Timeline of Western philosophers
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A wide-ranging list of philosophers from the Western traditions of philosophy. Included are not only philosophers (Socrates, Plato), but also those who have had a marked importance upon the philosophy of the day (Copernicus, Einstein, Planck).
The list stops at the year 1950, where it is presumed that philosophers fall into the broader Global category.
The most popular or noteworthy philosophers can be found in bold, and slightly less influential philosophers are in italics.
Philosophers are organized roughly by the publication of their first, most influential works, or their "breakout" moments.
Western & Middle Eastern Philosophers
Classical Philosophers
600-500 BCE
- Thales of Miletus - Ionian. "all is water"
- Anaximander of Athens - Ionian. "The Boundless", Evolution
- Anaximenes of Miletus - Ionian. earth water and fire, all is air
- Pythagoras - all is numbers, souls are immortal
- Xenophanes of Sicily - Elatic. anti-militant, skeptical
500-400 BCE
- Heraclitus - Ionian. mutability of the world, all is fire, paradoxes
- Parmenides - Elatic. everything has the same substance, logic
- Protagoras of Abdera - Sophist, relativism
- Zeno - Elatic. motion as logically impossible, as is one substance
- Empedocles - Pluralist. four elements, Vegetarianism
- Hippias - Sophist. empiricist
- Leucippus - Atomist. determinist
- Anaxagoras of Clazomenae - Pluralist. order is of mind, atomist
- Archelaus of Macedonia
- Democritus - Atomist
- Socrates of Athens - virtue, dialectics, truth
400-300 BCE
- Aristippus of North Africa - Cyreniac. hedonism
- Antisthenes of Athens - Cynic. wise can't be fooled, denied contradictions
- Xenophon of Greece - history
- Plato of Athens - idealism, polity
- Diogenes of Greece - Cynic. individualist, independent
- Euclid of Greece - geometry
- Aristotle of Athens - social advocate, moderation, universal logic
- Xenocrates - soul as numbers
- Pyrrho of Elis - skeptic
Hellenistic Philosophers
300-200 BCE
- Epicurus - atomism, hedonism
- Zeno of Citium - acceptance of objectivity allows overcoming of passion
- Timon - Pyrrhonist, skeptic
- Archimedes - engineering, Pi, geometer
- Chrysippus - stoic, calculus
200-100 BCE
- Carneades - light skeptic, probability
100-0 BCE
- Lucretius - Epicurean
Roman era philosophers
0-100 AD
- Jesus - forgiveness, separation of ideas and people
- Philo - allegorical method
- Seneca - pro-suicide, stoic
100-200 AD
- Epictetus - self-determination, desire as suffering
- Marcus Aurelius - stoic
200-400 AD
- Sextus Empiricus - skeptic, Pyrrhonist
- Plotinus - neoplatonist, central unity, chaos at the periphery, humans as microcosms
- Porphyry - student of Plotinus
- Iamblichus of Syria - late neoplatonist, espoused theurgy
Western Medieval era philosophers
400-500 AD
- Saint Augustine - everything is in the present tense, original sin
- Hypatia - Platonism, mathematics, "heretic"
- Pelagius - free will, anti-original sin
- Cyril of Alexandria - Christ as a single person with two aspects, persecuted opposing philosophers
- Nestorius - Christ as a dual man/God, "heretic"
- Proclus - late Neoplatonist
500-800 AD
800-900 AD
- al-Kindi - faith over reason
- John the Scot - Johannes Scotus Erigena; free will, Pelagian, realist, pantheism, predestination, neoplatonic
900-1000 AD
- al-Farŕbi - God through logic, Aristotlean logic Platonian society
- Saadia Gaon - linguistics, duty over pleasure
- al-Razi - chemist and early scientific genius; God creates the universe by rearranging pre-existing laws
1000-1100 AD
- Ibn Sina - proof of God through cause
- Ibn Gabirol - essence vs will of God
- Anselm - ontological argument for the existence of god faith over reason, atonement
- al-Ghazali - revelationist
1100-1200 AD
- Abelard - general turns universal after abstraction, intention over consequence
- Ibn Daud - free will
- Peter Lombard - history of philosophy
- Averroes (Ibn Rushd, "The Commentator") - God's existence can be proven by reason alone
- Maimonides - reason to its extent, then faith
- St Francis of Assisi - ascetism
1200-1300 AD
- Fibonacci - Fibonacci series of numbers
- Robert Grosseteste - origin of light
- Albert the Great - empiricism
- Roger Bacon - empiricism and mathematics
- Thomas Aquinas - faith over reason, proofs of God
- Bonaventure - reason legitimate only as extension of faith, humans as footprints of divinity
- Siger - moral assessments: intuitive, egoistic, and normative
- Boetius of Dacia - religion as irrational
1300-1400 AD
- Duns Scotus - formal distinctions
- Meister Eckhart - pantheist revelationist
- John Wycliffe - secularism
- Marsilius of Padua - chief function of gov't as mediator
- William of Ockham - nominalist, demands necessity of an entity indentified before existence, preference of clear arguments over convoluted ones
- Gersonides - matter is eternal religion can't conflict w/ reason
- Buridan - nominalist, inertial motion
- Crescas - happiness through faith over reason
1400-1500 AD
- Cusa - contradictions are solved through divinity
- Valla - incompatibility of divine omnipotence and free will, humanism, criticized scholastic logic
- Pico della Mirandola - unified theory, humanism
Early Modern philosophers
1500-1550 AD
- Erasmus - humanism, free will, irreligious
- Niccolň Machiavelli - leadership, success by any means, militarism
- Saint Thomas More - theism, utopia, hedonism, humanism, ecclesiology
- Copernicus - rotation of planets, heliocentric
- Petrus Ramus - dialectical
- Martin Luther - theism, Biblical authority, ecclesiastical reform
1550-1600 AD
- Teresa of Avila - mystic
- Montaigne - classical skeptic
- Bruno - heliocentrism, pantheism, infinite matter
- Suarez - voluntaristic law
- John Calvin - theism, divine sovereignty
1600-1700 AD
- Johannes Kepler - elliptical heliocentrism
- Charron - skepticism
- Mersenne - theist anti-skeptic
- Francis Bacon - empiricist
- Hugo Grotius - natural law theory of society
- Galileo - heliocentrism, scientific method
- Herbert of Cherbury - innate ideas
- Pierre Gassendi - mechanistic empirical
- Princess Elizabeth - skeptical of mind-body dualism
1600-1650 AD
- Queen Kristina - skepticism
- René Descartes - heliocentrism dualism, rationalist, skepticism overcome by certainty
- Pierre de Fermat - mathematics, probability
- Thomas Hobbes - pessimistic about human nature, obedience, Leviathan
- Filmer - divine monarchy
1650-1700
- Joseph Glanvill - anti-empirical skeptic, anti-atheist
- Arnold Geulincx - anti-dualist
- Louis Pascal - pro-faith, fideistic mathematician
- Henry More - compatibility of faith and reason, theistic
- Geraud Cordemoy - dualist
- Pierre Nicole - egoism
- Ralph Cudworth - immutable morality
- Margaret Cavendish - spiritual materialist feminism
- Antoine Arnauld - logic
- Richard Cumberland (philosopher) - anti-egoist, universal benevolence
- Jacques Rohault - animal mechanism
- Simon Foucher - skepticism
- Roger Boyle - chemist, mechanist
- Nicolas Malebranche - uncausality
- Samuel Pufendorf - social contract
- Baruch Spinoza - metaphysics, God, unity of existence, dual natures, thought and extension, practical knowledge
- Sir Isaac Newton - physics, gravity
- Anne Conway - universal substance, monad
- Pierre Régis - interaction of accidentally conjoined substances accepted on faith
- John Locke - empiricism, human nature, majority rule
- Damaris Masham - feminist
- John Toland - rational theism
- Pierre Bayle - fideist, skepticism, Pyrrhonist
- Madeline de Souvré - human nature
1700-1750
- Samuel Clarke - obligation to worship, Newtonian
- Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury - moral sense without God
- John Norris - Malebrancian
- Gottfried Leibniz - timeless 'monads', relationism
- George Berkeley - idealism, empiricism
- Catherine Cockburn - empiricism, rational morality
- Giambattista Vico - genius-centered historian
- Bernard Mandeville - egoist
- Francis Hutcheson - greatest happiness principle, moral sense
- Joseph Butler - conscience as moderation of self-love
- Christian Wolff - fatalism, rationalism
- John Gay (philosopher) - theistic roots of utilitarianism
- David Hume - never knowing causes, empiricism, morality as passion
- Julien La Mettrie - materialist, physician genetic determinist
- David Hartley - mechanisms for ideas
- Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu - skepticism, humanism
1750-1800
- Leonhard Euler - number theory
- Etienne de Condillac - empiricism
- Richard Price - liberal, intuitionist-rational morality
- Jean d'Alembert - agnosticism, empiricism
- Voltaire - deist, sensationalism
- Denis Diderot - atheism, social contract theory
- John Wesley - theism, divine grace
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - anti-contractual social theory, natural state of humanity
- Thomas Bayes - probability
- Baron d'Holbach - materialism, atheism
- Helvétius - hedonism, egoism, empiricism
- Adam Smith - political economy
- Thomas Jefferson - liberal
- Thomas Reid - realism common sense
- Thomas Paine - American revolutionary
- G.E. Lessing - truth as historical development
- Edmund Burke - traditionalist, aesthete
- Immanuel Kant - synthetic a priori truths, metaphysics of morals, duty morality
- Mary Wollstonecraft - feminism
- Jeremy Bentham - revolutionary, utilitarian
- Moses Mendelssohn - theist, immortal souls tolerance
- Dugald Stewart - common sense realism
- William Godwin - anarchism, social theorist, utilitarianism
- Friedrich Schiller - unKantian ethics
- Thomas Malthus - overpopulation
- William Paley - moral sense theory, teleological argument of God
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte - noumenal self, idealism, nationalism
Modern philosophers
1800-1850
- C.F. Gauss - electromagnetics prime numbers
- Madame de Staël - essayist of philosophy
- F.W.J. von Schelling - transcendental idealism
- Friedrich Schleiermacher - faith over reason, hermeneutics
- P.S. de Laplace - determinism
- G.W.F. Hegel - absolute idealism
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck - evolution
- Comte de Saint-Simon - socialism
- Joseph Fourier - heat conduction archeology
- Arthur Schopenhauer - pessimistic human nature, the human will
- Richard Whately -logician
- Charles Babbage - difference engine, economy
- N.I. Lobachevsky - nonEuclidean geometry
- John Austin - legal positivism, utilitarian
- Auguste Comte - sociology, communitarian, positivism
- William Whewell - realism, creative theory in science
- James Mill - utilitarianism, associationist
- P.J. Proudhon - anarchism, anti-feminism
- Bernard Bolzano - objective independence of truths
- Ralph Waldo Emerson - abolitionist, egalitarian, nontheist, humanist
- Ludwig Feuerbach - nontheistic humanism
- Augustus De Morgan - logical validity
- Margaret Fuller - egalitarian, social reformer
- Sřren Kierkegaard - theist existentialist
- George Boole - Boolean algebra
- Henry David Thoreau - revolutionary, passive resistance
1850-1875
- Bernhard Riemann - field theory
- Sojourner Truth - egalitarian
- Karl Marx - socialism, participatory economics, dialectical materialism
- Charles Darwin - natural selection
- Harriet Taylor - egalitarian, utilitarian
- Friedrich Engels - egalitarian, dialectical materialism
- William Hamilton - common sense
- Gregor Mendel - heredity and genetics
- J. S. Mill - utilitarian
- Rudolf Lotze - nature as the will of the Absolute
- Herbert Spencer - radical libertarian, genetic determinism, innate intelligence, social Darwinist
- John Venn - diagrammatic method
- Susan B. Anthony - feminism
- Mikhail Bakunin - revolutionary anarchism
- Georg Cantor - diagonal proof
- Franz Brentano - phenomenologist
1875-1900
- Henry Sidgwick - conflicting moralities
- Richard Dedekind - Peano postulates, real numbers defined as cuts of rational numbers
- W. K. Clifford - morally wrong to believe in errors or uncertainties
- Charles Peirce - pragmatism, abductive logic, syllogism
- Edward Caird - idealist
- Ernst Mach - logical positivism, radical empiricism
- T.H. Green - anti-laissez-faire, abstract thought
- Gottlob Frege - quantifiers
- Wilhelm Dilthey - metaphysics as a cultural phenomenon
- Friedrich Nietzsche - nihilism, ultimate skepticism, primacy of the will
- Lewis Carroll - epistemology
- Bernard Bosanquet - the Absolute, idealism, contradictions as illusions
- Giuseppe Peano - logicization of arithmatic
- Elizabeth Stanton - separation of church and state, egalitarian
- David George Ritchie - idealism, natural rights
- Émile Durkheim - sociology as transcendent of biological and psychological explanation
- William James - pragmatism
- Josiah Royce - absolute idealism
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman - feminist, matriarchical
- F.H. Bradley - absolute idealism
- Vilfredo Pareto - elitism
- Thorstein Veblen - sociology, liberal education
Late modern Philosophers
1900-1925
- Max Planck - the Planck constant
- Sigmund Freud - psychodynamics, structure of the psyche
- Max Weber - sociology, separation of observation and judgment
- Henri Bergson - thought and creativity as opponents to material entropy
- John Dewey - pragmatism, philosophy of education
- Alexius Meinong - levels of reality
- W.E.B. Dubois - sociologist of race
- Cook Wilson - realist epistemology
- Henri Poincaré - knowledge as utility and not truth
- Pierre Duhem - science as metaphysical speculation
- Edmund Husserl - phenomenology
- Jane Addams - pragmatism, social ethics
- Andrew Seth - personality as reality, idealism
- Ernst Zermelo - axiomatization of set theory
- G.E. Moore - subjective good, common sense
- Benedetto Croce - anti-fascist, non-cognitivist creativity
- Albert Einstein - theory of relativity
- Carl Jung - psychology, personality theory
- Emma Goldman - anarchism
- Hans Vaihinger - concepts as fictions
- Niels Bohr - atomist and quantum theory
- Rosa Luxemburg - revolutionary, activist
- Rudolf Otto - numinous feelings
- David Hilbert - axiomatic formalization of mathematics
- Miguel de Unamuno - human morality dilemma
- Alfred Adler - inferiority complex
- Ferdinand de Saussure - linguistic structuralism
- Jan Łukasiewicz - bracketless logical notation
- Martin Buber - Jewish existentialist
- Bertrand Russell - atheism, logical positivism, logical basis for mathematics, theory of types
- Alfred North Whitehead - event and process based metaphysics
- George Herbert Mead - self-consciousness, symbolic interactionism
- Samuel Alexander - perceptual realism
- J. M. E. McTaggart - ultimate idealism, antidialectics
- John Maynard Keynes - probability, economics: inflation sometimes helps boost economies
- C. D. Broad - existence of phenomena
- Gyorgy Lukács - socialist realism, communism
- George Santayana - desire for belief in human nature, aesthetic priority
1925-1950
- Hans Reichenbach - relativity, probability
- A.O. Lovejoy - perceptual realism principle of plentitude, history of ideas
- W.D. Ross - intuitionist, moral duties
- Nikolai Berdyaev - theistic existentialism
- Werner Heisenberg - quantum mechanics, uncertainty principle
- Heidegger - phenomenology, being-in-the-world
- Hans Kelsen - universal legal ground rule outside of morality
- Moritz Schlick - Vienna Circle. logical positivism, positivist ethics
- Otto Neurath - Vienna Circle. anti-metaphysic, logical positivism
- Frank Ramsey - redundancy theory of truth, nature of semantic paradox, modern applications of probability calculus
- Ernst Cassirer - categories as a priori
- Nicolai Hartmann - Kantian idealism, realism
- Karl Barth - theism, neo-orthodoxy
- Kurt Gödel - Vienna Circle. systems can't analyze themselves
- Ralph Barton Perry - naturalistic perceptual realism
- Antonio Gramsci - humanistic / libertarian Marxism
- R.G. Collingwood - understanding of history by reconstruction of thought
- Roman Ingarden - perceptual realism, phenomenalism, aesthetic theory
- C.I. Lewis - naturalism, Symbolic Logic
- Gaston Bachelard - knowledge as imagination between evidence and rationality
- A.J. Ayer - logical positivism, emotivist ethics
- Friedrich Waismann - Vienna Circle. logical positivism, conventionalist, analytic semantics
- Jacques Maritain - theist, one author of declaration of human rights
- Dorothy Day - theist, passive resistance, communism
- José Ortega y Gasset - relativism, populist
- Alfred Tarski - correspondence theory of truth, semantics
- Rudolf Carnap - Vienna Circle. Logical positivist, experiential, confirmation of hypotheses
- Willard van Orman Quine - pragmatism, logic, philosophy of language
- Brand Blanshard - absolute idealism naturalistic morality
- E. Nagel - logical pragmatism, reductionism
- Karl Popper - knowledge through disproof of alternatives and not proof of theory
- Ernest Addison Moody - philosopher of science, medievalist, philosophy of religion
- Mahatma Gandhi - humanism, passive resistance
- Karen Horney - vagina resentment
- Jean-Paul Sartre - humanistic existentialism
- Gilbert Ryle - logical behaviorism, misapplication of semantics in philosophy
- H.H. Price - defended relationship between sense-data and objects
- Susanne Langer - emotions as inexpressible by language
- Albert Camus - existentialism, death
- Mortimer Adler - liberal education, great ideas theory
- Friedrich von Hayek - classic liberal / libertarian economics
- Karl Jaspers - authentic existentialism
- C.L. Stevenson - emotivism
- Ludwig Wittgenstein - Vienna Circle. logical positivism, language as useful to convey sense-experience and logic / mathematics and all else is meaningless
- Theodor Adorno - Frankfurt School. conformity as a paradox to individuality, the authoritarian personality
- Alan Turing - AI studies, functionalism in the philosophy of mind
- H.A. Prichard - perceptual realism, moral intuitionism
- Gabriel Marcel - theistic existentialism
- Simone Weil - eclectic philosophy of religion
- Simone de Beauvoir - existentialism, feminism
- Frantz Fanon - colonialism, phenomenology
- John Howard Yoder - theism, pacifism & nonviolence
See also
- From this point in time forward, see the Timeline of global philosophers.
- Also be sure to take a look at the Timeline of Eastern philosophers.
External links
- http://www.philosophypages.com - an excellent resource by Garth Kemerling which informed much of this encyclopedia entry.