Place
Princeton
A quiet New Jersey university town where John Rawls, Thomas Kuhn, and Peter Singer all worked, and where the question of what justice requires has been argued across decades of seminar tables.
Princeton is a small, wealthy university town in central New Jersey, insulated from the pressures of the city while connected to them, and this has made it an unusual kind of thinking space. John Rawls spent decades refining A Theory of Justice at Princeton and then Harvard, and the questions he asked drew others: Kuhn was here at the Institute for Advanced Study, Singer holds a chair here in bioethics. The town has an orderly, somewhat unreal quality, manicured and purposeful, that may or may not have something to do with the philosophical temperament it tends to attract: rigorous, systematic, and at some distance from the disorder it theorizes.
Thinkers Connected to Princeton
John Rawls
He asked what principles of justice you would choose if you didn't know who you'd be. The answer was more radical than anyone expected.
Thomas Kuhn
He showed that science does not advance by accumulation but by revolution, and that insight was itself a revolution.
Peter Singer
He asked why we don't care about suffering just because it's far away, or caused by an animal. The question has never gone away.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
He argues that you can be rooted in a particular place and people while remaining a citizen of the whole world, and that these are not in tension.
Saul Kripke
A teenager in Omaha who had already mastered set theory and Wittgenstein, he grew up to argue that names don't describe things, they just point at them, in this world and in every possible world besides.