Dan Ariely (b. 1967)

Ariely is a behavioural economist, who studies the way we make decisions, with a particular focus on moral choices. His bestselling book, Predictably Irrational investigated the phenomenon of making decisions that seem entirely illogical.

Julian Baggini (b. 1968)

Baggini is a British philosopher, educationalist, and journalist. He has written many books on philosophy for a general audience. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us to explore how knowers do not exist independently of their physical and mental worlds.

William Blake (1775 – 1827)

Blake was English painter, poet, and printmaker. He is considered one of the seminal figures of the Romantic age. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how the truth can be twisted – and why this is even more damaging than outright lies.

Paul Bloom (b. 1963)

Bloom is a Canadian American psychologist who works at Yale University. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us to explore the extent to which we should – and shouldn’t – draw on empathy to arrive at ethical conclusions.

Derren Brown (b 1971)

Brown is an illusionist, writer, and artist. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us to explore how the Barnum effect and cold readings help enforce our confirmation biases about the world.

Lord George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824)

Byron was an English poet and politician. He was a leading figure of the Romantic period, and is regarded as one of the greatest English poets. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us understand the need to apply reason to the world.

Hannah Critchlow (b. 1980)

Critchlow is a British scientist, writer and broadcaster. Her work focuses on cellular and molecular neuroscience. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how knowers are affected by bias as they seek to understand the world.

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)

Descartes was a French physicist and mathematician, and has been dubbed the father of modern philosophy. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us explore how we learn about the world via rational means.

Antonio Damasio (b. 1944)

Damasio is a Portuguese neuroscientist who works at the University of Southern California. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the relationship between emotion and reason, and how the latter relies on the former to help us understand the world.

Daniel DiNicola

DiNicola is an American philosopher at Gettysburg College. His work focuses on the philosophy of education, theoretical and applied ethics, and epistemology. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the obligation of knowers to believe only that which they can justify with evidence.

David Eagleman (b. 1971)

Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, writer, and science broadcaster. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the brain’s connection with the outside world.

Julia Galef (b. 1983)

Galef co-founded the Center for Applied Rationality. She writes and speaks on the topics of rationality, science, technology, and design. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the way we must sometimes adopt an outsiders perspective to avoid being misled by our own biases.

Edmund Gettier (b. 1927)

Gettier is an American philosopher at Amherst. In 1963, he wrote the article, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?, establishing the ‘Gettier problem’. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore whether knowledge can be defined in the way Plato suggested.

Dan Gilbert (b. 1957)

Gilbert studied social psychology at Princeton, and has taught at Harvard. He is a widely published author, who writes on the subject of happiness, and how to acquire it, focusing on the way in which our intuition often leads us into making the wrong decisions.

Heidi Grant-Halvorson

Grant is a leadership and motivation expert, who studies and teaches on issues such as the way we are influenced by our biases. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the primacy effect, and how it affects the way we understand the world.

John Gray (b. 1948)

Gray is an English philosopher who focuses on analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the extent to which we can rely on the human sciences in ascertaining whether society is progressing or not.

AC Grayling (b. 1949)

Grayling is a British philosopher and journalist who will help us to remain objective about applying the rules of ethics, especially when it comes to making judgements about criminal acts. He also has a lot to say on how we acquire knowledge.

Sam Harris (b. 1967)

Harris is a philosopher, neuroscientists, and writer who is an advocate of skepticism, and who believes that morality needs a solid foundation. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how ‘we’ do not exist as independent knowers.

Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)

Hesse was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, painter, and spiritual thinker. His quest for enlightenment via self-knowledge characterized his writing, and helped to inspire the counter-counter thinkers of the 1960s and ’70s.

Donald Hoffman (b. 1955)

Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science writer. He is based at the University of California, Irvine. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how we construct our own versions of reality.

Damon Horovitz

Horovitz is a philosophy professor and entrepreneur. He has delivered TED talks on teaching philosophy in prison, and the ethics of the tech industry. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the need for a ‘moral operating system’.

David Hume (1711 – 1776)

Hume was an Edinburgh philosopher and historian, and is regarded as the most important of the British empiricists (along with Locke and Berkeley). He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the importance of drawing on our emotions when understanding the world.

William James (1842 – 1910)

James was an American psychologist and philosopher, and one of the founding figures of the pragmatic school of thinking.  He believed that truth was ‘mutable’ or changeable, rather than something concrete and absolute. James believed that it often takes a long time to figure out whether something is true or not, based on whether it works successfully. This help us in formulating an understanding on the nature of ‘truth’.

Gish Jen (b. 1955)

Jen is an American writer and public speaker who deals with topics such as cultural identity. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore different cultural perspectives, and how they lead to contrasting moral outlooks.

Kahneman, Daniel (b. 1934)

Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winning economist, who is also one of the most influential thinkers of psychology in the world. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us explore the extent to which we draw on generalizations when trying to make sense of the world.

Helen Keller (1880 – 1968)

Keller was an American author, and social and political thinker. The first deaf/blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, her ideas can be summed up by her famous quote: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

John Locke (1632 – 1704)

Locke was the first of the British empiricists who borrowed Aristotle’s idea of a blank slate, which he termed the tabula rasa. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how knowers employ empirical methods in order to understand the world.

Elizabeth Loftus (b. 1944)

Loftus is a world authority on memory, based in part on her landmark study in the 1970s looking at how the recall of past events can be shaped by the way in which witness are asked to describe them. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore whether we should rely on our memory in order to understand the world reliably.

Beau Lotto (b. 1964)

Lotto is a neuroscientist and founder of ‘Lotto Lab’ who investigates how we perceive the world with our senses and brains. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how we construct our perception of the world via our prior experiences.

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121 – AD 180)

Roman emperor from 161 to 180, Marcus Aurelius presided over the empire whilst it was still in its heyday – after him, it went into a steady decline. He was one of the most famous Stoic philosophers, which held that the negative effects of your emotions can be overcome simply by perceiving of them in a different way – in other words, reason over emotion.

John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873)

Mill was a philosopher and liberal thinker, and one of the most important figures in the campaign against slavery. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the importance of humility when understanding the world.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

One of the greatest ever essayists and writers, Montaigne’s ideas foreshadowed many of the ones found in Shakespeare’s plays. He believed we are trapped in our own natures, and are unable to escape our instincts and personalities.

Michael Mosley (b. 1957)

Mosley is a British TV journalist and former doctor, who has produced many different documentaries on medicine and psychology. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the importance of emotion when trying to understand the world.

Jennifer Nagel

Nagel is a Canadian philosopher at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. She is also a specialist on C17th philosophy. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the ideas of Plato and Gettier.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

Nietzsche permeates all modern thinking, and he is credited as being one of the key figures in the challenge to a religious-based approach to morality. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore whether truth exists – or whether everything is merely a matter of opinion.

Barack Obama (b. 1961)

Obama is an American politician and attorney, who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the role of empathy in helping us to arrive at moral conclusions.

Plato (428/427 – 348/347 BC)

Plato, a pupil of Socrates, was one of the most influential philosophers in history, helping to lay down the framework for the way we think. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the nature of knowledge, and how it should be defined.

Robert Plutchik (1928 – 2006)

Plutchik, an American psychologist, tried to categorize emotions by referring to them as ‘basic’ and ‘advanced’. Whether or not we can divide up such a nebulous phenomenon as our emotional state in such a way is one question that is worth considering.

Karl Popper (1902 – 1994)

Popper, an Austro-British academic, wrote on just about every subject there is. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the way scientific knowledge has to be ‘falsifiable’, and how we are often misled by our own biases.

Ken Robinson (1950 – 2020)

Robinson was an inspirational British educational thinker, writer, and international advisor on education in the arts to governments and other organizations. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore what a meaningful education should consist of.

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

Russell is one of the towering figures of 20^th century thought, and wrote on subjects as diverse as mathematics and the morality of nuclear weapons. His thoughts scatter the TOK course, beginning with the nature of knowledge, and the definition of truth.

Oliver Sacks (1933 – 2015)

Sacks was a neurologist, naturalist, and writer. He was born and educated in Britain, but spent his career in the USA. He asserted that the brain is the “most incredible thing in the universe”. He is one of our knowledge heroes, helping us to explore the way knowers create their own versions of reality.

Taiye Selasi (b. 1979)

Selasi is a British-American writer, photographer, and public speaker. Although she is of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin, she prefers to view herself as a “local” of Accra, Berlin, New York, and Rome. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore our own identities, and the myth of nationality.

Tali Sharot

Sharot is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. She witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and dedicated her research on how emotions affect memory. She is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the effect of cognitive biases on our ability to understand the world.

Julia Shaw (b. 1987)

Shaw is a German-Canadian psychologist and popular science writer who specializes in the fallibility of human memory. She is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us to explore the reliability of memory in informing us about the world.

Michael Shermer (b. 1954)

Founder of Skeptic magazine, Shermer spends his life debunking myths, exposing frauds, and highlighting fallacies. His key assertion is that before you draw on a supernatural cause for something, you first have to explore all the potential natural causes.

Peter Singer (b. 1946)

Singer is an Australian philosopher. His work focuses on applied ethics, and he is one of the key advocates of veganism. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the idea of ‘effective altruism’, and what prevents us from attaining it.

Socrates (469 – 399 BC)

Arguably, Socrates was the philosopher who started it all for us in the West, at least in terms of the way we think. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how admitting one’s ignorance is the key to acquiring wisdom.

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)

Swift was an Anglo-Irish author, essayist, political commentator, and poet who became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore how rumours spread.

David Foster Wallace (1962 – 2008)

Wallace was an influential American writer of novels, short stories and essays, and a university professor of English. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us explore the point of education.

Nigel Warburton (b. 1962)

Warburton is a British philosopher of applied ethics and aesthetics, and writer of popular philosophy. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the concepts of relativism.

Eric Weinstein (b. 1965)

Weinstein is an American financial adviser and non-academic physicist. He is one of our knowledge heroes, appearing in the BQ lessons to help us to explore the concepts of ‘mental sandboxes’, and how they help us come up with new ideas.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher of mathematics, language, and the mind. He is one of our knowledge heroes, and appears in the BQ lessons to help us explore the relationship between knowledge and language.

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