Great Critical Thinkers

22 people.

People known mainly for work outside philosophy (science, writing, medicine, reform) who are widely recognised for how they reasoned, tested claims or exposed errors. Philosophers are people whose main work is philosophy itself, as studied in philosophy courses and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See the philosophers.

• Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519Italian artist and engineer who filled notebooks with dissections, water studies and flying-machine designs.Evidence and sources
• Fyodor Dostoevsky1821–1881Russian novelist whose books are read as works of philosophy as well as fiction.Identifying assumptions
• Galileo Galilei1564–1642Italian astronomer and physicist at the centre of the Scientific Revolution.Evidence and sources
• Charles Darwin1809–1882English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection is the foundation of modern biology.Cognitive biases
• Richard Feynman1918–1988American physicist, Nobel laureate and famous explainer of science.Cognitive biases
• Ignaz Semmelweis1818–1865Hungarian doctor who worked in a Vienna maternity hospital.Evidence and sources
• Carl Sagan1934–1996American astronomer and the best-known science communicator of his era.Logical fallacies
• Florence Nightingale1820–1910English nurse, reformer and pioneering statistician.Numbers and chance
• John Snow1813–1858English doctor seen as a founder of modern epidemiology.Evidence and sources
• George Orwell1903–1950English writer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and sharp essays on politics and language.Interpreting an argument
• Mark Twain1835–1910American writer and satirist (Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer).Numbers and chance
• Daniel Kahneman1934–2024Israeli-American psychologist and 2002 Nobel prize winner in economics.Cognitive biases
• Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)c. 965–c. 1040Arab physicist and mathematician who worked in Basra and Cairo.Evidence and sources
• Shen Kuo1031–1095Chinese scholar-official and polymath of the Song dynasty.Applying a principle
• Ida B. Wells1862–1931African American journalist and civil rights campaigner.Fact vs opinion
• Rachel Carson1907–1964American marine biologist and author of Silent Spring (1962).Evidence and sources
• Marie Curie1867–1934Polish-French physicist and chemist, the first person to win Nobel prizes in two sciences.Evidence and sources
• Harry Houdini1874–1926Hungarian-American escape artist and magician.Cognitive biases
• Hans Rosling1948–2017Swedish doctor and statistician, co-founder of Gapminder.Numbers and chance
• Frederick Douglass1818–1895American abolitionist, writer and speaker who escaped slavery.Evaluating arguments
• Albert Einstein1879–1955Physicist whose theories of relativity changed how we understand space, time and gravity.Identifying assumptions
• Carl Jung1875–1961Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology.Cognitive biases