400 thinkers, 57 traditions

Each page lists the positions the primary sources support, and only those. Take the test to see who agrees with you.

Jump to: Ancient Near East · Classical Athens · Middle & Neo-Platonism · Gnosticism · Latin Fathers · Scholasticism · Christian Mysticism · Christian Literature · Reformation · Renaissance Humanism · Scientific Revolution · Rationalism · British Empiricism · British Moral Philosophy · French Enlightenment · Utilitarianism · Liberation · Existentialism · Postmodernism · Russian Religious Thought · Process Philosophy · Analytic Ethics · Philosophy of Science · Secular Thought · Human Sciences · Jewish Thought · Islamic Philosophy · Sufism · Hindu Darshanas · Bhakti · Modern Indian Thought · Śramaṇa Traditions · Indo-Tibetan Buddhism · East Asian Buddhism · Hundred Schools · Daoism · Classical Confucianism · Neo-Confucianism · Modern East Asian Thought · Latin American · African Philosophy · Indigenous Thought · Early Greek Thought · Hellenistic Philosophy · Eastern Christianity · Romanticism · German Idealism · Liberalism · Conservatism · Fascists & Superfascists · Libertarian Socialism · Marxism · Phenomenology · American Philosophy · Philosophy of Language · Analytic Metaphysics · Esotericism

Ancient Near East

☉ Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV)1353-1336 BCE
Akhenaten was an Egyptian pharaoh, born Amenhotep IV, who around 1350 BC closed the temples of Amun, had the old gods' names chiselled out, and ordered worship of the sun-disc Aten alone as sole creator.
🪪 Hammurabi of Babylonc. 1810-1750 BC
Hammurabi was a Babylonian king who unified much of Mesopotamia and issued the fullest law collection to survive from the ancient Near East, carved on a black stone pillar now in the Louvre.
🜂 Zarathustra (Avestan Zaraθuštra; Greek Zoroastres; Middle Persian Zardusht)c. 1200-1000 BC (disputed; proposals range c. 1750 BC to c. 600 BC)
Zarathustra was an Iranian priest and poet who composed the seventeen Old Avestan hymns called the Gathas, the only texts anyone can credit to him.
🏺 Ptahhotepc. 2400 BC
Ptahhotep was a vizier of Egypt's Old Kingdom and the traditional author of the Maxims, among the oldest works of ethical instruction we have.
🜄 Mazdak son of Bamdad (مزدک بامدادان)fl. c. 490s-520s; d. c. 524-528 (Crone 1991: after 531)
Mazdak led a movement in late Sasanian Iran that demanded the means of subsistence, and access to women, be divided out to everyone alike, on the ground that God laid these on the earth for all and that private surplus breeds strife.

Classical Athens

🦉 Aristotle384-322 BC
Aristotle was Plato's greatest student.
🏛️ Plato428-348 BC
Plato wrote the dialogues that founded Western philosophy.
❓ Socrates470-399 BC
Socrates was the gadfly of Athens, who asked questions of confident men until they contradicted themselves and turned philosophy away from the heavens toward how a person should live.

Middle & Neo-Platonism

☀️ Plotinus204-270
Plotinus founded Neoplatonism.
👥 Plutarch of Chaeroneac. 46-120
Plutarch was a Greek biographer who wrote as a Platonist and served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi.
✍ Celsus (Kelsos), author of The True Doctrine (Alethes Logos)fl. c. AD 175-180
Celsus was a Greek philosopher who wrote True Doctrine around 175 to 180, the earliest sustained intellectual attack on Christianity anyone knows of.
⚕️ Aelius Galenus of Pergamon129-216
Galen was a Greek physician who served Roman emperors and became the most copied medical writer of antiquity.
Θ Iamblichus of Chalcisc.245-c.325
Iamblichus was a Syrian Neoplatonist who broke with Plotinus and Porphyry, the Platonists before him, over how a soul reaches God.
🪐 Proclus Lycius Diadochus412-485
Proclus headed the Platonic school in Athens through its last great years, and he left a system built on a single movement: all things proceed from the One, the source of everything, and revert back to it.
🕎 Philo of Alexandria25 BC-50
Philo was a Jewish philosopher in first-century Alexandria who read the Torah as a coded map of the inner life, with Adam for the mind and Eve for the senses.
🪴 Porphyry of Tyre234-305
Porphyry studied under Plotinus, who left his writings in a heap, and sorted them into the Enneads, six sets of nine.

Gnosticism

🌘 Mani (Middle Persian Mānī; Syriac ܡܐܢܝ Mānī; Greek Μανιχαῖος; Latin Manichaeus)c. 216-274 CE
Mani was a Mesopotamian prophet raised in a baptising sect, which he broke with after visions of a heavenly Twin.
☍ Marcion of Sinope (Greek Μαρκίων ὁ Σινωπεύς; Latin Marcion Ponticus)c. 85 - c. 160 CE
Marcion was a shipowner from the Black Sea coast who came to Rome, was expelled around 144, and founded a rival church that outlasted him by centuries.
🏚 Valentinus (Οὐαλεντῖνος)c. 100 - c. 160
Valentinus trained in Alexandria, taught Christianity at Rome around 150, and became the most influential of the Gnostic masters.

Latin Fathers

💘 Augustine of Hippo354-430
Augustine was a North African bishop who wrote the first book in which a man tells God about his own past, stolen pears and mistresses included: the Confessions invented introspective autobiography in the West.
🎡 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius477-524
Boethius was a late Roman statesman, consul and chief minister to Theodoric, until a treason charge put him in a cell.
🛠 Pelagiusc. 354 - c. 418
Pelagius was a British-born ascetic teacher active in Rome from the 380s.
🦂 Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus)c.155-c.220
Tertullian wrote in Carthage around the year 200 and was the first major Christian theologian to work in Latin.

Scholasticism

🐂 Thomas Aquinas1225-1274
Aquinas was a Dominican friar of the Middle Ages.
🙏 Anselm of Canterbury1033-1109
Anselm was archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, and he thought he had proved God in a few lines.
🌳 Johannes Scotus Eriugenac.810-877
Eriugena was an Irish philosopher at the Frankish court who could read Greek when the Latin West had lost it, and he put Dionysios and Maximus into Latin.
🪒 William of Ockhamc.1287-1347
Ockham was an English Franciscan.
🫏 Jean Buridanc. 1301-1358
Buridan taught arts at Paris in the fourteenth century and never moved on to theology, which left him a career in logic.
🫆 Duns Scotus1266-1308
Scotus was a Franciscan theologian known as the Subtle Doctor.
🪽 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio1221-1274
Bonaventure was a Franciscan theologian who ran the order as its minister general while he wrote.
🗡️ Francisco Suárez1548–1617
Suárez was a Jesuit of the Salamanca school who put late scholastic metaphysics in order.
🏟️ Marsilius of Padua (Marsilio dei Mainardini)c. 1275–1342
Marsilius finished the Defensor Pacis in 1324 and argued there that all coercive authority in a city comes from the whole body of citizens: they alone make the law, they elect the ruler, and they may correct him or depose him.

Christian Mysticism

𓂀 William Blake1757-1827
A London engraver who published almost nothing and sold less, Blake called the Imagination the body of God itself, more than a faculty of the mind.
🌑 Dionysios the Areopagitec. 50
Dionysios the Areopagite is the Athenian whom Paul converted in Acts 17, and the Greek treatises that carry his name have been read in the Church under it since antiquity, though whether he wrote them himself was already disputed in the sixth century.
🫥 Meister Eckhart1260-1328
Eckhart was a German Dominican mystic whose sermons pushed to the edge of what can be said about God.
🕯 Juan De La Cruz (John of the Cross)1542-1591
John of the Cross was a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite friar and poet.
🎵 Hildegard of Bingen1098-1179
Hildegard was a twelfth-century German abbess, a composer of plainchant and a writer of medical handbooks, and she recorded her visions in a book called Scivias.
∅ Marguerite Porete (Lat. Margareta Porete; of Hainaut)c. 1250 - 1310
Marguerite Porete was a beguine in Hainaut, living under vows outside any convent.
♄ Simone Weil1909-1943
Weil was a French philosopher and mystic who took a year away from a teaching post to work a factory floor, then went to Spain with an anarchist column, sharing the condition of workers and soldiers.
💒 Bernard of Clairvaux1090-1153
Bernard was a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot and a mystic of the affections, for whom the whole spiritual life is one thing, loving God.
☌ Hadewijch of Brabant (Haywigis)fl. mid-13th c.
Hadewijch was a beguine in thirteenth-century Brabant who wrote in Middle Dutch and guided a circle of younger women by letter.

Christian Literature

✶ Dante Alighieri1265-1321
Dante was a Florentine poet who set out a Christian and Aristotelian picture of the world in the Divine Comedy.
Þ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien1892-1973
Tolkien taught philology at Oxford and held that story-making is a creaturely act: we sub-create in our small derivative way because a Maker made us in his image.
🦁 C.S. Lewis1898-1963
Lewis was a medievalist at Oxford and later a professor of literature at Cambridge who became the most read Christian apologist of the twentieth century.
🎈 G.K. Chesterton1874-1936
Chesterton was an English essayist and Catholic apologist who built his case out of paradox: the faith holds opposites at full strength, the fasting monk and the man at the feast, with neither one watered down.

Reformation

🦢 Martin Luther1483-1546
Luther was the German reformer who taught justification by grace through faith alone: nothing you do earns God's favour, and faith receives it as a gift.
❦ John Calvin1509–1564
Calvin was a French reformer who built Protestant theology into one complete system around the absolute sovereignty of God.
⚑ Thomas Müntzerc. 1489-1525
Müntzer was a German priest who broke with Luther over whether God still speaks.

Renaissance Humanism

🦊 Niccolò Machiavelli1469-1527
Machiavelli served Florence as a diplomat and studied what rulers do rather than what they should.
✠ Sir Thomas More (Thomas Morus)1478-1535
More wrote Utopia as a debate rather than a manifesto: the character carrying his own name argues against the traveller who describes the island, and closes by calling several of its institutions absurd.
🫒 Desiderius Erasmus1466–1536
Erasmus was a priest and satirist, the leading Christian humanist of the Northern Renaissance, and the editor of the first published Greek New Testament.
🖋️ Michel de Montaigne1533-1592
Montaigne was a French nobleman who retired to a tower at thirty-eight and turned the rest of his life into a subject: his kidney stones, his cat, his fear of dying.
🔥 Giordano Bruno1548-1600
Bruno was an Italian philosopher of the Renaissance whom Rome burned at the stake in 1600, for denying the Trinity and the Mass as much as for his sky.
◐ Nicholas of Cusa1401-1464
Cusanus was a German cardinal and mathematician.
♃ Marsilio Ficino1433-1499
Ficino was a Renaissance philosopher and priest in Medici Florence who revived Platonism there.
🧝 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola1463–1494
Pico was a humanist scholar in Florence.
🌞 Tommaso Campanella1568-1639
Campanella was an Italian Dominican friar who spent twenty-seven years in Neapolitan prisons after a failed revolt.
🕵️ Lorenzo Vallac. 1406–1457
Valla was an Italian Renaissance humanist and philologist who turned a mastery of classical Latin into a weapon against the schoolmen.

Scientific Revolution

🌗 Galileo Galilei1564-1642
Galileo was a Pisan astronomer and physicist who held that the book of nature is written in mathematics.
☄ Sir Isaac Newton1643-1727
Newton was an English natural philosopher whose work founded classical mechanics and optics.
♫ Johannes Kepler1571-1630
Kepler held that geometry is as old as the divine mind.
🔺 Blaise Pascal1623-1662
Pascal was a French mathematician who turned to religious writing.
🪛 Sir Francis Bacon1561-1626
Bacon was an English statesman and a prophet of the new science.
🕰️ Pierre-Simon Laplace1749-1827
Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer.
🌡️ Pierre Gassendi1592–1655
Gassendi was a Catholic priest who brought Epicurus back and baptized him.

Rationalism

💭 René Descartes1596-1650
Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician who threw out every belief he could find a reason to doubt, hunting for one that survived.
👓 Baruch Spinoza1632-1677
Spinoza's Amsterdam synagogue excommunicated him at twenty-three.
🎶 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz1646-1716
Leibniz was a polymath who held that the universe is made of monads: countless mind-like points, each one a unique and whole perspective on everything, none of them touching or acting on any other.
⦿ Nicolas Malebranche1638-1715
Malebranche was an Oratorian priest who took Descartes's two substances and removed all the power from both of them.
💠 Anton Wilhelm Amoc.1703-1759
Amo was an Nzema philosopher from the Gold Coast, taken to Germany as a small child, who studied at Halle and Wittenberg and earned a doctorate there in 1734.
🧲 Anne Conway1631-1679
Conway was an English philosopher of the early modern period whose Principles argued that one living substance runs through all creation, spirit and matter alike.

British Empiricism

👑 Thomas Hobbes1588-1679
Hobbes was an English political philosopher.
🎲 David Hume1711-1776
Hume was a Scottish skeptic who went looking for the link between cause and effect and found only habit.
🗝 John Locke1632-1704
Locke was an English empiricist who denied that anyone is born knowing anything.
👁️ George Berkeley1685-1753
Berkeley was an Irish bishop who denied that matter exists outside minds.

British Moral Philosophy

💰 Adam Smith1723–1790
Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher who wrote a book on ethics before he wrote one on economics.
🌹 Mary Wollstonecraft1759-1797
Wollstonecraft was an English writer.
🎓 Thomas Reid1710-1796
Reid founded the Scottish school of common sense.
⌛ Samuel Clarke1675–1729
Samuel Clarke was an English theologian who followed Newton and set out to prove God the way you prove a theorem, resting the argument on the rule that nothing is the case without a reason for being so.
🍯 Bernard Mandeville1670–1733
Mandeville made his case in verse in The Fable of the Bees: a hive full of vice prospers, and once its vices are stripped away the hive collapses.
🧎 Joseph Butler1692–1752
Butler was an English moral philosopher and Bishop of Durham.

French Enlightenment

🖤 Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade1740–1814
Sade was a French aristocrat who wrote most of his books behind bars, in the Bastille and later in an asylum.
🃏 François-Marie Arouet1694-1778
Voltaire was the arch-philosophe, and he made a career of attacking the church: superstition, clerical power and the courts that served both, in the name of toleration and reason.
📕 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu1689–1755
Montesquieu was a French political philosopher who founded the comparative study of politics.
🎗️ Maximilien Robespierre1758-1794
Robespierre was a French revolutionary who led the Jacobins.
🚶 Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712-1778
Rousseau was a Geneva-born philosopher who worked in France and held that human beings were peaceable and self-sufficient until society got hold of them.
🗂️ Denis Diderot1713–1784
Diderot gave twenty-five years of his life to editing the Encyclopedie, and kept his boldest writing in manuscript, where it stayed.
🤖 Julien Offray de La Mettrie1709-1751
La Mettrie was a French physician and the boldest materialist of the Enlightenment.
🍎 Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet1706–1749
Du Châtelet put Newton's Principia into French, and hers is still the translation in use.
🧐 Claude Adrien Helvétius1715-1771
Helvétius was a French Enlightenment philosopher and materialist who pushed Locke's empiricism to the wall.
🜍 Baron d'Holbach1723-1789
Baron d'Holbach was the most uncompromising atheist of the Enlightenment.
🗿 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac1714-1780
Condillac was a French abbe who pushed Locke's empiricism as far as it would go.

Utilitarianism

⚖️ Jeremy Bentham1748-1832
Bentham founded utilitarianism and wanted morals settled by arithmetic.
📊 John Stuart Mill1806-1873
Mill was a Victorian thinker whose On Liberty argues that the one good reason to stop a person doing as they like is harm to someone else.
⛲ H. L. A. Hart1907-1992
Hart was the leading analytic legal philosopher of the twentieth century.
➗ Henry Sidgwick1838–1900
Sidgwick was a Victorian moral philosopher who built the greatest-happiness standard on a handful of axioms he took to be self-evident, covering prudence, justice and good will toward others.

Liberation

⛓️‍💥 Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey)c. 1818-1895
Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 and became the fiercest abolitionist speaker and editor of his century.
⧉ William Edward Burghardt Du Bois1868-1963
Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian and editor who made the colour line an object of philosophical analysis and called it the problem of the twentieth century.
☮ Martin Luther King Jr.1929-1968
King was an American Baptist minister and the central leader of the civil rights movement, and he built a Christian doctrine of nonviolent resistance out of Gandhi, Thoreau and the Black church.
Ⓧ Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), born Malcolm Little1925-1965
Malcolm X was an American Muslim minister and Pan-Africanist who spent twelve years as the Nation of Islam’s most effective spokesman before breaking with it in 1964.
📘 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar1891-1956
Born untouchable, Ambedkar took doctorates abroad and came home a jurist to write the constitution of independent India.
🔗 bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins)1952-2021
bell hooks was a Black feminist and cultural critic who gave domination one name, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, to show racism, class and sexism working as a single interlocking system.
◧ Frantz Fanon1925-1961
Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique and a revolutionary who treated patients in colonial Algeria and traced their breakdowns to a lifetime spent under a gaze that told them they were less.
🎒 Paulo Freire1921-1997
Freire was a Brazilian educator who attacked what he called banking education, where a teacher deposits facts into students who sit and receive them.
🌍 Thomas Sankara1949-1987
Sankara was a Burkinabe army officer, a Marxist and a pan-Africanist who ran Burkina Faso for four years.
🫀 Léopold Sédar Senghor1906-2001
A poet governed Senegal for twenty years.
⛵ Edward Wilmot Blyden1832-1912
Blyden worked as an educator, diplomat and Presbyterian minister in Liberia.
🪧 Enrique Dussel1934-2023
Dussel was an Argentine philosopher of liberation who was exiled to Mexico.
✦ Kwame Nkrumah1909-1972
Nkrumah became the first leader of independent Ghana and a leading theorist of Pan-Africanism.
✒️ José Rizal1861-1896
Rizal was a Filipino eye doctor and writer whose two novels broke Spain's story about itself in the Philippines.

Existentialism

📓 Albert Camus1913–1960
Camus was a French-Algerian writer who built a philosophy out of one gap: you want the world to mean something and the world says nothing back.
🥸 Friedrich Nietzsche1844-1900
God is dead, the German philosopher Nietzsche wrote, and the hard part is what fills the hole he leaves.
🚪 Jean-Paul Sartre1905-1980
Sartre was a French existentialist who held that you exist first and make yourself afterward.
♀️ Simone de Beauvoir1908-1986
Beauvoir was a French existentialist whose The Second Sex, published in 1949, founded modern feminist philosophy.
🦘 Søren Kierkegaard1813-1855
Kierkegaard was a Danish writer who spent his life attacking the comfortable Christianity of Copenhagen, where everyone was born a Christian and nobody had to decide anything.
🥀 E. M. Cioran1911-1995
Cioran was a Romanian aphorist and philosopher of failure who settled in Paris and wrote in fragments, in French, about insomnia, decay and despair.
🎧 Gabriel Marcel1889-1973
Marcel was a French Christian existentialist who wrote plays alongside his essays.

Postmodernism

🔓 Michel Foucault1926-1984
Foucault was a French historian of thought who studied how power runs through modern life.
✂️ Jacques Derrida1930-2004
Derrida was a French philosopher who founded deconstruction, a way of reading that turns a text against itself.
🌋 Georges Bataille1897–1962
Bataille was a French philosopher who worked as a librarian and built an economics of useless expenditure on the model of the sun, which pours out its energy and gets nothing back.
🌱 Gilles Deleuze1925-1995
Deleuze was a French philosopher for whom what is real is difference and becoming, with no fixed forms standing behind the changes and no original that things copy.
🗨️ Jacques Lacan1901–1981
Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who reread Freud through the linguistics of his day and announced that the unconscious is structured like a language.
🖥️ Jean Baudrillard1929-2007
Baudrillard was a French theorist of late capitalist culture, which he argued has gone hyperreal.
🧫 Félix Guattari1930-1992
Guattari was a French psychoanalyst and activist who spent his career at La Borde, an experimental clinic, and co-wrote Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Deleuze.
🧩 Jean-François Lyotard1924–1998
Lyotard was a French philosopher who watched the big stories stop working by the 1970s: progress, emancipation, reason marching forward.

Russian Religious Thought

🪓 Fyodor Dostoevsky1821-1881
Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist whose books stage the spiritual crises of a modern age.
🌾 Leo Tolstoy1828-1910
Tolstoy was the Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace.
⚭ Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Владимир Сергеевич Соловьёв)1853-1900
Solovyov was a Russian philosopher of all-unity: history is God working his way into matter, and it finishes only when humanity consents of its own will to be lifted into God.
🚀 Nikolai Fyodorov1829-1903
Fyodorov read the Christian promise of resurrection as a work order.
🌪️ Lev Shestov1866-1938
Shestov was a Russian Jewish existentialist who set Jerusalem against Athens.

Process Philosophy

⏳ Henri Bergson1859-1941
Clock time is a line you can cut into equal parts.
⚙️ Alfred North Whitehead1861-1947
Whitehead was a British mathematician who co-wrote Principia Mathematica with Russell, then concluded that the universe holds no enduring stuff at all.
🐦 Charles Hartshorne1897-2000
Hartshorne was the leading American process philosopher after Whitehead, whose assistant he had been, and he carried process thought into theology.

Analytic Ethics

🚋 Philippa Ruth Foot1920-2010
Philippa Foot was a British philosopher who led the return to Aristotle and Aquinas in modern ethics.
🚬 Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe1919-2001
Anscombe was a Catholic philosopher who studied under Wittgenstein and put his Philosophical Investigations into English.
❤️‍🔥 Harry Gordon Frankfurt1929-2023
Frankfurt was an American philosopher of free will and moral psychology who put freedom one level up from wanting: you are free when you want the desires that move you to act, a wanting about your own wanting, and a creature that never asks the question he called a wanton.
🚉 Derek Parfit1942–2017
Parfit was a British philosopher at All Souls in Oxford.
🍀 Bernard Arthur Owen Williams1929-2003
Bernard Williams was a British moral philosopher who turned the tools of analysis against systematic ethical theory.
🎯 Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre1929-2025
MacIntyre wrote After Virtue to diagnose why moral argument had turned into shouting.
🚫 J. L. Mackie1917-1981
Mackie was an Oxford philosopher who gave moral scepticism its sharpest form.

Philosophy of Science

∫ Albert Einstein1879-1955
Einstein was a German-born physicist whose theories of relativity remade how we understand space, time and gravitation.
🦎 Charles Robert Darwin1809-1882
Darwin was an English naturalist who explained how eyes and wings get built with nobody aiming at them, by evolution through natural selection: small inherited differences, more young born than can survive, and enormous stretches of time.
🐱 Erwin Schrödinger1887–1961
Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who won the Nobel Prize for the wave equation.
🔄 Thomas Kuhn1922-1996
Kuhn was an American philosopher of science who gave the word paradigm its modern sense, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
❌ Karl Popper1902-1994
Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science who made falsifiability the mark of the real thing.
☂️ Paul Feyerabend1924-1994
Feyerabend was an Austrian-American philosopher of science who argued in Against Method that no single method runs through all good science, and that the great breakthroughs tended to break the rules of their day.

Secular Thought

📰 Christopher Hitchens1949-2011
Hitchens was a British-American journalist who argued in God Is Not Great that religion is made by men and does harm.
🛰️ Carl Edward Sagan1934-1996
Sagan taught planetary science at Cornell and became the century's best-known voice for thinking like a scientist.
⚡ Nikola Tesla1856-1943
Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor whose motors put alternating current into the electrical grid.
🪸 Ernst Haeckel1834–1919
Haeckel was a German zoologist who did more than anyone to spread Darwin's work in his country, then built a doctrine on it he called Monism.
📢 Robert G. Ingersoll1833-1899
Ingersoll was an American lawyer and orator known as the Great Agnostic, the most celebrated voice of unbelief in nineteenth-century America.

Human Sciences

🛋️ Sigmund Freud1856-1939
Freud founded psychoanalysis in Austria and cast the self as a divided thing, driven by desires it will not admit.
🧿 Carl Jung1875-1961
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who broke with Freud over the nature of desire and founded his own school, analytical psychology.
🧊 Maximilian Karl Emil Weber1864-1920
Weber trained as an economist and jurist and helped found modern sociology alongside Durkheim.
🐝 Émile Durkheim1858-1917
Durkheim founded academic sociology in France and built it into a university subject with a subject matter of its own: social facts such as suicide rates and moral rules, which stand outside any one person, press on you and outlast you.
🐐 Rene Girard1923-2015
Girard was a French American theorist of desire.
📐 Auguste Comte1798-1857
Comte was a French thinker who founded positivism and coined the word sociology.
🚲 Ivan Illich1926-2002
Illich was a Roman Catholic priest and historian who argued that tools remake the people who use them.
🧒 Maria Montessori1870–1952
Montessori was an Italian physician who built a philosophy out of watching children.
📈 Florence Nightingale1820-1910
Nightingale set out her theology in Suggestions for Thought, a book she had printed for private circulation in 1860 and never published.

Jewish Thought

☞ Moses Maimonides1138-1204
Maimonides was a Jewish rabbi and a working physician.
🤝 Martin Buber1878–1965
Buber was an Austrian Jewish philosopher who found two ways of meeting anything and set them out in his book I and Thou.
🪟 Moses Mendelssohn1729-1786
Mendelssohn was the central figure of the Jewish Enlightenment and a voice of the Berlin Aufklärung.
🌙 Levi ben Gershon (Ralbag)1288–1344
Gersonides was a Provencal Jewish polymath and the boldest Aristotelian rationalist after Maimonides.
⚱️ Isaac Luria (ha-Ari)1534-1572
Luria was a kabbalist of the town of Safed, known to his followers as ha-Ari, who told creation as a disaster.
🛤️ Saadia ben Yosef (Saadia Gaon)882–942
Saadia ben Yosef headed the academy at Sura and gave medieval Judaism its first systematic philosophy.
🌌 Hasdai Crescas1340-1411
Crescas was a Catalan Jewish philosopher whose world took Aristotle on trust, through Maimonides.

Islamic Philosophy

📖 Ibn Rushd (Averroes)1126-1198
Ibn Rushd was an Andalusian philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle earned him one name in medieval Europe: the Commentator.
💊 Ibn Sina (Avicenna)980-1037
Ibn Sina was a Persian philosopher and physician.
🏜️ Abu Zayd Abd ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun1332–1406
Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century Tunisian historian and statesman who watched dynasties rise and rot, and found a pattern in it.
⁘ Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari (أبو الحسن الأشعري)c. 874-936
Al-Ash'ari trained under the Mu'tazila and broke with them around his fortieth year, then spent the rest of his life arguing that they had reasoned God's own words away.
🏙️ Abu Nasr al-Farabic.872–950
Farabi belonged to the Baghdad school of Islamic philosophy, and later tradition called him the Second Teacher, ranking him behind only Aristotle.
🕌 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali1058-1111
Ghazali was a Persian theologian and Sufi who took the philosophy of Avicenna apart using its own logic, in The Incoherence of the Philosophers.
🧪 Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes)854–925
Razi was a Persian physician of Rayy, one of the greatest doctors of the medieval world and its most notorious freethinker.
💡 Mulla Sadra1571-1640
Sadra was the leading philosopher of Safavid Iran, and he fused Avicenna's metaphysics with Illuminationism and Sufism into the system he called the Transcendent Theosophy.
🔦 Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi1154-1191
Suhrawardi was a twelfth-century Persian philosopher who founded the Illuminationist school as a rival to the Aristotelian tradition of Avicenna.
⚔️ Taqi ad-Din Ibn Taymiyyah1263-1328
Ibn Taymiyyah was a Hanbali jurist and theologian in Damascus whose own rulers jailed him more than once.
☪️ Muhammad Iqbal1877-1938
Iqbal was an Indian Muslim poet and philosopher of the early twentieth century who wrote in Urdu and Persian, pressing Muslims to stop waiting and become selves with force in them, khudi.
📡 Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindic.801–873
Kindi was a ninth-century Iraqi thinker who worked at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, where he had Greek books turned into Arabic and supervised the scholars who did the work.

Sufism

💃 Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi1207-1273
Rumi was a Persian Sufi, a respectable legal scholar in Konya until he met a wandering dervish called Shams, and the friendship burned his old life down.
⊙ Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi1165-1240
Ibn Arabi was an Andalusian Sufi philosopher whom Sufis call the Greatest Shaykh.
☥ René Guénon1886-1951
Guénon was a French Traditionalist, which for him meant that behind every authentic religion stands one primordial truth, a single metaphysics handed down through unbroken chains of initiation from teacher to pupil.
💔 Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj858-922
Al-Hallaj was a Persian Sufi mystic, one of those who sought the annihilation of the self in God.
🏯 Raden Ngabehi Ranggawarsita1802-1873
Ranggawarsita served as a poet and philosopher at the Javanese court, and he gave Indonesia its name for a rotten era: Jaman Edan, the Age of Madness, where joining the madness pays and staying honest leaves you hungry.

Hindu Darshanas

🩺 Charaka / Caraka (चरक), redactor of the Carakasamhita (चरकसंहिता)fl. c. 100 BC - AD 200
The Carakasamhita, the founding compendium of Ayurvedic medicine, carries Charaka's name, though whether he was one man, a title or a lineage is unsettled.
🐚 Madhva (Madhvacharya)1238-1317
Madhva was a Kannada Vaishnava theologian who founded Dvaita, the dualist school and the third great school of Vedanta, against teachers who said your soul and God are one thing at bottom.
🪢 Patañjali200 BC-200 AD
Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, the root text of the classical Yoga school.
🕉️ Adi Shankara788-820
Shankara was an Indian philosopher who compared the world of many separate things to mistaking a rope for a snake in poor light.
अ Abhinavagupta (अभिनवगुप्त)c. 950-1016
Abhinavagupta was a Kashmiri Saiva philosopher and writer on art who held that one consciousness lights itself up and pours out the world, and that what defines it is total freedom.
ॐ Bhartṛhari (भर्तृहरि)c. 450-510
Bhartrhari studied Sanskrit grammar and came out of it with a metaphysics, set down in the Vakyapadiya.
🔖 Kumārila Bhaṭṭac. 7th c.
Kumārila led one branch of Mimamsa, the Hindu school that reads the Veda for what it commands.
🛕 Ramanuja1017-1137
Ramanuja was an Indian philosopher who taught qualified nondualism, Viśiṣṭādvaita, which keeps God, souls and matter distinct inside one whole.
🪔 Yajnavalkyac. 800–700 BC
Yajnavalkya was a Vedic sage whose dialogues fill the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

Bhakti

🧶 Kabir (Kabir Das)c.1440-1518
Kabir wove cloth in Benares, low caste and a weaver's son, and mocked the Hindu priest and the Muslim mullah in the same breath, refusing the authority of both.
🪯 Guru Nanak (ਗੁਰੂ ਨਾਨਕ), Nanak Dev1469-1539
Guru Nanak founded Sikhism in the Punjab, and he is one of the few pre-modern founders of a religion whose own words survive under a mark of authorship: some 974 hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib.
🔱 Lalleshwari (Lal Ded)c.1320-1392
Lalleshwari was a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic and poet of the Trika Shaiva tradition.

Modern Indian Thought

🧵 Mohandas K. Gandhi1869–1948
Gandhi led India's independence struggle with a method he called satyagraha, holding to truth: break an unjust law, take the punishment for it, never hit back.
🔯 Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose)1872–1950
Aurobindo was an Indian revolutionary nationalist who became a yogi and founded Integral Yoga.
🌏 Swami Vivekananda1863-1902
Vivekananda was a nineteenth-century Indian monk and the chief disciple of Ramakrishna.
🎙 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan1888-1975
Radhakrishnan held a chair at Oxford before serving as India's first Vice-President and its second President.
🌺 Sri Ramakrishna1836-1886
Ramakrishna was a Bengali Hindu mystic who served as a priest of the Kali temple at Dakshineswar and was given to ecstatic absorption, samadhi, a state so complete that the world around him dropped away.

Śramaṇa Traditions

🧹 Vardhamana Mahavira (Nigantha Nataputta / Jnatrputra), महावीर वर्धमानc. 599-527 BC (traditional); c. 497-425 BC on the revised chronology
Jains count Mahavira the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara, the figure from whom their historical tradition descends.
🜃 Ajita Kesakambali (अजित केशकम्बली)fl. c. 5th c. BC
Ajita Kesakambali taught in Magadha a generation before the Buddha and is the earliest named materialist in Indian thought.
💎 Kundakunda (Ācārya Kundakunda; Prakrit Kundakunda / Padmanandin)c. 3rd-8th c. CE (disputed; possibly a corporate authorship)
Kundakunda is the name attached to the Samayasara, a Digambara Jain text whose date is argued over across five centuries; the name may cover a tradition of texts rather than one man.

Indo-Tibetan Buddhism

🛞 Siddhattha Gotama / Siddhartha Gautama (सिद्धार्थ गौतम), the Buddhac. 480-400 BC
The Buddha was a north Indian ascetic teacher of the fifth century BC.
🕳️ Nagarjuna150-250
Nagarjuna was an Indian Buddhist who founded the Madhyamaka school, and his word for the way things are is emptiness, śūnyatā.
🗄️ Asaṅga (असङ्ग)c. 300–370 CE
Asanga was an Indian Mahayana monk and philosopher who founded the Yogacara school with his half-brother Vasubandhu.
🐘 Aśoka Maurya (अशोक; in his own inscriptions Devānāṃpiya Piyadasi)r. c. 268-232 BCE
Aśoka ruled most of the Indian subcontinent and had his edicts cut into rock in his own lifetime, so he still speaks in his own voice.
☴ Bhadantacariya Buddhaghosa (Pali: Buddhaghosa)fl. c. 5th c. CE
Buddhaghosa worked at the great monastery in Anuradhapura in the fifth century and pressed the whole Buddhist path into three words: virtue, concentration, understanding.
✖️ Dignāga (Diṅnāga)c. 480–540 CE
Dignaga was a south Indian logician who founded the Buddhist tradition of pramana, the study of what counts as valid knowing, and wrote the Pramanasamuccaya.
識 Vasubandhu316-396
Vasubandhu was a synthesizer of Indian Buddhism who wrote the Abhidharmakosa, the standard encyclopedia of Buddhist scholastic doctrine, then changed schools and joined the Yogacara.
☾ Chandrakirtic.600–650
Chandrakirti was a seventh-century Indian Buddhist who systematized the Prasangika branch of the Middle Way school founded by Nagarjuna.
🔎 Dharmakīrtic. 600-660
Dharmakirti was a seventh-century South Indian Buddhist who took the logic and theory of knowledge of Dignaga and made his version the standard one.
💫 Longchen Rabjam (Longchenpa)1308-1364
Longchenpa was a Tibetan master of the Nyingma school and the great systematizer of Dzogchen, its highest teaching.
🧘 Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa1357-1419
Tsongkhapa was a Tibetan philosopher and monastic reformer who founded the Gelug school the Dalai Lamas belong to.
☸ Bidiya Dandarovich Dandaron1914-1974
Dandaron was a Buryat Buddhist lama and scholar of Tibet, recognized in childhood as a tulku, a teacher held to be his predecessor reborn.

East Asian Buddhism

坐 Dogen Zenji1200-1253
Dogen was a Japanese Zen master who founded the Sōtō school and wrote the Shōbōgenzō.
👏 Hakuin Ekaku (白隠慧鶴)1686–1769
Hakuin revived Japanese Rinzai Zen and rebuilt its training around koans, the questions a student sits with; his arrangement of them is still the backbone of Rinzai practice.
頓 Dajian Huineng638-713
Huineng was a wood-seller who could not read and became the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism, or so his school told the story.
🌻 Nichiren1222-1282
Nichiren was a Japanese monk who told his country's rulers that the earthquakes, famine and threat of invasion they faced were punishment for false teaching, and he was exiled for saying so.
◯ Thích Nhất Hạnh1926-2022
Thích Nhất Hạnh was a Vietnamese Zen monk who joined mindfulness practice to peace work.
🐎 Xuanzang602-664
Xuanzang was a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk who left China without permission, walked to India, studied at the monastery of Nalanda, and came back to Chang'an seventeen years later with hundreds of Sanskrit manuscripts.
🏵️ Fazang (法藏)643–712
Fazang was the third patriarch of the Huayan school of Buddhism.
⚪ Sengzhao 僧肇c. 384–414 CE
Sengzhao was the foremost Chinese student of the translator Kumarajiva, and in the four essays of the Zhaolun he gave Buddhism in China its first rigorous statement of emptiness.
信 Shinran (親鸞)1173–1263
Shinran founded Jodo Shinshu, True Pure Land Buddhism, on giving up: no amount of practice or effort of your own saves you, and Amida Buddha's vow does all of the work.
🪷 Hōnen Shōnin (Genku)1133-1212
Honen was a Japanese monk who trained on Mount Hiei and came down convinced the old monastic disciplines had stopped working.
密 Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi)774-835
Kukai founded Japan's Shingon school and its mountain complex at Koya.
和 Wonhyo (元曉)617–686
Wonhyo is the most seminal thinker in Korean Buddhism, and he arrived when the country's schools were at war with each other.

Hundred Schools

🐅 Sun Tzu (Sun Wu)trad. c. 544-496 BCE
Sun Tzu is the reputed author of The Art of War, the founding Chinese treatise on strategy, though whether one man of that name wrote the book is doubted.
🧮 Mo Di470-391 BC
Mozi founded Mohism, the first school to take on Confucius.
法 Han Feic.280–233 BC
Han Fei was a third-century BC Chinese Legalist.
🦱 Yang Zhu (楊朱)c. 440–360 BCE
Yang Zhu taught in the early Warring States period in China and survives only through rivals who despised him.

Daoism

🐉 Laozi6th c. BC
Laozi is the legendary founder of Taoism, credited with the Dao De Jing.
🦋 Zhuangzi369-286 BC
Zhuangzi was a Taoist thinker who dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure which of the two was dreaming the other.
🐢 Ge Hongc. 283-343 CE
Ge Hong was a Daoist alchemist and physician in fourth-century China, under the Eastern Jin.
👣 Guo Xiang (郭象), courtesy name Zixuan 子玄c. 252-312
Guo Xiang was an official in Western Jin China who cut the Zhuangzi to the thirty-three chapters we read now and wrote its standard commentary.

Classical Confucianism

仁 Kongzi (Confucius)551-479 BC
Confucius was a Chinese teacher who wanted rulers worth copying.
🌼 Mengzi (Mencius)372-289 BC
Mencius was a Confucian who argued that human nature is good from birth.
🧱 Xunzi (Xun Kuang)c. 310-235 BC
Xunzi was a Confucian philosopher who held, against Mencius, that human nature is bad, since people come into the world grasping and envious.
天 Dong Zhongshu179–104 BC
Dong Zhongshu was a Han dynasty Confucian who taught that floods and eclipses are Heaven's complaints about the emperor, since the human order and the natural one move together through yin and yang and the five phases.
🎣 Liu Zongyuan773-819
Liu Zongyuan was a Tang essayist, poet and statesman who helped lead the return to plain classical prose, then split with Han Yu in public over the sky.

Neo-Confucianism

⚫ Zhou Dunyi (周敦頤)1017-1073
Zhou Dunyi took a diagram of the Supreme Polarity and wrote a few hundred words explaining it, and Neo-Confucianism grew out of that page.
良 Wang Yangming1472-1529
Wang Yangming was a Ming philosopher who taught that knowing and doing are one act, and he made that unity the center of his teaching.
理 Zhu Xi1130-1200
Zhu Xi was a Song-dynasty philosopher who pulled Neo-Confucian thought into one system.
童 Li Zhi (李贄), style name Zhuowu (卓吾)1527-1602
Li Zhi held office in the late Ming, then resigned it, took Buddhist tonsure without leaving the world, and called himself a heretic on purpose.
退 Yi Hwang (Toegye)1501-1570
Toegye was the foremost reader of Zhu Xi in Joseon Korea, and he granted principle a power his master had withheld from it.
🌇 Huang Zongxi1610-1695
Huang Zongxi was a Confucian scholar loyal to the Ming dynasty.
衡 Wang Chong27-100
Wang Chong wrote in the Eastern Han, in a culture that read portents as messages from Heaven about the conduct of men.
气 Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan)1619-1692
Wang Fuzhi wrote in seclusion after the Ming dynasty fell, refusing to serve the Qing that replaced it.

Modern East Asian Thought

🔔 Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長)1730-1801
Norinaga worked as a physician in Matsusaka and spent three decades on a commentary on Japan's oldest chronicle, building from it a theology of the Way of the kami, the native gods.
中 Sun Yat-sen1866-1925
Sun Yat-sen was the founding figurehead of the Chinese Republic, and three principles carried its revolution: nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood, which he cashed out as land reform and state-led development.
同 Kang Youwei (康有為)1858-1927
Kang Youwei ran two programmes at once.
智 Mou Zongsan (牟宗三)1909-1995
Mou Zongsan was a twentieth-century Confucian who rebuilt the tradition by working through Kant.
空 Keiji Nishitani1900-1990
Nishitani was a twentieth-century Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School.
🈳 Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎)1889–1960
Watsuji was the leading moral philosopher of modern Japan, working next door to the Kyoto School.
場 Nishida Kitarō1870-1945
Nishida founded the Kyoto School and stands as modern Japan's most original philosopher.

Latin American

🎆 Octavio Paz Lozano1914-1998
Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet and essayist and the 1990 Nobel laureate in literature.
🌎 Simon Bolivar (El Libertador)1783-1830
Bolívar was a Venezuelan soldier and politician called El Libertador, and Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia came out of Spanish rule behind his armies, the last of them named after him.
⟳ Jorge Luis Borges1899-1986
Borges was an Argentine writer who made short stories carry arguments inside them: a library holding every possible book, a man whose memory forgets nothing.
🌴 José Julián Martí Pérez1853–1895
Martí was a Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party and was killed in battle at Dos Ríos.
🗺 Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López1781-1865
Andrés Bello was a Venezuelan-born polymath who built the intellectual institutions of the new Spanish American republics from Santiago, where he founded the University of Chile in 1843 and wrote the Civil Code of 1855.
🔭 Mario Augusto Bunge1919-2020
Mario Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian who trained as a physicist and then wrote an eight-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy.
🌸 Nezahualcoyotl1402-1472
Nezahualcoyotl ruled Texcoco and stands as the most celebrated of the Nahua sages, the name on the best-known poetry to survive from Mesoamerica before Columbus.
✏️ Domingo Faustino Sarmiento1811-1888
Sarmiento was an Argentine writer and educator who became his country's seventh president.
✺ Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz1648-1695
Sor Juana was a Mexican nun of the Hieronymite order, a poet and playwright, and the earliest major philosopher Latin America produced.
🩸 Tlacaelel I1397-1487
Tlacaelel was a Mexica statesman and high priest who shaped the Aztec empire more than any emperor did.
🧬 José Vasconcelos1882-1959
Vasconcelos was a Mexican philosopher who served as education minister, ran a mass literacy campaign and handed the walls of public buildings to the muralists, launching the Mexican muralist movement.
🧭 Leopoldo Zea1912-2004
Zea was a Mexican philosopher who asked whether Latin America has to earn the right to philosophize, and answered no.

African Philosophy

🌈 Desmond Tutu1931-2021
Tutu was a South African Anglican archbishop who preached against apartheid while it still stood, calling for sanctions on his own country's economy.
⊚ Kwame Gyekye1939-2019
Gyekye was a Ghanaian philosopher who argued that the Akan of Ghana had a philosophy in the full sense, fit to be set beside any other.
🥁 John Mbiti1931-2019
Mbiti was a Kenyan philosopher and priest.
🌰 Sophie Bosede Oluwole1935-2018
Sophie Oluwole was a Nigerian philosopher and the first woman in Nigeria awarded a doctorate in philosophy.
🤲 Kwasi Wiredu1931-2022
Which Western ideas survive translation into an African language, and which fall apart on the way?
🔆 Zärʾä Yaʿqob1599-1692
Zera Yacob was a seventeenth-century Ethiopian who fled persecution and spent two years hiding in a cave.

Indigenous Thought

🛖 Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk)c. 1863–1950
Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota holy man and healer.
🦬 Vine Deloria Jr.1933-2005
Deloria was a Standing Rock Sioux author, theologian and activist.
◉ Viola F. Cordova1937–2002
Cordova was the first Native American woman to earn a philosophy doctorate in the United States, Jicarilla Apache on her father's side.

Early Greek Thought

🏹 Homerc. 8th century BC
Homer is the poet credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the founding epics of Greek literature.
🫧 Democritus of Abderac. 460-370 BC
Democritus of Abdera founded atomism with Leucippus.
🐟 Empedocles of Acragas (Ἐμπεδοκλῆς ὁ Ἀκραγαντῖνος)c. 494-434 BCE
Empedocles wrote his philosophy in verse, and it survives in quotation by other authors plus one papyrus at Strasbourg.
♨️ Heraclitus of Ephesus535-475 BC
Heraclitus belonged to the Greek thinkers who came before Socrates, and he taught that everything flows.
⚒ Hesiodfl. c. 700 BC
Hesiod wrote the Theogony and Works and Days, the earliest Greek instructional poems that carry their author's name.
🎹 Pythagoras of Samos570-495 BC
Pythagoras was a semi-legendary sage of sixth-century BC Samos, and little about the man is certain.
🏃 Zeno of Eleac.490-430 BC
Zeno came from Elea and spent his arguments defending his teacher Parmenides, who held that what is is one and unchanging.
🌠 Anaxagoras of Clazomenaec. 500-428 BC
Anaxagoras was an Ionian Presocratic who carried the study of nature to Athens, where he told the Athenians that the sun is a red hot stone, a glowing lump of rock.
⭕ Parmenides of Elea515-450 BC
Parmenides belonged to the Greek thinkers who came before Socrates, and he set his philosophy down in a poem.
🧍 Protagoras of Abderac. 490-420 BC
Protagoras of Abdera was the first of the Greek sophists, charging fees to teach ambitious Athenians rhetoric and good judgement in running a household and a city.
💧 Thales of Miletusc. 624-546 BC
Thales counts as the first Western philosopher, a Greek from Miletus around 600 BC whom his countrymen numbered among the Seven Sages.

Hellenistic Philosophy

🛡️ Marcus Aurelius121-180
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and a Stoic.
🦅 Marcus Tullius Cicero106-43 BC
Cicero was a Roman senator and orator who spent his life defending a Roman Republic that was dying under him, first against Caesar and then against Antony.
🛢️ Diogenes of Sinopec.412–323 BC
Diogenes was a Cynic who turned philosophy into a public attack on false needs.
◨ Epictetus of Hierapolis50-135
Epictetus was born a slave and later freed, and he taught one sorting rule.
🍇 Epicurus of Samos341-270 BC
Epicurus was a Greek materialist who taught that atoms and empty space are all that exists and that the gods take no interest in us.
🪶 Lucius Annaeus Seneca4 BC-65 AD
Seneca was a Roman statesman and Stoic who tutored Nero and shaped the early years of the reign.
⚛️ Titus Lucretius Carusc.99–55 BC
Lucretius was a Roman poet whose On the Nature of Things gives the fullest surviving account of Epicurean philosophy, six books of Latin verse written to free his readers from the fear of gods and the fear of death.
🐖 Pyrrho of Elisc. 360-270 BCE
Pyrrho founded the ancient Greek skeptical tradition later named Pyrrhonism, and his advice was to stop deciding.
🤷 Sextus Empiricus160-210
Sextus was a Greek physician and the main surviving voice of Pyrrhonian skepticism.
🎨 Zeno of Citiumc.334–262 BC
Zeno of Citium was a Phoenician from Cyprus who founded Stoicism and taught from a painted colonnade in Athens that gave the school its name.

Eastern Christianity

🎼 Maximus the Confessor580-662
Maximus was a Byzantine theologian who insisted that Christ had two wills, one human and one divine, since a Christ with no human will saves nothing.
🌅 Origen of Alexandriac.185-253
Origen was a scholar in Alexandria who wrote the first systematic Christian theology, On First Principles.
✨ Gregory Palamas1296-1359
Palamas was a Byzantine monk and later an archbishop.
🪜 Gregory of Nyssac.335-395
Gregory of Nyssa was a Cappadocian theologian and the brother of Basil the Great.
☧ Clement of Alexandria150-215
Clement was an early Christian Platonist who taught at Alexandria around the year 200 and was remembered as head of the Christian school there.
🖼️ John of Damascusc.675-749
John of Damascus was a Syrian theologian who wrote while Byzantine emperors were smashing icons.
⛪ John Zizioulas1931-2023
Zizioulas was a Greek Orthodox bishop and theologian who held that nothing exists on its own.

Romanticism

⚘ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749-1832
Goethe refused the title of philosopher and built a science of looking instead, outside the systems of his day.
🩰 Friedrich Schiller1759-1805
Schiller was a German poet and philosopher who read Kant hard and spent his last years beside Goethe at Weimar.
🕮 Johann Georg Hamann1730-1788
Hamann worked as a tax official in Koenigsberg and wrote rhapsodies under false names aimed at his friend Kant.
✿ Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Novalis)1772-1801
Novalis worked as a mining engineer in Saxony, wrote poems, and left his philosophy in notebooks.
🌀 Giambattista Vico1668-1744
Vico was a Neapolitan philosopher of rhetoric.

German Idealism

➿ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1770-1831
Hegel was a German idealist who held that everything there is amounts to Spirit, or mind, coming to know itself.
📏 Immanuel Kant1724-1804
Kant was a Prussian philosopher who argued that space, time and cause are shapes your own mind imposes on experience.
🎭 Arthur Schopenhauer1788-1860
Schopenhauer was a German pessimist who said that underneath the world you see lies a blind striving Will, hungry and aimed at nothing, and that every living thing is that Will made visible.
👹 Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt)1806-1856
Stirner was the most radical of the Young Hegelians, the German writers who worked in Hegel's wake.
🧗 Johann Gottlieb Fichte1762-1814
Fichte was a German idealist who set out to finish Kant's work by grounding all experience in a single act.
⏸️ J.M.E. McTaggart1866–1925
McTaggart was a Cambridge idealist who argued in 1908 that time is unreal: every event has to be past, present and future in turn, and nothing can be all three at once.
📽️ Ludwig Feuerbach1804-1872
Feuerbach was a Young Hegelian who read God as humanity looking into a mirror and failing to recognise itself.
💀 Philipp Mainländer (Philipp Batz)1841-1876
Mainländer was a German pessimist who took Schopenhauer's blind will to live and turned it into a will to die.
🪺 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling1775-1854
Schelling was a German idealist who began with a philosophy of nature and ended with one of freedom, evil and a personal God.

Liberalism

✎ George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)1903-1950
Eric Blair, writing as Orwell, defended objective truth against a politics that manufactures its own facts.
🌁 John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes1883-1946
Keynes built his economics on a theory of knowledge he set out in A Treatise on Probability in 1921: probability is a logical relation between propositions, and many such relations carry no number at all.
💵 Ayn Rand1905-1982
Rand was a Russian-American novelist who called her system Objectivism and built it from a flat starting point, existence exists: the world is what it is whether you like it or not.
🕶️ John Rawls1921-2002
Rawls was the leading American political philosopher of his century.
🐑 Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville1805-1859
A French aristocrat who sat as a deputy, Tocqueville took the levelling of ranks as a providential fact, decreed by God and past any human power to stop, then asked only whether it would end in freedom or servitude.
🦔 Friedrich August von Hayek1899-1992
Hayek was an Austrian economist who settled in Britain and defended classical liberalism.
⇄ Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises1881-1973
Mises rebuilt economics as praxeology, a deductive science whose theorems are true a priori like those of logic, not findings open to statistical refutation.
🏘️ Robert Nozick1938–2002
Nozick was a political philosopher at Harvard who wrote the main libertarian reply to Rawls.
🔤 Wilhelm von Humboldt1767-1835
Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Prussian statesman and linguist.
🌊 Futa Helu1934-2010
Helu was a Tongan philosopher and educator who founded 'Atenisi, an independent university in Tonga where Plato and Tongan thought sat at the same table.

Conservatism

⚜️ Edmund Burke1729-1797
Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman who defended prejudice by name: the settled habits a people cannot justify carry more wisdom than the reasoning of any one generation, and he set that against the abstractions of the Jacobins.
📙 Leo Strauss1899-1973
Strauss was a German-Jewish-American political philosopher who taught at Chicago and trained a wide cohort of students there to read between the lines.
❄ Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev (Константин Николаевич Леонтьев)1831-1891
Leontiev trained as a physician and served as a consul in the Ottoman Balkans, then took secret tonsure at Optina and died a monk.

Fascists & Superfascists

🪖 Benito Mussolini1883–1945
Mussolini was an Italian journalist and socialist agitator who broke with the left over the First World War and founded Fascism, ruling Italy as dictator from 1922 to 1943.
➰ Giovanni Gentile1875–1944
Gentile was an Italian idealist who held that reality is the act of thinking itself, never anything already thought, a doctrine he called actual idealism.
🜨 Carl Schmitt1888-1985
Schmitt defined the political as a matter of intensity: any quarrel turns political once it hardens into a grouping of friend and enemy, and only those inside the conflict can judge it.
🗻 Giulio Cesare Andrea 'Julius' Evola1898-1974
Evola was an Italian esotericist and radical traditionalist for whom history runs downhill: a fall through four ages, with power sliding from sacred kings to warriors to merchants to the masses.

Libertarian Socialism

✋ Ursula K. Le Guin1929-2018
Le Guin was an American novelist and essayist who was an anarchist outside her fiction as well as inside it.
🏴 Mikhail Bakunin1814–1876
Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary and a militant atheist who wrote that if God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.
Ⓐ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon1809-1865
Proudhon was a self-taught French printer and the first man to call himself an anarchist.
🍞 Peter Kropotkin1842-1921
Kropotkin was a Russian prince and geographer.
📅 Charles Fourier1772-1837
Fourier was a French utopian socialist who would rebuild society from the ground up as self-sufficient communities he called phalanxes, about 1,620 people to each, housed in one great shared building, the phalanstery.
🏭 Robert Owen1771–1858
Owen was a Welsh manufacturer who ran New Lanark, a cotton mill in Scotland where he cut the working hours and put the children into school to prove that people are made by their conditions.
⛏️ Gerrard Winstanley1609–1676
Winstanley led the Diggers, a band who in 1649 occupied common land and planted it to act out his principle that the earth is a common treasury for all.

Marxism

⛓️ Friedrich Engels1820-1895
Engels managed his family's cotton mill in Manchester and used the profits to keep Marx writing.
✊ Ernesto "Che" Guevara1928-1967
Guevara was an Argentine revolutionary who fought in Cuba and trusted revolutionary will over material conditions.
🚩 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)1870-1924
Lenin was the Russian Marxist who led the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.
🔨 Mao Zedong1893-1976
Mao was a Chinese revolutionary who bent Marxism-Leninism to fit a country of peasants.
☭ Karl Marx1818-1883
Marx was a German political economist who read history as a long fight between classes over who controls the means of making things.
🎻 Theodor W. Adorno1903–1969
Adorno was a German philosopher of the Frankfurt School.
💬 Jürgen Habermas1929-2019
Habermas was a German philosopher of the second Frankfurt School generation who recast reason as talk aimed at mutual understanding.
🔒 Antonio Gramsci1891–1937
Gramsci was an Italian Marxist whom Mussolini's police jailed for eleven years, and he filled the Prison Notebooks from 1929 until illness stopped him in 1935.
⭐ Hồ Chí Minh1890-1969
Hồ Chí Minh was a Vietnamese revolutionary who read Lenin and found a weapon against empire, joining Marxism-Leninism to anti-colonial nationalism.
📺 Herbert Marcuse1898-1979
Marcuse was a Frankfurt School theorist who read Marx through Freud.
🏁 Alexandre Kojève1902-1968
Kojève was a Russian emigrant whose Paris seminar on Hegel in the 1930s taught a generation to read history through desire and the fight to be recognized, master against slave.
⧗ Rosa Luxemburg (Róża Luksemburg)1871-1919
Luxemburg argued in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) that capitalism cannot keep growing without markets outside itself to sell into, which builds empire into the structure of the system.
🏔️ José Carlos Mariátegui1894–1930
Mariátegui was a Peruvian Marxist who argued in his Seven Interpretive Essays that Peru would never get socialism by importing it from Europe.
🐊 Val Plumwood1939-2008
Plumwood was an Australian ecofeminist philosopher who mounted one of the most thorough attacks on Western dualism, reading the mastery of nature and the mastery of women as one pattern.

Phenomenology

🪨 Martin Heidegger1889-1976
Heidegger was a German philosopher who thought metaphysics had forgotten the plainest question, and reopened it in Being and Time: what does it mean for anything to be at all?
🗳️ Hannah Arendt1906-1975
Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist sent to cover Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem.
👂 Hans-Georg Gadamer1900–2002
Gadamer was the German founder of philosophical hermeneutics, the study of how understanding works.
🔍 Edmund Husserl1859-1938
Husserl founded phenomenology, and his method starts with a refusal: set aside the question of whether the world out there is real, and describe instead how things show up for you.
👤 Emmanuel Levinas1906-1995
Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and spent his career arguing that ethics comes before everything else in philosophy, including the question of what exists.
🖐️ Maurice Merleau-Ponty1908–1961
Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenologist, a philosopher of how experience shows up from the inside, and his subject was the lived body.
🔶 Alexius Meinong1853-1920
Meinong was an Austrian philosopher who studied under Brentano and founded the theory of objects.
🙇 Friedrich Schleiermacher1768-1834
Schleiermacher told educated Germans who had given up on religion that it runs deeper than doctrine and deeper than morals.
🌷 Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta)1891-1942
Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who wrote her doctorate under Husserl on a hard question: how can you know another person's grief when you only ever feel your own?

American Philosophy

🪁 Benjamin Franklin1706-1790
A printer, experimenter and diplomat, Franklin wanted a religion answerable to results: one God who takes an interest in the world, a soul judged by its conduct, and doing good to God's other children as the highest form of worship.
🌿 William James1842-1910
The American pragmatist James helped found modern psychology, then turned the same eye on religion, gathering first-hand accounts of conversion and mysticism for The Varieties of Religious Experience.
📜 Thomas Jefferson1743-1826
Jefferson was a Virginia statesman and the third U.S.
🏫 John Dewey1859-1952
Dewey was an American pragmatist who took his arguments to the public.
🌲 Ralph Waldo Emerson1803-1882
Emerson was the sage of Concord.
🗞️ Thomas Paine1737-1809
Paine was an Anglo-American pamphleteer who wrote for people who had never opened a political treatise, and Common Sense turned American independence into a popular demand against monarchy and hereditary rule.
🪵 Henry David Thoreau1817-1862
Thoreau lived alone by a pond at Walden for two years and filled journals with what he saw there, and those Concord notebooks pioneered close ecological observation.
🔣 Charles Sanders Peirce1839-1914
Peirce was an American logician whose test for any idea was a question: what practical difference would it make if it were true?
🪞 Richard Rorty1931-2007
Drop the picture of the mind as a mirror held up to reality, the American pragmatist Rorty said, and philosophy stops being a hunt for the one true description.
🏠 Jane Addams1860-1935
Addams was an American settlement-house pioneer who turned pragmatism toward the urban poor.

Philosophy of Language

🗣️ Ludwig Wittgenstein (Investigations-era)1929-1951
In his later work Wittgenstein turned on his own first book, the Tractatus, and its theory that a sentence pictures a fact.
🔢 Bertrand Russell1872-1970
Russell was a British logician who set out to derive all of mathematics from pure logic, and Principia Mathematica came of the attempt.
🔇 Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus-era)1889-1929
Early Wittgenstein means Wittgenstein in the phase of his first book, the Tractatus.
✔️ A. J. Ayer1910-1989
Ayer was an English logical positivist who brought the Vienna Circle's programme home for English readers in Language, Truth and Logic.
🔠 Rudolf Carnap1891–1970
Carnap belonged to the Vienna Circle.
🌟 Gottlob Frege1848–1925
Frege was a German mathematician who built the first working system of modern logic, a way of writing arguments so their form can be checked like a calculation, and tried to found all of arithmetic on it.
🏷️ Saul Kripke1940–2022
Kripke was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the later twentieth century.
⊨ Peter Frederick Strawson1919-2006
Strawson set out to describe the conceptual scheme we already use rather than replace it, and called that descriptive metaphysics.
🚢 Otto Neurath1882–1945
Neurath was an Austrian member of the Vienna Circle and a socialist economist who wanted an economy planned in goods rather than in money.

Analytic Metaphysics

🪆 Kurt Gödel1906-1978
Gödel was an Austrian-American logician whose incompleteness theorems proved that any consistent set of rules big enough to do arithmetic contains truths it can never prove.
💻 Alan Turing1912-1954
Turing was a British mathematician who laid the foundations of computer science.
ℵ Georg Cantor1845-1918
Cantor was a German mathematician who founded set theory and broke a two-thousand-year ban, inherited from Aristotle, on treating an infinite thing as finished.
🧠 Daniel Dennett1942-2024
Dennett was an American analytic philosopher and an outspoken atheist who held that nothing exists beyond nature: the mind is what the brain does, and God is one more thing people invented.
🌐 David Kellogg Lewis1941–2001
David Lewis was an American philosopher of the analytic school.
🕸️ Willard Van Orman Quine1908-2000
Quine taught philosophy at Harvard, and in Two Dogmas of Empiricism he attacked the old line between truths of meaning and truths of fact.
🟢 Nelson Goodman1906-1998
Goodman was an American analytic philosopher who denied that anything has a fixed essence.

Esotericism

⛩️ Alan Watts1915–1973
Watts was born in Britain, left the Episcopal priesthood in America, and spent the rest of his life explaining Zen, Taoism and Vedanta to Western readers.
✴️ Aleister Crowley1875–1947
Crowley was an English occultist and ceremonial magician who founded the religion of Thelema on The Book of the Law, a text he said was dictated to him in Cairo in 1904.
☿ Hermes Trismegistusc. 1st-3rd c. AD
Hermes Trismegistus is a legendary sage credited with the Hermetica, Greek writings from Roman Egypt that fuse the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth.
🍄 Terence Kemp McKenna1946-2000
McKenna was an American ethnobotanist who argued in Food of the Gods (1992) that hallucinogenic plants set off human self-reflection and speech, a claim his critics tagged the stoned ape.
⚗️ Theophrastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus)1493-1541
Paracelsus was a Swiss-German physician and alchemist of the Renaissance who founded medical chemistry.
🔮 Helena Blavatsky1831-1891
Blavatsky was a Russian-born occultist who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and stitched Hindu, Buddhist and Western esoteric material into one cosmic story: spirit falls into matter, then climbs back through lifetime after lifetime.
🌄 Jakob Böhme1575-1624
Böhme was a Lutheran shoemaker with no schooling, and light on a pewter dish set off the vision he spent the rest of his life writing out.
✵ Emanuel Swedenborg (born Emanuel Swedberg)1688-1772
Swedenborg spent some thirty years as a Swedish mining official and scientist, then said in 1744 that his spiritual sight had opened, and paid to print the theology that followed.