The list is long, but I'm going to go for it anyways... How's this? I'll stick to the 20th century.
Theodor AdornoAs Hegel was Beethoven, so Adorno was to Schoenberg. Adorno gave us (with Horkheimer) the first, and still perhaps the best, critique of Enlightenment Rationality (
The Dialectic of Enlightenment). He gave us a
new categorical imperative in
After Auschwitz, that it never happen again, that it happened in the first place because people obeyed instead of thinking for themselves and so anything which would tell us "don't think" must be treated as suspect and subjected to critique. He also gave us the
Minima Moralia, the reflections of a European bourgeois, as a jew in exile in Los Angeles from the Nazis (his good friend and another great philosopher Walter Benjamin wasn't so lucky, he shot himself to avoid the camps, Benjamin wrote some
very interesting things on hashish). He wrote several critical sociological texts on music and the burgeoning "mass culture," of which he was very critical, as he saw it as not requiring any thought or attention. One example of this is his "
On Popular Music." His
Aesthetic Theory is one of the better I know of (following closely the
Third Critique of Kant)... And, finally, his "
Negative Dialectics" manages to turn Hegel on his head the same way Schoenberg had Beethoven.
Martin HeideggerAdorno hated Heidegger. He saw Heidegger's "Fundamental Ontology" as complicit with fascism, you can read all about that in the "Negative Dialectics" linked above, and also in his "
Jargon of Authenticity". But love him or hate him, Heidegger did throw down the gauntlet in his breakout masterpiece "
Being and Time." Here, Heidegger claims we have for too long neglected the question of Being, that is, what the Being of beings might mean. He begins the book, by saying the way into this question is through the being for whom Being is a question, namely, being-there, or Dasein (in German). He proceeds to ask after Being through Dasein, and offers up some really amazing insights. Heidegger later went on to write several other amazing texts, some of which include his critique of Humanism and Existentialism, in his "
Letter on Humanism." His critique of technology, in "
The Question Concerning Technology." And his own great masterpiece on art, "
The Origin of the Work of Art." Heidegger was an incredible thinker, and an incredibly influential thinker. He didn't abide dialectics, and this gained him much favor with the proceeding generations. You've got to check out Heidegger. My own personal favorite of his is, "
What are Poet's For:" so amazing beautiful.
Gille Deleuze If you're an acid freak, a psychonaut, or any other beast of the sort, then Deleuze is indispensable. His philosophy, though never by name, embodies the psychedelic like no other I know of... He wrote several great books on his own, the "Logic of Sense," "Difference and Repetition," "Nietzsche and Philsophy" -- all great. But he is most famous for his collaborations with Felix Guattari, if "
A Thousand Plateaus" doesn't read like an trip than nothing does... It is a follow up to their "
Anti-Oedipus," a so-called schizoanalytic critique of psychoanalysis. Deleuze followed Spinoza, and many here at the Nexus, in building an ontology based soley upon a single plane of immanence, always becoming, becoming animal, becoming woman, becoming-becoming-becoming different... Everything is just this single plane at different thresholds of intensity--it goes through phase transitions, it deterritorializes but then is retteitorialized itself. Deleuze also followed Nietzsche, he sought
pure affirmation of creativity and difference, and a whole hearted rejection of negativity and specters of transcendence. Check him out if you don't know him, he's positively intoxicated. (Deleuze will be my stand in for his great contemporary and friend Michel Foucault, his stuff is also great, and worth checking out... He really sort of carried Adorno's critique of Enlightenment rationality further than Adorno had, and without really knowing about Adorno at all, also from a decidedly undialectical standpoint).
I've probably filled enough space with these, and I'm not even really explaining, just linking... Even so, I'll end here with a list. No links, no explanations.
Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hunter S. Thompson, Giorgio Agamben, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Marion, Alexander Shulgin, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan (and his reader
Slavoj Zizek),
Emmanuel Levinas, (Walter Benjamin) & (Michel Foucault) mentioned above, S
imone Weil, ... This is only the 20th century mind you, the masters of us all have got to be
Hegel, and
Kant before him (it's really all already there in Kant if you read carefully, everything, that is, except the psychedelic experience.
I could go on, as this is kind of my field, (regretfully), I also know there is a decided bias here towards Western white male thinkers... And that's always bad news, so let me throw in
Luce Irigaray, Franz Fanon, Eduard Glissant, Gayatri Spivak, Donna Haraway (finally came around on her),
Homi K. Baba, and so on, and so on.