Richard Dawkins. People nominating guys like Hawking are missing the point - an intellectual is more than just a really smart guy. You have to be a polymath, someone who is conversant in more than one field of knowledge, to be an intellectual - and one of those fields should be philosophy.
Dawkins is both a scientist and a philosopher, who has made major contributions in both fields. His idea of the "meme" alone has had a profound influence on many modern thinkers, both for and against. His books are passionate arguments for rationalism, and he demolishes many of the common assumptions that have driven Western culture since the Enlightenment.
Chomsky is another great intellectual, but I find his philosophy too partisan and based in outmoded ideas from the sixties. He is more a political commentator than anything else, which is fine, but a hundred years from now his ideas will be mostly irrelevant, which you cannot say about Dawkins (well, you can, but I think you'll be wrong).
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Better educated sadness than oblivious joy.
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