not to argue that Eastern wisdom is superior. But to use genuine philosophical distance as a diagnostic tool: if you have only ever read Western philosophy, you cannot see its unspoken assumptions. China provides a contrast sufficient to make those assumptions visible.
His core concept is "écart" (gap or divergence): not the difference between two things (which presupposes a common measure) but the space between them that makes comparison generative. Two philosophical traditions do not share enough common ground to be compared directly; what they share is the capacity to illuminate each other's blind spots.
He has applied this method to everything. The Silent Transformations (2009) uses Chinese thought to develop a philosophy of change that is not event-based: change that happens continuously, imperceptibly, without rupture. The opposite of the Western tendency to think of change as crisis, revolution, decision. He argues that most of the important changes in a life, a society, a relationship happen in this silent way — and that the Western obsession with the decisive moment blinds us to them.
A Treatise on Efficacy (1996) compares Greek strategy (the imposition of form onto resistance) with Chinese strategy (the exploitation of propensity, going with the natural tendency of situations). Both work. They rest on entirely different ontologies. The comparison destabilizes both.
He is ignored in France because the philosophical establishment does not take sinology seriously as philosophy. He is ignored in sinology because he is doing philosophy, not history. He falls between two stools by design.
Start with: A Treatise on Efficacy (1996). Then The Silent Transformations (2009).
Rémi Brague (born 1947): Europe Has No Identity Except Transmission
Brague is a Catholic philosopher and medievalist who has spent his career arguing one counterintuitive thesis: Europe's defining characteristic is not any particular content — not a set of values, not a civilization, not a culture — but a mode of relating to tradition. Europe is the civilization that defines itself through secondarity: it receives from elsewhere (Greece, Rome, Jerusalem, Arabia) and transmits what it received. Its identity is the act of transmission itself, not the transmitted content.
This has consequences. It means European culture is essentially humble: it does not regard its sources as its own, it relates to them as gifts. It means European culture is essentially open: it absorbed Arabic philosophy, Greek science, Jewish scripture not as foreign contaminations but as things more true than what it already had. And it means the crisis of European culture is the crisis of transmission: if there is nothing worth receiving and passing on, the culture ends without violence, simply by forgetting.
His book Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (1992) makes this argument at book length. The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (2005) traces the concept of divine law through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and finds three entirely different structures with the same name — a correction to every lazy "Abrahamic religions" framing.
He is ignored because his argument is Catholic in a milieu that treats Catholicism as either irrelevant or dangerous, and because his conclusions are conservative in ways that do not fit the liberal or nationalist frameworks available in contemporary French debate.
Start with: Eccentric Culture (1992). Dense but short.
Olivier Rey (born 1964): The Mathematician Who Thinks About Size
Rey trained as a mathematician, became a research director at the CNRS, and then began publishing philosophical essays that have no equivalent in contemporary French thought.
His 2014 book Une question de taille (published in English as A Matter of Size) is about the philosophy of scale: the idea that scale is not a neutral variable, that size changes the nature of a thing, and that modernity has a systematic tendency to ignore this. He traces the concept through biology (where it originates with D'Arcy Thompson), architecture (Christopher Alexander), economics, and politics. Large organizations do not work the same as small ones. Large cities do not function the same as small ones. The assumption that you can simply scale up a form without changing its essence is one of the organizing illusions of modern management, modern politics, and modern urban planning.
Leurre et malheur du transhumanisme (2018) is a philosophical demolition of transhumanism — not a religious objection but a philosophical one: transhumanist thought rests on a category error about what human beings are, treats the self as a substrate to be upgraded rather than a form that can only exist in a specific material range, and inherits all the worst assumptions of Cartesian dualism without noticing.
He also wrote a psychoanalytically informed study of Flaubert. He does not stay in a lane. He is very French in the best sense: a generalist who takes mathematics seriously.
Start with: A Matter of Size (2014). The English translation is good.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy (born 1941): Engineering Catastrophe
Dupuy is an engineer and philosopher, trained at the École Polytechnique and Stanford, who has spent forty years thinking about one problem: why do modern societies systematically fail to act on credible predictions of catastrophe?
His argument in Pour un catastrophisme éclairé (2002, translated as A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis) is paradoxical: the only way to prevent a catastrophe is to believe, truly believe, that it will happen — not as a possibility but as a certainty. Standard probabilistic risk assessment fails because it allows people to discount unlikely events indefinitely. What is needed is a different relationship to the future: the catastrophe must be projected as real, as having already happened, and then action must be taken backward from that imagined reality.
He calls this "enlightened catastrophism" and distinguishes it carefully from both fatalism (which says nothing can be done) and optimism (which says nothing needs to be done). It is the position of someone who believes the worst will happen and acts as if it can still be prevented — a logical contradiction that he argues is the only psychologically and politically viable stance.
He has applied this to nuclear war, climate change, and artificial intelligence. His AI writing is particularly interesting: in The Mark of the Sacred (2008) and subsequent essays, he argues that the problem with AI is not that it will become conscious or malevolent but that humans will attribute to it a form of sacred authority that removes it from moral questioning entirely. The danger is not the machine. It is the human tendency to worship machines.
Start with: On the Origins of Cognitive Science (2009) for the intellectual biography. Then A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis (2015) for the catastrophe theory.
America
Robin Hanson (born 1959): Everything You Do Is for a Hidden Reason
Hanson is an economist at George Mason who has spent thirty years developing one thesis: humans systematically deceive themselves about their motives. Almost every major human institution — medicine, education, politics, law, charity — is explained officially as serving one purpose and actually serves a different one. The real function is signaling: displaying qualities (wealth, virtue, intelligence, group loyalty) to observers. The stated function is the cover story.
The Elephant in the Brain (2018), written with Kevin Simler, applies this thesis systematically. Medicine is primarily about signaling care, not producing health; studies show that more medicine does not produce better health outcomes at the margin, but nobody cuts their medical spending because cutting spending would signal that you do not care. Education is primarily about signaling intelligence and conformity, not producing learning; most of what is taught is immediately forgotten and the credential is the product. Politics is primarily about demonstrating tribal loyalty, not selecting good policies.
The thesis is uncomfortable because it implies that most of what people do in the name of virtue and improvement is self-interested performance. Hanson does not present this as a cynical take. He presents it as an observation about how evolution built human social cognition, and argues that understanding it is necessary for building institutions that actually work.
His blog, Overcoming Bias, has been running since 2006 and contains some of the most original applied economics and social theory written in English. He also developed the concept of "futarchy" (govern by prediction markets) and wrote The Age of Em (2016), a detailed sociological projection of a world where human brain emulations are the dominant economic agents. Whether you find that plausible or not, the methodology — take an assumption seriously and follow it to its logical consequences without flinching — is unusual.
Start with: The Elephant in the Brain (2018). Then spend a few hours on the Overcoming Bias archive.
Peter Turchin (born 1957): He Predicted 2020 in 2010
Turchin is a biologist who decided in the 1990s to apply the mathematical methods of population ecology to history. He called the resulting field "cliodynamics." Most historians ignored or mocked it. In 2010 he published a prediction in the journal Nature: based on his analysis of historical cycles of elite overproduction, inequality, and political instability, he predicted that the 2020s would see a period of severe political instability in the United States.
He was right. This made people pay attention.
His model tracks two key variables. The first is the ratio of elite aspirants to elite positions: when too many people with elite credentials compete for too few elite positions, they turn into a frustrated, politically disruptive class. The second is popular immiseration: when real wages stagnate and social mobility declines, mass discontent builds. Both variables peak together periodically, producing revolutions, civil wars, or serious political crises. In American history this happened in the 1860s, in the 1920s-30s, and appears to be happening again now.
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (2016) is the technical version. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) is the accessible one. His argument is not that history repeats but that it has a structure, and that structure can be modeled.
He is ignored by historians because they distrust mathematical modeling and because his conclusions are uncomfortable for everyone: the crisis is structural, not the fault of any particular party or leader.
Start with: End Times (2023). Then Ages of Discord (2016) if you want the model.
David Bentley Hart (born 1965): The Theologian Who Argues Materialism Is Incoherent
Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher who writes with a polemical fury that has no parallel in contemporary academic theology or philosophy. He has spent twenty years making one argument: the contemporary philosophical consensus — that mind reduces to matter, that consciousness is a product of brain processes, that there is no genuine intentionality or subjectivity in nature — is not merely unproven but incoherent, resting on a set of category errors that have been identified clearly since Aristotle and that contemporary philosophers repeat without noticing.
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013) is the most accessible statement of the argument. His target is not crude atheism but the metaphysical assumptions shared by most contemporary educated people: that the physical is the fundamental, that consciousness is epiphenomenal, that intentionality can be reduced to information processing. He argues that all of these positions, when examined carefully, dissolve into incoherence: you cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, why the something is intelligible, or why there is something it is like to be a conscious being, within a purely materialist framework. These are not gaps to be filled by future science; they are category errors that science as currently conceived cannot address.
That All Shall Be Saved (2019) is a theological argument for universal salvation — the position that a God who would create beings capable of eternal damnation is not good in any meaningful sense — that scandalized American evangelical and Catholic readers and has not been adequately answered.
He is also a devastating polemicist and his essays on contemporary culture, collected in A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays (2016), are among the sharpest things written in English in the last twenty years.
Start with: The Experience of God (2013). Then the essays.
Agnes Callard (born 1974): Philosophy of Becoming Someone Different
Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago whose 2018 book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming solves a genuine puzzle that philosophy had mostly ignored: how do you rationally choose to become someone with different values?
Standard decision theory requires you to have stable preferences to make rational choices. But the most important decisions in a life — to become an artist, to adopt a religion, to have children, to commit to a relationship — are exactly the cases where your current preferences do not fit the values you are trying to acquire. You do not already value what the future version of you will value. You are trying to learn to value it. This is not irrational choosing; it is a specific form of agency Callard calls "aspiration," and she argues it requires a philosophy of its own.
The argument is worked out with unusual precision: she uses Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and contemporary decision theory together without forcing any of them. The book is short and dense and does not condescend.
She also writes essays with unusual intellectual honesty. A 2020 essay arguing against the moral duty to apologize (apology is a performance that replaces genuine moral transformation, not a path to it) generated real controversy. A piece on the ethics of anger was similarly direct. She does not write to be liked. She writes to be right.
Start with: Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018). Then her essays at The Point magazine.
England
John Gray (born 1948): Progress Is a Myth, Humans Are Just Animals
Gray spent the 1980s as a reasonably mainstream political philosopher, associated with Hayekian liberalism and the British conservative tradition. Then in 2002 he published Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and burned his bridges with almost everyone.
The argument: humanism — the belief that humans are special, that history has a direction, that collective moral progress is possible, that science will solve the human problem — is a secular religion with no more rational foundation than Christianity. The Enlightenment did not escape religious thought; it secularized it. Progress is Providence renamed. Human rights are salvation renamed. The rational autonomous individual is the immortal soul renamed. None of these secular concepts are more defensible than the religious ones they replaced; they are simply less honest about their nature.
What follows from this is not despair but a different kind of realism. Humans are animals. Animals do not progress morally. They have natures, which are fixed within a range, and they live out those natures in changing circumstances. Cruelty and violence are not bugs to be patched but features of what humans are. The appropriate response to this is not to engineer a better human but to build institutions that constrain the worst impulses and protect spaces of private life.
He is reviled by liberals because he attacks liberalism, by conservatives because he attacks religion, and by leftists because he attacks the entire tradition they inhabit. He has no institutional home. He writes books every three years and does not apologize for any of them.
Start with: Straw Dogs (2002). Then The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013).
Paul Kingsnorth (born 1972): Collapse Is Not a Problem to Solve
Kingsnorth was a mainstream environmental activist and journalist until about 2009, when he concluded that mainstream environmentalism had failed and that the failure was structural: the movement had accepted the framing of industrial civilization and was arguing for a greener version of the same project, rather than questioning the project itself.
He co-founded the Dark Mountain Project with Dougald Hine in 2009: a literary and philosophical movement based on the premise that industrial civilization is in terminal decline and that the appropriate response is not to prevent the collapse but to tell true stories in its shadow. The founding manifesto, "Uncivilisation," is worth reading as a document of a specific kind of honest despair.
His subsequent trajectory has been unusual. He moved to rural Ireland to farm. He wrote a trilogy of novels about the English experience of land and conquest, beginning with The Wake (2014), written in a shadow language derived from Old English. He became increasingly interested in mystical and spiritual traditions as the only adequate response to civilizational breakdown. In 2021 he converted to Orthodox Christianity, which surprised his secular environmentalist audience considerably.
His essays, collected in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017) and ongoing at his Substack The Abbey of Misrule, are among the most honest writing about the collapse of progressive hopes in contemporary English prose. He does not offer solutions. He thinks the search for solutions is part of the problem.
Start with: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017). Then The Wake (2014) for the fiction.
Theodore Dalrymple (born 1949): What Soft Compassion Actually Does to People
Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a retired doctor who worked for twenty years in British inner-city hospitals and prisons, and before that in various parts of Africa and Latin America. He has spent thirty years writing essays about what he saw.
His single consistent argument: the welfare state, as actually implemented in Britain, has not helped the poor. It has trapped them in a system that removes the incentive for self-improvement, destroys family structure, creates permanent dependency, and then attributes the resulting misery to the failures of capitalism rather than the failures of the system designed to correct them. The intellectuals who designed and defend this system do not live near the people it affects. Their compassion is abstract and self-serving.
He is not arguing for Victorian laissez-faire. He is arguing that the specific forms of soft determinism embedded in British welfare thinking — the idea that criminal behavior is caused by poverty and therefore cannot be morally judged, that addiction is a disease and therefore the addict bears no responsibility, that family breakdown is a lifestyle choice and therefore requires no moral framework — have had measurable, devastating effects on the people subjected to them.
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001) collects his clinical essays. The title is blunt and the essays are blunter. He writes about specific patients, specific conversations, specific mechanisms by which people are kept dependent and their capacity for agency systematically undermined by the institutions supposedly helping them.
He publishes in conservative outlets and is therefore dismissed without being read by everyone who should read him.
Start with: Life at the Bottom (2001). Then Our Culture, What's Left of It (2005).
Ireland
Richard Kearney (born 1954): God After the Death of God
Kearney is an Irish philosopher at Boston College who has spent his career in the gap between Continental philosophy and theology — a gap that most people on both sides prefer to pretend does not exist.
His most original contribution is "anatheism," developed in Anatheism: Returning to God After God (2010). The argument: the death of God in modernity — the collapse of the institutional, metaphysical God of Western Christianity — is not the end of religious experience but a clearing that makes possible a more honest encounter with the sacred. The "ana" is Greek for "again" or "back": not a return to the God that died, but a return to the possibility of God on the other side of atheism.
He traces this movement through literature (Woolf, Proust, Joyce), through philosophy (Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida), and through theology. The figures he is interested in are people who encountered genuine transcendence without the institutional and doctrinal scaffolding of established religion: the moment of hospitality to the stranger (his reading of Abraham and the three angels), the experience of something sacred in ordinary life, the persistence of the religious impulse in secular thought.
This is not soft spirituality or vague "something more." It is philosophically serious work on a genuine question: if you take the critiques of religion seriously but also take the phenomenology of religious experience seriously, what is left? Kearney's answer is more rigorous than either the new atheists or the religious apologists usually manage.
He has also written extensively on narrative imagination, Irish philosophy, and the concept of the possible. His Poetics of Imagining (1991) is a serious history of imagination in Western philosophy from Hume to the present.
Start with: Anatheism (2010). Then The God Who May Be (2001) for the more technical theology.
Mark Patrick Hederman (born 1944): The Abbot Who Reads the Unconscious
Hederman is a Benedictine monk and former Abbot of Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick. He has been publishing philosophy and theology since the 1970s, and almost nobody outside Ireland has read him.
His framework combines Jungian depth psychology with Christian theology and Irish mythology in a way that sounds syncretic but is actually carefully argued. His thesis: the unconscious — in the specific Jungian sense of the psychic layer that operates below conscious control and communicates through dream, symbol, and art — is not a pathological residue but a source of genuine knowledge. It carries content that the rational, discursive intellect cannot access. Art, myth, and dream are epistemological channels, not decorations.
Applied to Irish culture, this produces an argument about the role of Irish mythology (the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Otherworld, the fairy faith) as a genuine philosophical resource, not a folk-cultural curiosity. These mythological structures encode a relationship to the sacred, to the non-human, and to the deeper layers of psychic life that Irish culture has carried for two thousand years and that modernity has been systematically dismantling.
Underground Cathedrals (2010) is the most accessible statement of the argument. Dancing with Dinosaurs (1993) is earlier and stranger. He has written on Joyce (his reading of Ulysses as a spiritual autobiography is genuinely original), on education, and on the relationship between monasticism and contemporary life.
He is ignored because he is a monk writing philosophy, because his sources are unfashionable (Jung, Irish mythology), and because the Irish intellectual establishment has spent the last forty years trying to distance itself from Catholic thought in all forms, even when that thought is doing something entirely different from what the establishment fears.
Start with: Underground Cathedrals (2010). Short and direct.
Where to Start
| Thinker | Country | Best First Book | One-line hook |
|---|---|---|---|
| François Jullien | France | A Treatise on Efficacy (1996) | China as a tool to think about the West |
| Rémi Brague | France | Eccentric Culture (1992) | Europe's identity is the act of transmission |
| Olivier Rey | France | A Matter of Size (2014) | Scale changes the nature of things |
| Jean-Pierre Dupuy | France | A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis (2015) | Believe the catastrophe is certain; act to prevent it |
| Robin Hanson | America | The Elephant in the Brain (2018) | Your stated motive is almost never your real one |
| Peter Turchin | America | End Times (2023) | He modeled the 2020s in 2010 and was right |
| David Bentley Hart | America | The Experience of God (2013) | Materialism is incoherent, argued with philosophical precision |
| Agnes Callard | America | Aspiration (2018) | How do you rationally choose to become someone different? |
| John Gray | England | Straw Dogs (2002) | Progress is a myth; humans are just animals |
| Paul Kingsnorth | England | Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017) | Collapse is not a problem to solve |
| Theodore Dalrymple | England | Life at the Bottom (2001) | Soft compassion is destroying the people it claims to help |
| Richard Kearney | Ireland | Anatheism (2010) | God after the death of God |
| Mark Patrick Hederman | Ireland | Underground Cathedrals (2010) | The unconscious as an epistemological channel |
One note on the list: living thinkers are still changing. Kingsnorth converted to Orthodoxy and keeps moving. Turchin publishes new data every year. Hanson has opinions about the future that are harder to evaluate than his opinions about the present. The books listed are stable; the thinkers are not. Follow the work, not the reputation.