Stephen David Ross (born 1935) is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.
He has published over 30 books in interdisciplinary philosophy, especially on art, literature, ethics, and metaphysics, from American pragmatism through poststructuralism, from human beings to animals and things.
He has explored different forms of writing and varied terminologies for expressing what resists expression, based on the conviction that such a resistance requires constant vigilance and innovative writing, the constant production and transformation of forms of knowledge, especially including philosophy, whose relations to art, literature, science, and religion enrich it profoundly with novel and imaginative questions and answers.
He linked it with Anaximander's notion of injustice in all things, later defining it as the nonidentity of every identity with itself, a systematic and pervasive sense of how nature and reason exceed themselves, with evolution a foremost example of the first, art and literature of the second.
This double movement of betraying led to books on enchantment and disenchantment, on asking and telling, to a novel, returning to an infinite and inclusive ethics through animals and other things.