Library of Living Philosophers

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The Library of Living Philosophers is a series of books conceived of and started by Paul Arthur Schilpp in 1939; Schilpp remained editor until 1981. The series was edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn from 1981 until 2001, and is currently edited by Randall E. Auxier. Each volume is devoted to a single living philsoopher of note, and contains, alongside an "intellectual autobiography" of its subject and a complete bibliography, a collection of critical and interpretive essays by several dozen contemporary philosophers on aspects of the subject's work, with responses by the subject. The Library was originally conceived as a means by which a philosopher could reply to his interpreters while still alive, hopefully resolving endless philosophical disputes about what someone "really meant." While its success in this line has been dubious at best--a reply, after all, can stand just as much in need of interpretation as an original essay--the series has become a noted philosophical resource and the site of much significant contemporary argument.

Subjects of the Library, to date, are: John Dewey (1939); George Santayana (1940); Alfred North Whitehead (1941); G. E. Moore (1942); Bertrand Russell (1944); Ernst Cassirer (1949); Albert Einstein (1949); Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1952); Karl Jaspers (1957); C. D. Broad (1959); Rudolf Carnap (1963); Martin Buber (1967); C. I. Lewis (1968); Karl Popper (1974); Brand Blanshard (1980); Jean-Paul Sartre (1981); Gabriel Marcel (1984); W. V. Quine (1986); Georg Henrik von Wright (1989); Charles Hartshorne (1991); A. J. Ayer (1992); Paul Ricoeur (1995); Paul Weiss (1995); Hans-Georg Gadamer (1997); Roderick Chisolm (1997); P. F. Strawson (1998); Donald Davidson (1999); Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2000); Marjorie Grene (2002); Jaakko Hintikka (2006).