What is the use of listing names? It is kinda silly since we can just go to wikipedia and get those lists. And Nine, forget any specific number because there have been thousands, but the some of the names listed in other answers are significant. The question is what is it that makes a thinker on logic’s work influential. What are the criteria? The main criteria is that they should profoundly change how we think about logic. Best example is Peirce. He has probably done more to change the way we think about logic than anyone else since Aristotle who created it for us in the West. But there has been so much work in logic over the last century that it is difficult to say who is most important. Fuzzy Logic is definitely important. Para-consistency of Priest is important. But perhaps the most important is G. Spencer Brown who along with Bricken and Hellerstien and Kauffman have created a boundary logic that is the logic of Masses to rival the Syllogistic Logic of Sets. But then also very important is August Stern and his Matrix Logic. There are now myriad deviant logics including Quantum Logic that are significant. Another major contribution was Higher Logical Type Theory of Russell. But also Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his later retraction Philosophical Investigations and Philosophical Grammar drew a lot of attention to logic. Also there is Topos theory, which is about the Categorical representation of logic. There has been a lot happening in Logic over the last century. Logic is not what you think it is anymore. It is a whole field with multiple profound contributions. No standard list of names is going to capture that reality. A renaissance in Logic has occurred over the last century and everyone basically missed it. But eventually it will change the way we think about everything. An important contribution to this was the book Life Itself by Robert Rosen where he shows that causal and inference structures can be analyzed categorically into entailment structures and that these are more complex than we bargained for, complex enough to let biology into the science that includes physics without appeal to vitalism. Lots going on there to learn about, think about and use as a tool for making our theorizing better.

Zizek talks about Ethical Evil which Kant did not believe existed.

Easy to list them, but hard to say why they are influential. They are influential because they are exploring the ideas of Heidegger based on those of Husserl, Hegel and Aristotle. They have rediscovered the meta-levels of Being. They have explored this territory discovering

Pure Being – Husserl
Process Being — Heidegger
Hyper Being — Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida
Wild Being — Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Castoradis
Ultra Being — Zizek, Badiou

If you can understand these kinds of Being you can understand the nature of the essential nature of the Western worldview.

Zizek is the most influential because he is like a pop star of philosophy due to the fact that he has an opinion on everything. But he also has some deep points to make especially when you contrast him with Badiou and understand his reduction of Lacan to Hegel. He is appealing because he has interesting things to say about everything under the sun. He likes to say things that are controversial and thrives on intellectual jousting with the other intellectual pop stars of our time.

Probably Zizek’s books particularly Parallax View but the other significant ones as well all work together to give an interesting reevaluation of Hegel now that Marxism is free from the Soviet Communist yoke. The first such book was Critique of Dialectical Reason by Sartre. Recent books by Fredrick James are also offering reassessment of dialectics in the face of Postmodernism. But Zizek has actually via Lacan come up with a genuinely new view of Hegel and if taken seriously that is going to make a difference in the way political philosophy is understood. The first big break was the political economics of Bataille with the idea of the Accursed Share. We can see the effects of that in Deleuze and Baudrillard. But Zizek uses Lacan and Hegel to drive the point home with a vengeance which should transform the way we think about politics fundamentally in terms of the blatant Ideology of our supposedly post-ideological age after a century of ideological warfare. Just because you have beaten all ideological foes does not mean Ideology has vanished, it has just gone underground because there are no other standing ideologies to compete any longer. Zizek makes the point that unconscious ideology is probably worse than blatant ideological discourse because everyone thinks they are free from ideology.

They are really all sophists, even Socrates.

What is the nature and structure of the Western Worldview? And beyond that what is the nature of Scientific Discovery within our worldview and what are the alternatives to that which might shed some light on its underlying assumptions that are not immediately obvious? And beyond that what can be done with respect to transforming this worldview given its inherent structure to make it so that our worldview which has become dominant and global does not destroy the planet, other species, and ourselves.

This is my problematic. I have been pursuing research in this problematic for years. If you want knowledge you have to have a problematic. And it is that problematic that gives rise to the significant and relevant questions that need answers in order for you to gain knowledge with respect to the subjects that you find fascinating. There is no magic bullet that makes knowledge suddenly appear out of nowhere. Look at the people who have contributed to our knowledge within our worldview, they worked hard, very hard for long long time before they figured out what ever their contribution to our knowledge happened to be. Many tried and many failed before someone discovered something of value that we pass on in this tradition. So there is no magic bullet when it comes to seeking knowledge, but only hard work, probably without reward, for a lifetime and then results are not guaranteed.

One of my favorite books is Knowledge Painfully Acquired by Lo Chen Shun who thought about the relation between Confucianism and Buddhism for years when Chinese thought was under siege and tried to formulate in his mind a simple way of understanding the uniquely Chinese contribution that Buddhism had no answer to, and so his book represents a life time of deep thought about the key points of his native culture that were under threat, and why they were more valuable than what Buddhism had to offer.

We need this kind of thought very badly today about our tradition. What is the key thing about our tradition that if changed would prevent it from destroying us and the world too, along with all other species. What is going to have to change fundamentally so that the earth does not become like Venus too hot for our kind of life. Not enough thought has been done concerning this issue. So I decided long ago to work on it. And I have come up with some results that appear in my various papers. But the results are not good enough to avert disaster. And not enough others are thinking deeply about it to make a difference. But I am trying and you should be trying. If we all try very hard then perhaps someone will figure out how to cut the Gordian Knot that binds us to the fate we seem to have decreed for our planet which is against our own interests.

Pick a problematic of your own. Work on what fascinates you. Attempt to find the cutting edge of your discipline and do something creative there that advances the tradition. The success is in the working toward the end. It is human success. Success at being who we are inquisitive animals on a lonely planet with no other refuge in sight, yet we are fouling our own nest. What is the root of this perversion in our souls. What makes us suicidal? It is one thing we abhor that anyone would become a suicide bomber taking others with them in their evil self-destruction. But what do we say to a species that want to take all other species with them in a similar senseless self-destruction through the destruction of the planet, and every living thing on it including ourselves.

The situation is absurd. But if we don’t strive to understand what is driving us toward that self-made apocalypse then there is no chance we will change the direction of the car careening off the cliff. We have to stop it or turn it aside before it goes over the cliff edge. Regrets later will not be enough to satisfy the generations of suffering or dead or forever unborn victims of our insanity.

My favorite method in this regard is Heuristic Research by Clark Moustakas

http://books.google.com/books/about/Heuristic_Research.html?id=U5ui98VyyXQC

but he also wrote a general book on Phenomenological Research Methods
http://books.google.com/books/about/Phenomenological_Research_Methods.html?id=QiXJSszx7-8C

Software Engineering came in when the Software Crisis became an issue and the idea was to put more Engineering into software rather than ad hoc programming, coding or hacking. It turns out that the part of the work of writing the line of code is just a small part of the job, and the quality of the product has a lot to do with everything else that goes on around the writing of the code or programming. Also eventually degrees in computer science became the way to get into the field more and more so that people were trained like engineers are trained to produce software more and more all the time. It was also the influence of the Software Engineering Institute whose purpose was to bring more discipline to software development. They came up with the CMM and then the CMMI and started appraising organizations as to their software maturity, and you could not get a contract with the government unless you were appraised to be of maturity level Three at least. This has not spread to Systems Engineering and Hardware Engineering despite much resistance. The resistance was so great that it spawned Agile and then Lean approaches which were directly opposed to the Software Process approach espoused by Watts Humphrey based on the work of Deming. Agile and now Lean have attempted to throw off the process yoke, but many of those issues that caused Software Engineering to be founded, to make Software production more than a craft are coming back with Agile at Scale issues. In other words if you are creating web sites you just do not need to do things that a traditional engineering approach would say are necessary, like Requirements Engineering, Architectural Design, High Level Planning, Documentation, etc. But if you are creating larger systems where multiple teams have to cooperate and synchronize and collaborate then these things become necessary again in some form, so people are working out the Agile way to do these things that were first introduced under the guise of engineering. But actually Hardware Engineers never did the things that were developed in Software Engineering until they were forced to by the CMMI when it was applied to everyone. The point is no matter what you call it, creating software is a special kind of craft which is hard to raise to commercial and production standards.

The reason why, which I go into in my paper on Software Engineering Ontology that is part of my book Wild Software Meta-systems (see http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer) is that software has a special ontological status. There are different meta-levels of Being, and these have been described in Continental Philosophy much to the chagrin of Analytical Philosophers. These are as follows:

Pure Being — Parmenides Static

Process Being — Heraclitus Dynamic

Hyper Being — Plato’s Third kind of Being in the Timaeus, DifferAnce of Derrida

Wild Being — discovered by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and InVisible

Ultra Being — The existential core of Being

What I discovered when I finally understood how CPUs work which I learned by programming designing and programming real time systems in assembly language was that they are based on the interaction of pointers and accumulators, and thus exemplified the pointing of Pure Being and the Grasping of Process Being that Merleau-Ponty talks about in the Phenomenology of Perception where he tries to make more concrete the present-at-hand and ready-to-hand of dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time. It turns out that hardware embodies the first two meta-levels of Being, and that means that Software is the embodiment of the third meta-level of Being, i.e. Hyper Being, e.g. Differance of Derrida which is an interval of differing and deferring, or what Paul Simon calls “slip-sliding away”. We get this analogy when code is compared to nailing jelly to a tree

Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=like%20nailing%20jello%20to%20a%20tree

[http://www.atomicshrimp.com/st/content/nailing_jelly_to_a_tree/].

Object Oriented Design

See http://ulocal.kmbc.com/_Nailing-Jello-to-a-Tree/photo/3065337/62690.html

See also http://www.flickr.com/photos/16849615@N02/3405307141/lightbox/

Code is something very malleable because it has very few physical limits and most of its limits are discrete mathematical or to do with relativistic space and time constraints, or underlying computing machinery constraints. Basically you can do almost anything, represent almost anything in code if you are clever enough. And if you cannot do it in a given language you can invent another language that allows you to do whatever it is you want to represent. If you cannot directly do something in code then most likely you can simulate it. In code because the same formalism represents both the Turing machine and the Universal Turing machine (operating system) it means that there is a degree of freedom in the production of source code representations that is normally just not there in most material things. It is interesting that the difference engine of Babbage which Lady Ada programmed at least conceptually was based on a Jacquard Loom by which patterns in fabric were mass produced. Basically any kind of pattern you want to produce can be produced by our modern difference engines that we call computers with software in them acting as little conceptual machines that control the hardware. We can think of software as basically a state machine and a stack (read tape) that manipulate pointers and execute hardware operations on operands in accumulators. We impose on this micro-dance that weaves together patterns into larger patterns many layers of conceptualization until we get up to a software design that we can understand which is doing something for us and providing some accordance in our world we would not have otherwise, like the cell phone in our hand or the world wide web, or a working ATM machine.

But when we think about software itself what comes to mind eventually is that software can rewrite software transforming it, and it is in this case where it starts to become like jelly. In some sense the nails of our design concepts have a hard time pinning it down and so we develop an object oriented approach and package the jello in boxes and use it that way.

Now the interesting thing is that software is the only object in our culture that embodies Hyper Being. And what is amazing is that no one appears to notice the emergence of a new kind of cultural object that never before existed, until Lady Ada put her pin to paper and tried to figure out how to program the difference engine. Notice that Differance (differing and deferring) runs on a difference engine. Our calling them computers after the ladies who used to do calculations by hand and whose jobs were taken over by these mechanical beasts because if there is no error in the program then the answers are far more accurate than any computationalist could manage. Difference engines are actually a better name for them than computers. They weave threads of pointer and accumulator operations together one use of which is to calculate, but this is just one very narrow use, predominately we see them as communication devices rather than calculating devices. But the uses of them are actually endless, as we find more and more uses of them to offer accordance and thus transform our lifeworld.

Now, when we realize that the nature of the computer and its code together is to push us into Hyper Being and out of the machine dominant culture that preceded the computer dominated culture, where computers are machines that can be reprogrammed and that can actually reprogram themselves, which is why I believe my Grand Mother called them “re-puters”. Once something takes on a life of its own in this way that pushes us further into Wild Being in which things take on a seeming life of their own, and we chuck those things out of Software Engineering into Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life or Artificial Sociality. It is this ability of code to reference itself and rewrite itself that makes it like jello not only the fact that it can represent almost anything either directly or as simulations with very few restrictions. Coders are those who dealt directly with the encoding and decoding of the assembly level instructions originally via punch cards. Programmers appeared when people could first set at terminals and enter the code directly into the machine via a coded interface like ASCII characters. Programmers dealt with languages discovered by Chomsky rather than the coding and encoding of assembly instructions. Then we started building bigger and bigger systems and SEI tried to get us to put some discipline into our work and used Engineering as a paradigm for transforming programming all the other work necessary to build large systems which software engineers did, of which programming was only a small part. Eventually it was realized that development had a lifecycle and that there were certain phases that you just had to go through in order to get a product that worked in the end. And that is why the term software developer came in, as someone who does everything that is necessary to get working code out the other end and there was a dichotomy introduced between developers and testers because it was thought best to have someone else different from the developer do the testing of the code. But of course testers were also writing code to do the testing. So software engineer became the generic term. Basically you can decide if you want something that is coded, programmed, developed and tested or engineered. These are both levels of abstraction and they are also levels of rigor and discipline as currently understood. There are hackers who try all sorts of things to achieve their goals, and are not necessarily systematic about what they are doing. Coders suggest some level of systematization because you are taking a model of what you want to software to do and are encoding it into the language of the machine. Programmers have a little broader scope in as much as they are dealing with higher level languages and there is some sense that they are not just coding in a model but actually programming the system to do something that is desired by someone else. Developers on the other hand along with Testers are creating larger systems of many parts that work together, and they develop a larger scale system that works because many different things are done beyond just programming the system, like testing, like reviews, like documentation. They develop a whole system that end users will use and customers will buy, but the scale of it may not be very large and the performance aspects not the emphasis. But if you decide you need something realtime and large scale then you pretty much have to fall back into engineering practices with their extra rigor and discipline. Ironically it was software engineers who introduced this rigor and discipline which is now being absorbed by other disciplines such as Hardware engineering, or at a higher level of abstraction Systems Engineering. It is not as one might expect that these terms are random, but they developed as the discipline of software engineering developed step by step and based on the technology available at different stages and the rigor that is needed for the task at hand. However, we still use all the terms and the semantics has continued to shift as new terms are added to the mix. For instance, Software Engineering includes within it requirements engineering and architectural design as up front activities that developers might gloss over and programmers would not necessarily see as part of the work of programming software. Also the heart of Software Engineering is in my view Realtime systems that become relativistic if there is no global clock in the system. Very sophisticated architectures are necessary to make those kinds of system work. But with multicores this is becoming commonplace on desktop systems. All the new languages have tasking built in. So what were simple batch type systems, or then applications, are now very sophisticated in how they farm out the work to tasks and tasks to cores, and so something that started off as only necessary in Software Engineering has now become ubiquitous in our attempt to sustain Moores law when it becomes more and more challenging to continue increasing performance exponentially.

Software Engineering puts limits on the jello aspect of software, and excludes anything that is strange like self-rewriting code, neural networks, expert rule systems and other artificial intelligence techniques. Software engineering as it exists with computer science as its basis is a real research program that has gone through several paradigm shifts from just code it, to structural and functional models of programs, to object oriented, and now in things like Scala (read Haskell) back to a mathematically functional model of how programs should work. And also with Agile in a reaction to the CMM and CMMI from SEI there is a social ideological revolution as well that is trying to take us back to the roots of coding and programming when they were black arts that no one understood, and thus really little control could be exerted on how the work was done as we have attempted to do by introducing engineering models into software. But as we move out of that social paradigm change into Lean and Agile at Scale models then the same problems that Software Engineering was meant to deal with come back to haunt us and so some of the deprecated practices that Agile wished to throw out are slowly being realized that they are necessary in a transformed way within Agile at Scale and Second Generation Lean (Reinertsen Flow) environments. So now we see hybrids like Agile Software Engineers rather than Agile Developers being sought by larger companies. Can you get the befits of Agile and stay true to the paradigm shift of the Agile Manifesto and Agile principles as well as apply the rigor and disciple necessary for large scale software product development. All this is a trial and error process unfortunately as the pendulum swings back and forth between effectiveness (Agile) and efficiency (Lean) and between freedom from managerial control (Ashby’s law) and necessary discipline taught as a harsh lesson due to repeated failure. City codes only exist because of disasters that happened without them. Outliers can produce extraordinary results but Probabilities kick in on large scale, sometimes truly global, systems that the CMMI was designed to handle in the face of factors like learning curve, employee turnover, the fact that the system needs to last for decades, etc.

What I believe is going to happen is that Agile and Lean are going to be reabsorbed by Software Engineering and then eventually even Systems Engineering and the paradigm shift will fundamentally alter how we work. But whatever benefits we can gain in the short term will be overwhelmed by the ever increasing scale of what we are building so that rigor and discipline will have to be part of it as well, and practices like Requirements Engineering, Architectural Design, Verification and Validation will come back with a vengeance to become part of our transformed way of working. The escape from rigor and discipline as well as necessary at scale practices like Requirements Engineering, Architectural Design, High level Planning are all coming back as we can see in Leffingwell’s Agile at Scale Framework as seen in Agile Software Requirements. An excellent book where you can see this happening right before our eyes is  Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development James O. Coplien, Gertrud Bjørnvig. Here the Use Case is reintroduced and justified piece at a time and then a new design discipline called Data Context Interaction (DCI) is introduced based on code injection that better models the actual use of the software by the users in the code. So the culture wars in Software are far from over as the new paradigm of Agile/Lean/Flow slowly takes hold. It is a social change that seems to me inevitable because it reintroduces the concepts of human scale back into software development, the model of humans as computers is slowly losing its grip on us, and we are starting to realize that we have talents not yet dreamed of by by our cyborg friends who are our creations. They have not yet started to dream of Electric Sheep. But we are dreaming of Beautiful code, teams, design etc. and actually smelling the problems in the code. I think we are entering a truly fascinating chapter of the development of software expertise whatever the title is that you associate with it. But that is a social paradigm shift were we are rediscovering our human limitations but also the creativity and the miracles we perform when we overcome the impossible in the technological infrastructure we ourselves have built, and as we continually bootstrap ourselves to keep up with and to keep reinventing the technological infrastructure based on software that is re-factoring our worldview.

I think this question needs to be clarified.

I think it is now pretty certain that there is a mutiverse that somehow gives rise to our universe in the Big Bang and we can consider the fact that the universe is still accelerating in its expansion due to dark energy pouring in from somewhere as the greatest evidence for that. But whatever the multiverse is it is not spacetime as we understand it in our universe, and no one knows what it might be, and the chances of ever finding out are somewhat slim.

Now the thing about the Universe that we do know is that the whole thing is entangled because it all had an origin together at the Big Bang. The fact that everything is entangled lends credence to the idea that everything interpenetrates within the universe which is held for instance by Fa Tsang in Hua Yen Buddhism where emptiness is equated with interpenetration. This interpenetration is now thought about in Physics as the Holographic principle and the idea that the universe as three dimensional may be a projection off of a domain wall and that the dimensionality of our universe may ultimately be an illusion.

What we are discovering slowly is that Quantum Mechanical phenomena is not restricted to the micro world and that there are quantum mechanical states in macro phenomena that actually affect macro outcomes. For instance it was recently seen that there is quantum moment in photosynthesis. I am fairly certain that we are going to find that Life itself is based on these quantum phase shifts at the macro level in and out of entangled and superpositioned states.

If that is true, and we find more phenomena like that where Quantum Mechanics counts as having macro effects as Penrose suggested it might for Consciousness in the brain then there is a good chance that quantum mechanical phenomena will end up being linked to evolution in some way.

According to Deutsch in The Fabric of The Universe the multiverse is actually manifest as interference in Quantum Phenomena.

And we know from Kauffman At Home in the Universe that we are dependent on Order arising from nowhere to create life via Negative Entropy.

So, given these sources and what they have said I could envisage a theory that says that the multiverse is seen in our universe as Quantum interference, and Quantum interference occurs even on the macro level, and that somehow speciation is linked to that quantum phase shifts at the macro level, because Evolution has this strange punctuation that was incorporated into the theory by Gould. We do not know how punctuation works when lots of different species are suddenly created, many of which die out, but these speciation events leave their mark on evolutionary history.

For a long time they said that snowball earth was impossible because if it ever occurred the planet could never get out of it. But now we know it has occurred twice. Before they found out that the universe was still accelerating in its expansion physicists would have thought that was impossible. Even the researchers who discovered it couldn’t believe it at first. So there are many strange and hard to believe things about our universe that we are finding. For instance it was only when we found the microwave background radiation that the Big Bang became the dominate theory. It is discovery of the unexpected that drives science. Occasionally we get something like the Higgs particle that was predicted, but the real drivers is not what is predicted by theory but what we discover exists that we would never have guessed like Super Conductivity that took twenty years to explain convincingly. So I would not rule out the idea that there may ultimately be a connection between the Multiverse and Evolution of Species. But as someone else expressed it is hard to think what that might be at this point when thoughts about the Multiverse itself are so new, and since like string theory we won’t be doing experiments any time soon where we can test the various ideas that are being developed. But the very fact that we are taking seriously the idea of the multiverse is a wonderful expansion of the reach of our imagination in science as was string theory itself.

I predict that what we will find is that there are quantum moments all over the place in life, where life takes advantage of some quirk at the quantum level to increase its efficiency and effectiveness of its negative entropy order production. And if more of those quantum shifts are found like the one recently reported in photosynthesis then macro quantum states are going to become more and  more important for explaining now inexplicable things like life, consciousness and social phenomena in species. And the more QM takes on this role in things like Biology and if it turns out that D. Deutsch is right about Quantum interference being multiverses interacting in the substrate of our universe, then the more people may talk about the role of the multiverse in shaping macro phenomena such as evolution within our universe.