Timeline of eastern Timeline of Eastern philosophers This is a wide-ranging list of philosophers from the Eastern traditions of philosophy, with special interest in Indo-Chinese philosophy. The list stops at the year 1950, after which philosophers fall into the category of Contemporary philosophy....  | western philosophers

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.

The list stops at the year 1950, after which philosophers fall into the category of Contemporary philosophy

Contemporary philosophy

Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the end of the 19th century with the professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy....

.

600-500 BCE

• Thales
  Thales
  Thales of Miletus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
  
   of Miletus (ca. 624-546 BCE). Of the Milesian school
  Milesian school
  The Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the 6th century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes...
  
  . Believed that all was made of water.
• Anaximander
  Anaximander
  Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia; Milet in modern Turkey. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales...
  
   of Miletus (c. 610-546 BCE). Of the Milesian school
  Milesian school
  The Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the 6th century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes...
  
  . Famous for the concept of Apeiron, or "the boundless".
• Anaximenes of Miletus
  Anaximenes of Miletus
  Anaximenes of Miletus was an Archaic Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher active in the latter half of the 6th century BC. One of the three Milesian philosophers, he is identified as a younger friend or student of Anaximander. Anaximenes, like others in his school of thought, practiced material monism...
  
   (c. 585-525 BCE). Of the Milesian school
  Milesian school
  The Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the 6th century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes...
  
  . Believed that all was made of air.
• Pythagoras
  Pythagoras
  Pythagoras of Samos was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him...
  
   of Samos (c. approx. 580-500 BCE). Of the Ionian School. Understood the deepest reality to be composed of numbers; believed that souls are immortal.
• Xenophanes
  Xenophanes
  of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and social and religious critic. Xenophanes life was one of travel, having left Ionia at the age of 25 he continued to travel throughout the Greek world for another 67 years. Some scholars say he lived in exile in Siciliy...
  
   of Colophon (c. 570-480 BCE). Sometimes associated with the Eleatic school. Politically anti-militant, and epistemically skeptical.

500-400 BCE

• Heraclitus
  Heraclitus
  Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
  
   of Ephesus (c. approx. 535-475 BCE). Of the Ionians. Emphasized the mutability of the world, which he understood to be analogous to fire.
• Parmenides
  Parmenides
  Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides...
  
   of Elea (c. 515-450 BCE). Of the Eleatics.
• Anaxagoras
  Anaxagoras
  Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than...
  
   of Clazomenae (c. 500-428 BCE). Of the Ionians. Atomist.
• Zeno
  Zeno of Elea
  Zeno of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic. He is best known for his paradoxes, which Bertrand Russell has described as "immeasurably subtle and profound".- Life...
  
   (c. approx. 490-430 BCE). Of the Eleatics. Famous for Zeno's paradoxes.
• Empedocles
  Empedocles
  Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...
  
   of Acragas (c. 490-430 BCE). Believed in metaphysical doctrine of four elements. Advocate of ethical vegetarianism
  Vegetarianism
  Vegetarianism encompasses the practice of following plant-based diets , with or without the inclusion of dairy products or eggs, and with the exclusion of meat...
  
  .
• Protagoras
  Protagoras
  Protagoras was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato credits him with having invented the role of the professional sophist or teacher of virtue...
  
   of Abdera (c. 481-420 BCE). Sophist. Early advocate of relativism
  Relativism
  Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
  
  .
• Hippias
  Hippias
  Hippias of Elis was a Greek Sophist, and a contemporary of Socrates. With an assurance characteristic of the later sophists, he claimed to be regarded as an authority on all subjects, and lectured on poetry, grammar, history, politics, mathematics, and much else...
  
   (middle of the 5th century BCE). Sophist.
• Gorgias
  Gorgias
  Gorgias ,Greek sophist, pre-socratic philosopher and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger...
  
  . (c. 483-375 BCE). Sophist.
• Socrates
  Socrates
  Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
  
   of Athens (ca. 470-399 BCE). Emphasized virtue ethics
  Virtue ethics
  Virtue ethics describes the character of a moral agent as a driving force for ethical behavior, rather than rules , consequentialism , or social context .The difference between these four approaches to morality tends to lie more in the way moral dilemmas are...
  
  . In epistemology, understood dialectic
  Dialectic
  Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
  
   to be central to the pursuit of truth.
• Leucippus
  Leucippus
  Leucippus or Leukippos was one of the earliest Greeks to develop the theory of atomism — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms — which was elaborated in greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus...
  
   of Miletus (First half of 5th century BCE). Atomist, Determinist.
• Democritus
  Democritus
  Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos....
  
   of Abdera (c. 450-370 BCE). Atomist.
• Archelaus
  Archelaus (philosopher)
  Archelaus was an Ancient Greek philosopher, a pupil of Anaxagoras, and said by some to have been a teacher of Socrates. He asserted that the principle of motion was the separation of hot from cold, from which he endeavoured to explain the formation of the Earth and the creation of animals and...
  
  . A pupil of Anaxagoras.
• Melissus of Samos
  Melissus of Samos
  Melissus of Samos was the third and last member of the ancient school of Eleatic philosophy, whose other members included Zeno and Parmenides. Little is known about his life except that he was the commander of the Samian fleet shortly before the Peloponnesian War. Melissus’ contribution to...
  
  . Eleatic.
• Cratylus
  Cratylus
  Cratylus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from late 5th century BC, mostly known through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue Cratylus. Little is known of Cratylus or his mentor Heraclitus . According to Cratylus at 402a, Heraclitus proclaimed that one cannot step twice into the same stream...
  
  .
• Ion of Chios
  Ion of Chios
  Ion of Chios was a Greek writer, dramatist, lyric poet and philosopher. He was a contemporary of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. Of his many plays and poems only a few titles and fragments have survived...
  
  .
• Echecrates
  Echecrates
  Echecrates was, according to Plato, a Pythagorean philosopher from the ancient Greek town of Phlius.He appears in Plato's Phaedo dialogue as an aid to the plot. He meets Phaedo, the dialogue's namesake, some time after the execution of Socrates, and asks Phaedo to tell him the story of the famed...
  
  .
• Timaeus of Locri
  Timaeus of Locri
  Timaeus of Locri was a Greek Pythagorean philosopher living in the 5th century BC.He features in Plato's Timaeus, where he is said to come from Locri in Italy, thus of Locrian origin.He also appears as one of the speakers in Plato's Critias....
  
  .

400-300 BCE

• Aristippus
  Aristippus
  Aristippus of Cyrene, , was the founder of the Cyrenaic school of Philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates, but adopted a very different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by adapting circumstances to oneself and by maintaining proper control over both...
  
   of Cyrene
  Cyrene, Libya
  Cyrene was an ancient Greek colony and then a Roman city in present-day Shahhat, Libya, the oldest and most important of the five Greek cities in the region. It gave eastern Libya the classical name Cyrenaica that it has retained to modern times.Cyrene lies in a lush valley in the Jebel Akhdar...
  
   (c. 435-366 BCE). A Cyrenaic
  Cyrenaics
  The Cyrenaics were an ultra-hedonist Greek school of philosophy founded in the 4th century BC, supposedly by Aristippus of Cyrene, although many of the principles of the school are believed to have been formalized by his grandson of the same name, Aristippus the Younger. The school was so called...
  
  . Advocate of ethical hedonism.
• Antisthenes
  Antisthenes
  Antisthenes was a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. Antisthenes first learned rhetoric under Gorgias before becoming an ardent disciple of Socrates. He adopted and developed the ethical side of Socrates' teachings, advocating an ascetic life lived in accordance with virtue. Later writers...
  
   (c. 444-365 BCE). Founder of Cynicism. Maintained that the wise cannot be fooled. Pupil of Socrates.
• Xenophon
  Xenophon
  Xenophon , son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary, philosopher and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates...
  
   (c. 427-355 BCE). Philosopher of history.
• Plato
  Plato
  Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
  
   (c. 427-347 BCE). Famed for view of the transcendental forms. Advocated polity
  Polity
  Polity is a form of government Aristotle developed in his search for a government that could be most easily incorporated and used by the largest amount of people groups, or states...
  
   governed by philosophers.
• Diogenes of Sinope
  Diogenes of Sinope
  Diogenes the Cynic was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope , he was born in Sinope , an Ionian colony on the Black Sea , in 412 or 404 BCE and died at Corinth in 323 BCE.Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure...
  
   (c. approx. 399-323 BCE). Cynic.
• Euclid
  Euclid
  Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...
  
   (c. 325-265 BCE). Founder of Euclidean geometry.
• Aristotle
  Aristotle
  Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
  
   (c. 384-322 BCE). A polymath whose works ranged across all philosophical fields.
• Strato of Lampsacus
  Strato of Lampsacus
  Strato of Lampsacus was a Peripatetic philosopher, and the third director of the Lyceum after the death of Theophrastus...
  
   (ca. 340 BCE–ca. 268 BCE). Atheist, Materialist.
• Xenocrates
  Xenocrates
  Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements...
  
   (c. 396-314 BCE). Disciple of Plato.
• Pyrrho
  Pyrrho
  Pyrrho , a Greek philosopher of classical antiquity, is credited as being the first Skeptic philosopher and the inspiration for the school known as Pyrrhonism, founded by Aenesidemus in the 1st century BC.- Life :Pyrrho was from Elis, on the Ionian Sea...
  
   of Elis (c. 360-270 BCE). Skeptic.

300-200 BCE

• Epicurus
  Epicurus
  Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
  
   (c. 341-270 BCE). Materialist Atomist, hedonist.
• Zeno of Citium
  Zeno of Citium
  Zeno of Citium was a Greek philosopher from Citium . Zeno was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in...
  
   (c. 333-264 BCE). Founder of Stoicism
  Stoicism
  Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...
  
  . Anarchist. Held that the acceptance of objectivity allows the overcoming of passions.
• Timon
  Timon (philosopher)
  Timon of Phlius was a Greek skeptic philosopher, a pupil of Pyrrho, and a celebrated writer of satirical poems called Silloi . He was born in Phlius, moved to Megara, and then he returned home and married. He next went to Elis with his wife, and heard Pyrrho, whose tenets he adopted...
  
   (c. 320-230 BCE). Pyrrhonist, skeptic.
• Chrysippus
  Chrysippus
  Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Soli, Cilicia, but moved to Athens as a young man, where he became a pupil of Cleanthes in the Stoic school. When Cleanthes died, around 230 BC, Chrysippus became the third head of the school...
  
   of Soli (c. 280-207 BCE). Major figure in Stoicism
  Stoicism
  Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...
  
  .

200-100 BCE

• Carneades
  Carneades
  Carneades was an Academic skeptic born in Cyrene. By the year 159 BC, he had started to refute all previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism, and even the Epicureans whom previous skeptics had spared. As head of the Academy, he was one of three philosophers sent to Rome in 155 BC where his...
  
   (c. 214-129 BCE). Academic skeptic. Understood probability
  Probability
  Probability is ordinarily used to describe an attitude of mind towards some proposition of whose truth we arenot certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "Will a specific event occur?" The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain are we that the event will occur?" The...
  
   as the purveyor of truth.

0-100 CE

• Cicero
  Cicero
  Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
  
   (c.106 BCE-43 BCE)
• Philo
  Philo
  Philo , known also as Philo of Alexandria , Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew, was a Hellenistic Jewish Biblical philosopher born in Alexandria....
  
   (c. 20 BCE-40 CE). Believed in the allegorical method of reading texts.
• Seneca the Younger
  Seneca the Younger
  Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...
  
   (ca. 4 BCE-65 CE). Stoic
  STOIC
  STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
  
  .

100-200 CE

• Epictetus
  Epictetus
  Epictetus was a Greek sage and Stoic philosopher. He was born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia , and lived in Rome until banishment when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece where he lived the rest of his life. His teachings were noted down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses...
  
   (c.55-135). Stoic
  STOIC
  STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
  
  . Emphasized ethics of self-determination.
• Marcus Aurelius (121-180). Stoic
  STOIC
  STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
  
  .

200-400 CE

• Sextus Empiricus
  Sextus Empiricus
  Sextus Empiricus , was a physician and philosopher, and has been variously reported to have lived in Alexandria, Rome, or Athens. His philosophical work is the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman skepticism....
  
   (fl. during the 2nd and possibly the 3rd centuries CE). Skeptic, Pyrrhonist.
• Plotinus
  Plotinus
  Plotinus was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas and he is of the Platonic tradition...
  
   (ca. 205-270). Neoplatonist. Had a holistic metaphysics.
• Porphyry
  Porphyry (philosopher)
  Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...
  
   (c.232-304). Student of Plotinus.
• Iamblichus of Syria (ca. 245-325). Late neoplatonist. Espoused theurgy
  Theurgy
  Theurgy describes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of invoking the action or evoking the presence of one or more gods, especially with the goal of uniting with the divine, achieving henosis, and perfecting oneself.- Definitions :*Proclus...
  
  .
• Augustine of Hippo
  Augustine of Hippo
  Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
  
   (c. 354-430). Original Sin
  Original sin
  Original sin is, according to a Christian theological doctrine, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred...
  
  . Church father.
• Proclus
  Proclus
  Proclus Lycaeus , called "The Successor" or "Diadochos" , was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, one of the last major Classical philosophers . He set forth one of the most elaborate and fully developed systems of Neoplatonism...
  
   (c. 412-485). Neoplatonist
  Neoplatonism
  Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
  
  .

500-800 CE

• Boethius
  Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
  Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, commonly called Boethius was a philosopher of the early 6th century. He was born in Rome to an ancient and important family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after...
  
   (c. 480–524).
• John Philoponus
  John Philoponus
  John Philoponus , also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was a Christian and Aristotelian commentator and the author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works...
  
   (c. 490–570).

800-900 CE

• Al-Kindi
  Al-Kindi
  ' , known as "the Philosopher of the Arabs", was a Muslim Arab philosopher, mathematician, physician, and musician. Al-Kindi was the first of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers, and is unanimously hailed as the "father of Islamic or Arabic philosophy" for his synthesis, adaptation and promotion...
  
   (c. 801-873). Major figure at Islamic philosophy
  Islamic philosophy
  Islamic philosophy is a branch of Islamic studies. It is the continuous search for Hekma in the light of Islamic view of life, universe, ethics, society, and so on...
  
  . Influenced by Neoplatonism
  Neoplatonism
  Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
  
  .
• John the Scot
  Eriugena
  Eriugena is an adjective meaning Irish . It was typically used in the early Middle ages as a surname when it was common to distinguish people by labeling them according to where they were born or lived. It has been notably applied to the following philosophers;* Augustine Eriugena* Johannes Scotus...
  
   (ca. 815-877). Pelagian, neoplatonist, pantheist.

900-1000 CE

• al-Faràbi
  Al-Farabi
  ' known in the West as Alpharabius , was a scientist and philosopher of the Islamic world...
  
   (c. 870-950). Major Islamic philosopher. Neoplatonist.
• Saadia Gaon
  Saadia Gaon
  Saʻadiah ben Yosef Gaon was a prominent rabbi, Jewish philosopher, and exegete of the Geonic period.The first important rabbinic figure to write extensively in Arabic, he is considered the founder of Judeo-Arabic literature...
  
   (c. 882-942).
• al-Razi
  Al-Razi
  Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī , known as Rhazes or Rasis after medieval Latinists, was a Persian polymath,a prominent figure in Islamic Golden Age, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher, and scholar....
  
   (c. 865-925). Rationalist. Major Islamic philosopher. Held that God creates universe by rearranging pre-existing laws.

1000-1100 CE

• Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (c. 980-1037). Major Islamic philosopher.
• Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) (c. 1021-1058). Jewish philosopher.
• Anselm
  Anselm of Canterbury
  Anselm of Canterbury , also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109...
  
   (c. ~1034–1109). Christian philosopher. Produced ontological argument for the existence of God.
• al-Ghazali
  Al-Ghazali
  Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī , known as Algazel to the western medieval world, born and died in Tus, in the Khorasan province of Persia was a Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic....
  
   (c. 1058-1111). Islamic philosopher. Mystic
  Mysticism
  Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
  
  .

1100-1200 CE

• Peter Abelard
  Peter Abelard
  Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...
  
   (c. 1079-1142). Scholastic
  Scholasticism
  Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...
  
   philosopher. Dealt with problem of universals.
• Abraham ibn Daud
  Abraham ibn Daud
  Abraham ibn Daud was a Spanish-Jewish astronomer, historian, and philosopher; born at Toledo, Spain about 1110; died, according to common report, a martyr about 1180. He is sometimes known by the abbreviation Rabad I or Ravad I. His mother belonged to a family famed for its learning...
  
   (ca. 1110-1180). Jewish philosophy
  Jewish philosophy
  Jewish philosophy , includes all philosophy carried out by Jews, or, in relation to the religion of Judaism. Jewish philosophy, until modern Enlightenment and Emancipation, was pre-occupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism; thus organizing...
  
  .
• Peter Lombard
  Peter Lombard
  Peter Lombard was a scholastic theologian and bishop and author of Four Books of Sentences, which became the standard textbook of theology, for which he is also known as Magister Sententiarum-Biography:Peter Lombard was born in Lumellogno , in...
  
   (c. 1100-1160). Scholastic.
• Averroes
  Averroes
  ' , better known just as Ibn Rushd , and in European literature as Averroes , was a Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy,...
  
   (Ibn Rushd, "The Commentator") (c. 1126-December 10, 1198). Islamic philosopher.
• Maimonides
  Maimonides
  Moses ben-Maimon, called Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn in Arabic, or Rambam , was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages...
  
   (c. 1135-1204). Jewish philosophy
  Jewish philosophy
  Jewish philosophy , includes all philosophy carried out by Jews, or, in relation to the religion of Judaism. Jewish philosophy, until modern Enlightenment and Emancipation, was pre-occupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism; thus organizing...
  
  .
• St Francis of Assisi (c. 1182-1226). Ascetic.

1200-1300 CE

• Robert Grosseteste
  Robert Grosseteste
  Robert Grosseteste or Grossetete was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents at Stradbroke in Suffolk. A.C...
  
   (c. 1175-1253).
• Albert the Great (c. 1193-1280). Early Empiricist.
• Roger Bacon
  Roger Bacon
  Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
  
   (c. 1214-1294). Empiricist, mathematician
  Mathematician
  A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
  
  .
• Thomas Aquinas
  Thomas Aquinas
  Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
  
   (c. 1221-1274). Christian philosopher.
• Bonaventure
  Bonaventure
  Saint Bonaventure, O.F.M., , born John of Fidanza , was an Italian medieval scholastic theologian and philosopher. The seventh Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, he was also a Cardinal Bishop of Albano. He was canonized on 14 April 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV and declared a Doctor of the...
  
   (c. 1225-1274). Franciscan
  Franciscan
  Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
  
  .
• Siger (c. 1240-1280s). Averroist.
• Boetius of Dacia
  Boetius of Dacia
  Boetius of Dacia was a 13th century Danish philosopher....
  
  . Averroist, Aristotelian
  Aristotelianism
  Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...
  
  .

1300-1400 CE

• Ramon Llull
  Ramon Llull
  Ramon Llull was a Majorcan writer and philosopher, logician and tertiary Franciscan. He wrote the first major work of Catalan literature. Recently-surfaced manuscripts show him to have anticipated by several centuries prominent work on elections theory...
  
    (c.1232-1315) catalan philosopher
• Duns Scotus
  Duns Scotus
  Blessed John Duns Scotus, O.F.M. was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was nicknamed Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought....
  
   (c. 1266-1308). Franciscan
  Franciscan
  Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
  
  , Scholastic
  Scholasticism
  Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...
  
  .
• Meister Eckhart
  Meister Eckhart
  Eckhart von Hochheim O.P. , commonly known as Meister Eckhart, was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia in the Holy Roman Empire. Meister is German for "Master", referring to the academic title Magister in theologia he obtained in Paris...
  
   (c. 1260-1328). mystic
  Mysticism
  Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
  
  .
• John Wycliffe
  John Wycliffe
  John Wycliffe was an English Scholastic philosopher, theologian, lay preacher, translator, reformer and university teacher who was known as an early dissident in the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century. His followers were known as Lollards, a somewhat rebellious movement, which preached...
  
   (c.1320-1384).
• Nicole Oresme  (c. 1320-5 – 1382) . Made contributions to economics, science, mathematics, theology and philosophy.
• Marsilius of Padua
  Marsilius of Padua
  Marsilius of Padua Marsilius of Padua Marsilius of Padua (Italian Marsilio or Marsiglio da Padova; (circa 1275 – circa 1342) was an Italian scholar, trained in medicine who practiced a variety of professions. He was also an important 14th century political figure...
  
   (c. 1270-1342). Understood chief function of state as mediator.
• William of Ockham
  William of Ockham
  William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
  
   (c. 1288-1348). Franciscan
  Franciscan
  Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
  
  . Scholastic
  Scholasticism
  Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...
  
  . Nominalist, creator of Ockham's razor.
• Gersonides
  Gersonides
  Levi ben Gershon, better known by his Latinised name as Gersonides or the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG , philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, astronomer/astrologer. He was born at Bagnols in Languedoc, France...
  
   (c. 1288-1344). Jewish philosopher.
• Jean Buridan
  Jean Buridan
  Jean Buridan was a French priest who sowed the seeds of the Copernican revolution in Europe. Although he was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the late Middle Ages, he is today among the least well known...
  
   (c. 1300-1358). Nominalist.
• Hasdai Crescas
  Hasdai Crescas
  Hasdai ben Judah Crescas was a Jewish philosopher and a renowned halakhist...
  
   (c. 1340-~1411). Jewish philosopher.

1400-1500 CE

• Nicholas of Cusa
  Nicholas of Cusa
  Nicholas of Kues , also referred to as Nicolaus Cusanus and Nicholas of Cusa, was a cardinal of the Catholic Church from Germany , a philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, and an astronomer. He is widely considered one of the great geniuses and polymaths of the 15th century...
  
   (c. 1401-1464). Christian philosopher.
• Lorenzo Valla
  Lorenzo Valla
  Lorenzo Valla was an Italian humanist, rhetorician, and educator. His family was from Piacenza; his father, Luciave della Valla, was a lawyer....
  
   (c. 1406-August 1, 1457). Humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  , critic of scholastic logic.
• Pico della Mirandola (c. 1463-1494). Renaissance humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  .

1500-1550 CE

• Desiderius Erasmus
  Desiderius Erasmus
  Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus , known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and a theologian....
  
   (c. 1466-1536). Humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  , advocate of free will
  Free will
  "To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
  
  .
• Niccolò Machiavelli
  Niccolò Machiavelli
  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...
  
   (c. 1469-1527). Political realism.
• Copernicus (c. 1473-1543).
• Sir Thomas More
  Thomas More
  Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...
  
   (c. 1478-1535). Humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  , created term "utopia".
• Petrus Ramus
  Petrus Ramus
  Petrus Ramus was an influential French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was killed during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.-Early life:...
  
   (c. 1515-1572).
• Martin Luther
  Martin Luther
  Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
  
   (c. 1483-1546). Major Western Christian theologian.

1550-1600 CE

• Teresa of Avila
  Teresa of Ávila
  Saint Teresa of Ávila, also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, was a prominent Spanish mystic, Roman Catholic saint, Carmelite nun, and writer of the Counter Reformation, and theologian of contemplative life through mental prayer...
  
   (c. 1515-1582). Spanish mystic.
• Michel de Montaigne
  Michel de Montaigne
  Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...
  
   (c. 1533-1592). Humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  , skeptic.
• Giordano Bruno
  Giordano Bruno
  Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
  
   (c. 1548-1600). Advocate of heliocentrism
  Heliocentrism
  Heliocentrism, or heliocentricism, is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around a stationary Sun at the center of the universe. The word comes from the Greek . Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center...
  
  .
• Francisco Suarez
  Francisco Suárez
  Francisco Suárez was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement, and generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas....
  
   (c. 1548-1617). Politically proto-liberal.
• John Calvin
  John Calvin
  John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...
  
   (c. 1509-1564). Major Western Christian theologian.
• Pierre Charron
  Pierre Charron
  Pierre Charron was a French 16th-century Catholic theologian and philosopher, and a disciple and contemporary of Michel Montaigne.-Biography:...
  
   (c. 1541-1603).

1600-1650 CE

• Francis Bacon (c. 1561-1626). Empiricist.
• Hugo Grotius
  Hugo Grotius
  Hugo Grotius , also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law...
  
   (c. 1583-1645). Natural law
  Natural law
  Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
  
   theorist.
• Galileo Galilei
  Galileo Galilei
  Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
  
   (c. 1564-1642). Heliocentrist.
• Herbert of Cherbury. Nativist.
• René Descartes
  René Descartes
  René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
  
   (c. 1596-1650). Heliocentrism
  Heliocentrism
  Heliocentrism, or heliocentricism, is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around a stationary Sun at the center of the universe. The word comes from the Greek . Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center...
  
  , dualism
  Dualism
  Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
  
  , rationalism
  Rationalism
  In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
  
  .
• Pierre Gassendi
  Pierre Gassendi
  Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. With a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the...
  
   (c. 1592-1655). Mechanicism. Empiricist.
• Marin Mersenne
  Marin Mersenne
  Marin Mersenne, Marin Mersennus or le Père Mersenne was a French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, often referred to as the "father of acoustics"...
  
   (c. 1588-1648). Cartesian
  Cartesianism
  Cartesian means of or relating to the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes—from his name—Rene Des-Cartes. It may refer to:*Cartesian anxiety*Cartesian circle*Cartesian dualism...
  
  .
• Baltasar Gracián
  Baltasar Gracián
  Baltasar Gracián y Morales, SJ was a Spanish Jesuit and baroque prose writer. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud .-Biography:...
  
   (c. 1601-1658). Spanish catholic philosopher
• Queen Kristina (c. 1626-1689).
• Pierre de Fermat
  Pierre de Fermat
  Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his adequality...
  
   (c. 1601-1665). Probability
  Probability
  Probability is ordinarily used to describe an attitude of mind towards some proposition of whose truth we arenot certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "Will a specific event occur?" The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain are we that the event will occur?" The...
  
   theorist.
• Robert Filmer
  Robert Filmer
  thumbnail|150px|right|Robert Filmer Sir Robert Filmer was an English political theorist who defended the divine right of kings...
  
   (c. 1588-1653).

1650-1700 CE

• Thomas Hobbes
  Thomas Hobbes
  Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
  
   (c. 1588-1679). Political realist.
• Joseph Glanvill
  Joseph Glanvill
  Joseph Glanvill was an English writer, philosopher, and clergyman. Not himself a scientist, he has been called "the most skillful apologist of the virtuosi", or in other words the leading propagandist for the approach of the English natural philosophers of the later 17th century.-Life:He was...
  
   (c. 1636-1680).
• Arnold Geulincx
  Arnold Geulincx
  Arnold Geulincx was a Flemish philosopher. He was one of the followers of René Descartes who tried to work out more detailed versions of a generally Cartesian philosophy...
  
   (c. 1624-1669). Important occasionalist theorist.
• Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
  
   (c. 1623-1662). Physicist, scientist. Noted for Pascal's wager
  Pascal's Wager
  Pascal's Wager, also known as Pascal's Gambit, is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Blaise Pascal that even if the existence of God could not be determined through reason, a rational person should wager as though God exists, because one living life...
  
  .
• Henry More
  Henry More
  Henry More FRS was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school.-Biography:Henry was born at Grantham and was schooled at The King's School, Grantham and at Eton College...
  
   (c. 1614-1687).
• Geraud Cordemoy. Dualist.
• Pierre Nicole
  Pierre Nicole
  Pierre Nicole was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists.Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister, who took in charge his education...
  
   (c. 1625-1695).
• Ralph Cudworth
  Ralph Cudworth
  Ralph Cudworth was an English philosopher, the leader of the Cambridge Platonists.-Life:Born at Aller, Somerset, he was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gaining his MA and becoming a Fellow of Emmanuel in 1639. In 1645, he became master of Clare Hall and professor of Hebrew...
  
   (c. 1617-1688). Cambridge Platonist.
• Margaret Cavendish
  Margaret Cavendish
  Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was an English aristocrat, a prolific writer, and a scientist. Born Margaret Lucas, she was the youngest sister of prominent royalists Sir John Lucas and Sir Charles Lucas...
  
   (c. 1623-1673). Materialist, feminist.
• Antoine Arnauld
  Antoine Arnauld
  Antoine Arnauld — le Grand as contemporaries called him, to distinguish him from his father — was a French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mathematician...
  
   (c. 1612-1694).
• Richard Cumberland
  Richard Cumberland (philosopher)
  Richard Cumberland was an English philosopher, and bishop of Peterborough from 1691. In 1672, he published his major work, De legibus naturae , propounding utilitarianism and opposing the egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes.Cumberland was a member of the latitudinarian movement, along with his friend...
  
   (c. 1631-1718). Early proponent of utilitarianism
  Utilitarianism
  Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
  
  .
• Jacques Rohault
  Jacques Rohault
  Jacques Rohault was a French philosopher, physicist and mathematician, and a follower of Cartesianism.Rohault was born in Amiens, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and educated in Paris. Having grown up with the conventional scholastic philosophy of his day, he adopted and popularised the new...
  
  .(c.1617-1672) [Cartesian]
• Simon Foucher
  Simon Foucher
  Simon Foucher was a French polemic philosopher. His philosophical standpoint was one of Academic skepticism: he did not agree with dogmatism, but didn't resort to Pyrrhonism, either.-Life:...
  
   (c. 1644-1696). Skeptic.
• Robert Boyle
  Robert Boyle
  Robert Boyle FRS was a 17th century natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology. He has been variously described as English, Irish, or Anglo-Irish, his father having come to Ireland from England during the time of the English plantations of...
  
   (c. 1627-1691).
• Nicolas Malebranche
  Nicolas Malebranche
  Nicolas Malebranche ; was a French Oratorian and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world...
  
   (c. 1638-1715). Cartesian.
• Samuel von Pufendorf
  Samuel von Pufendorf
  Baron Samuel von Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist, statesman, and historian. His name was just Samuel Pufendorf until he was ennobled in 1684; he was made a Freiherr a few months before his death in 1694...
  
   (c. 1632-1694). Social contract
  Social contract
  The social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments. Social contract arguments assert that individuals unite into political societies by a process of mutual consent, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept...
  
   theorist.
• Baruch Spinoza
  Baruch Spinoza
  Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
  
   (c. 1632-1677).
• Isaac Newton
  Isaac Newton
  Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
  
   (c. 1643-1727).
• Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway
  Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway
  Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway was an English philosopher whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Leibniz....
  
   (c. 1631-1679).
• John Locke
  John Locke
  John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
  
   (c. 1632-1704). Major Empiricist. Political philosopher.
• Damaris Masham.
• John Toland
  John Toland
  John Toland was a rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment...
  
   (c. 1670-1722).
• Pierre Bayle
  Pierre Bayle
  Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the Historical and Critical Dictionary, published beginning in 1695....
  
   (c. 1647-1706). Pyrrhonist.
• Madeline de Souvré
  Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé
  Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé , French writer, was the daughter of Gilles de Souvré, marquis de Courtenvaux, tutor of Louis XIII, and marshal of France....
  
  .

1700-1750 CE

• Samuel Clarke
  Samuel Clarke
  thumb|right|200px|Samuel ClarkeSamuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican clergyman.-Early life and studies:...
  
   (c. 1675-1729).
• Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
  Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury was an English politician, philosopher and writer.-Biography:...
  
   (c. 1671-1713).
• John Norris (c. 1657-1711). Malebranchian.
• Gottfried Leibniz
  Gottfried Leibniz
  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
  
   (c. 1646-1716). Co-inventor of the calculus
  Calculus
  Calculus is a branch of mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. This subject constitutes a major part of modern mathematics education. It has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus, which are related by the fundamental theorem...
  
  .
• George Berkeley
  George Berkeley
  George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
  
   (c. 1685-1753). Idealist, empiricist.
• Catherine Cockburn (c. 1679-1749).
• Giambattista Vico
  Giambattista Vico
  Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
  
   (c. 1668-1744).
• Bernard Mandeville (c. 1670-1733).
• Francis Hutcheson
  Francis Hutcheson (philosopher)
  Francis Hutcheson was a philosopher born in Ireland to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment....
  
   (c. 1694-1746). Proto-utilitarian.
• Joseph Butler
  Joseph Butler
  Joseph Butler was an English bishop, theologian, apologist, and philosopher. He was born in Wantage in the English county of Berkshire . He is known, among other things, for his critique of Thomas Hobbes's egoism and John Locke's theory of personal identity...
  
   (c. 1692-1752).
• Christian Wolff
  Christian Wolff (philosopher)
  Christian Wolff was a German philosopher.He was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant...
  
   (c. 1679-1754). Determinist, rationalist.
• John Gay (philosopher)
  John Gay (philosopher)
  John Gay , a cousin of the poet John Gay, was an English philosopher, biblical scholar and Church of England clergyman. The greatest happiness principle, Gay supposed, represented a middle ground between the egoism of Hobbes and Hutcheson's moral sense theory.-Education:Gay was educated at...
  
  .
• David Hume
  David Hume
  David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
  
   (c. 1711-1776). Empiricist, skeptic.
• Julien La Mettrie (c. 1709-1751). Materialist, genetic determinist.
• David Hartley
  David Hartley (philosopher)
  David Hartley was an English philosopher and founder of the Associationist school of psychology. -Early life and education:...
  
   (c. 1705-1757).
• Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
  Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
  Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu , generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment...
  
   (c. 1689-1755). Skeptic, humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  .

1750-1800 CE

• Etienne de Condillac.
• Richard Price
  Richard Price
  Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...
  
   (c. 1723-1791). Political liberal.
• Jean d'Alembert (c. 1717-1783).
• Voltaire
  Voltaire
  François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
  
   (c. 1694-1778).
• Denis Diderot
  Denis Diderot
  Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
  
   (c. 1713-1784).
• John Wesley
  John Wesley
  John Wesley was a Church of England cleric and Christian theologian. Wesley is largely credited, along with his brother Charles Wesley, as founding the Methodist movement which began when he took to open-air preaching in a similar manner to George Whitefield...
  
   (c. 1703-1791).
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
  
   (c. 1712-1778). Social contract
  Social contract
  The social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments. Social contract arguments assert that individuals unite into political societies by a process of mutual consent, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept...
  
   political philosopher.
• Baron d'Holbach
  Baron d'Holbach
  Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon...
  
   (c. 1723-1789). Materialist, atheist.
• Claude Adrien Helvétius
  Claude Adrien Helvétius
  Claude Adrien Helvétius was a French philosopher and littérateur.-Life:...
  
   (1715-1771). Utilitarian.
• Adam Smith
  Adam Smith
  Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
  
   (c. 1723-1790). Economic theorist, member of Scottish Enlightenment
  Scottish Enlightenment
  The Scottish Enlightenment was the period in 18th century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By 1750, Scots were among the most literate citizens of Europe, with an estimated 75% level of literacy...
  
  .
• Thomas Jefferson
  Thomas Jefferson
  Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
  
   (c. 1743-1826). Liberal political philosopher.
• Thomas Reid
  Thomas Reid
  The Reverend Thomas Reid FRSE , was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher, and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment...
  
   (c. 1710-1796). Member of Scottish Enlightenment, founder of Scottish Common Sense philosophy.
• G.E. Lessing (c. 1729-1781).
• Edmund Burke
  Edmund Burke
  Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
  
   (c. 1729-1797). Conservative political philosopher.
• Immanuel Kant
  Immanuel Kant
  Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
  
   (c. 1724-1804). Deontologist, proponent of synthetic a priori truths.
• Mary Wollstonecraft
  Mary Wollstonecraft
  Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
  
   (c. 1759-1797). Feminist.
• Jeremy Bentham
  Jeremy Bentham
  Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
  
   (c. 1748-1832). Utilitarian, hedonist.
• Moses Mendelssohn
  Moses Mendelssohn
  Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah is indebted...
  
   (c. 1729-1786). Member of the Jewish Enlightenment
  Haskalah
  Haskalah , the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement among European Jews in the 18th–19th centuries that advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history...
  
  .
• Sylvain Maréchal
  Sylvain Maréchal
  Sylvain Maréchal was a French essayist, poet, philosopher, and, as a political theorist, precursor of utopian socialism and communism...
  
   (c. August 15, 1750—January 18, 1803) Anarcho-communist, Deist
• Dugald Stewart
  Dugald Stewart
  Dugald Stewart was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician. His father, Matthew Stewart , was professor of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh .-Life and works:...
  
   (c. 1753-1828).
• William Godwin
  William Godwin
  William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...
  
   (c. 1756-1836). Anarchist, utilitarian.
• Friedrich Schiller
  Friedrich Schiller
  Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
  
   (c. 1759-1805).
• William Paley
  William Paley
  William Paley was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy .-Life:Paley was Born in Peterborough, England, and was...
  
   (c. 1743-1805).
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant...
  
   (c. 1762-1814).

1800-1850 CE

• Joseph de Maistre
  Joseph de Maistre
  Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre was a French-speaking Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat. He defended hierarchical societies and a monarchical State in the period immediately following the French Revolution...
  
   (c. 1753-1821) Conservative
  Conservatism
  Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
  
  
• Madame de Staël (c. 1766-1817).
• F.W.J. von Schelling (c. 1775-1854). German idealist.
• Friedrich Schleiermacher (c. 1768-1834). Hermeneutician.
• P.S. de Laplace (c. 1749-1827). Determinist.
• G.W.F. Hegel (c. 1770-1831). German idealist.
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
  Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
  
   (c. 1744-1829). Early evolutionary theorist.
• Comte de Saint-Simon (c. 1760-1825). Socialist.
• Arthur Schopenhauer
  Arthur Schopenhauer
  Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
  
   (c. 1788-1860). Pessimist.
• Richard Whately
  Richard Whately
  Richard Whately was an English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.-Life and times:...
  
   (c. 1787-1863).
• Charles Babbage
  Charles Babbage
  Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
  
   (c. 1791-1871).
• John Austin (c. 1790-1859). Legal positivist, utilitarian.
• Auguste Comte
  Auguste Comte
  Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
  
   (c. 1798-1857). Social philosopher, positivist.
• William Whewell
  William Whewell
  William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.-Life and career:Whewell was born in Lancaster...
  
   (c. 1794-1866).
• James Mill
  James Mill
  James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher. He was a founder of classical economics, together with David Ricardo, and the father of influential philosopher of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill.-Life:Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of...
  
   (c. 1773-1836). Utilitarian.
• P.J. Proudhon
  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first person to call himself an "anarchist". He is considered among the most influential theorists and organisers of anarchism...
  
   (c. 1809-1865). Anarchist.
• Bernard Bolzano
  Bernard Bolzano
  Bernhard Placidus Johann Nepomuk Bolzano , Bernard Bolzano in English, was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian, Catholic priest and antimilitarist of German mother tongue.-Family:Bolzano was the son of two pious Catholics...
  
   (c. 1781-1848).
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
  
   (c. 1803-1882). Trancendentalist
  Transcendentalism
  Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
  
  , abolitionist, egalitarian, humanist
  Humanism
  Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
  
  .
• Ludwig Feuerbach (c. 1804-1872).
• Augustus De Morgan
  Augustus De Morgan
  Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. The crater De Morgan on the Moon is named after him....
  
   (c. 1806-1871). Logician.
• Charles Darwin
  Charles Darwin
  Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
  
   (c. 1809-1882).
• Margaret Fuller
  Margaret Fuller
  Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, commonly known as Margaret Fuller, was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism...
  
   (c. 1810-1850). Egalitarian.
• Søren Kierkegaard
  Søren Kierkegaard
  Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel...
  
   (c. 1813-1855). Existentialist.
• Henry David Thoreau
  Henry David Thoreau
  Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
  
   (c. 1817-1862). Trancendentalist
  Transcendentalism
  Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
  
  , pacifist.

1850-1900 CE

• Sojourner Truth
  Sojourner Truth
  Sojourner Truth was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, she...
  
   (c. 1797–1883). Egalitarian.
• Karl Marx
  Karl Marx
  Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
  
   (c. 1818-1883). Socialist, formulated historical materialism.
• Harriet Taylor Mill
  Harriet Taylor Mill
  Harriet Taylor Mill was a philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her second husband was John Stuart Mill, one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the 19th century...
  
   (c. 1807-1858). Egalitarian, utilitarian.
• Friedrich Engels
  Friedrich Engels
  Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
  
   (c. 1820-1895). Egalitarian, dialectical materialist.
• Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
  Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
  Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet was a Scottish metaphysician.-Early life:He was born in Glasgow. He was from an academic family, including Robert Hamilton, the economist...
  
   (c. 1788-1856).
• J. S. Mill (c. 1806-1873). Utilitarian.
• Hermann Lotze.
• Herbert Spencer
  Herbert Spencer
  Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
  
   (c. 1820-1903). Nativism, libertarianism, social Darwinism.
• John Venn
  John Venn
  Donald A. Venn FRS , was a British logician and philosopher. He is famous for introducing the Venn diagram, which is used in many fields, including set theory, probability, logic, statistics, and computer science....
  
   (c. 1834-1923).
• Susan B. Anthony
  Susan B. Anthony
  Susan Brownell Anthony was a prominent American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to introduce women's suffrage into the United States. She was co-founder of the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President...
  
   (c. 1820-1906). Feminist.
• Mikhail Bakunin
  Mikhail Bakunin
  Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
  
   (c. 1814-1876). Revolutionary anarchist.
• Franz Brentano
  Franz Brentano
  Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
  
   (c. 1838-1917). Phenomenologist.
• Henry Sidgwick
  Henry Sidgwick
  Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women...
  
   (c. 1838-1900). Rationalism, utilitarianism.
• Richard Dedekind
  Richard Dedekind
  Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind was a German mathematician who did important work in abstract algebra , algebraic number theory and the foundations of the real numbers.-Life:...
  
   (c. 1831-1916).
• W. K. Clifford
  William Kingdon Clifford
  William Kingdon Clifford FRS was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour, with interesting applications in contemporary mathematical physics...
  
   (c. 1845-1879). Evidentialist.
• Charles Sanders Peirce (c. 1839-1914). Pragmatist
  Pragmatist
  Pragmatist may refer to:*A person who subscribes to pragmatism, a field of philosophy*A person who subscribes to pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy...
  
  .
• Edward Caird
  Edward Caird
  Edward Caird FRSE was a Scottish philosopher and younger brother of the theologian John Caird.He was the son of engineer John Caird, the proprietor of Caird & Company,...
  
   (c. 1835-1908). Idealist.
• Ernst Mach
  Ernst Mach
  Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves...
  
   (c. 1838-1916). Philosopher of science, influence on logical positivism.
• T.H. Green (c. 1836-1882). British idealist.
• Gottlob Frege
  Gottlob Frege
  Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
  
   (c. 1848-1925). Influential analytic philosopher.
• Wilhelm Dilthey
  Wilhelm Dilthey
  Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of...
  
   (c. 1833-1911).
• Friedrich Nietzsche
  Friedrich Nietzsche
  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
  
   (c. 1844-1900). Naturalistic philosopher, influence on Existentialism.
• Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (c. 1832-1898).
• Bernard Bosanquet
  Bernard Bosanquet (philosopher)
  Bernard Bosanquet was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in late 19th and early 20th century Britain...
  
   (c. 1848-1923). Idealist.
• Giuseppe Peano
  Giuseppe Peano
  Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician, whose work was of philosophical value. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in...
  
   (c. 1858-1932).
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement...
  
   (c. 1815-1902). Egalitarian.
• David George Ritchie
  David George Ritchie
  David George Ritchie was a Scottish philosopher who had a distinguished university career at Edinburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford, and after being fellow of Jesus and tutor of Balliol was elected professor of logic and metaphysics at St Andrews...
  
   (c. 1853–1903). Idealist.
• Émile Durkheim
  Émile Durkheim
  David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
  
   (c. 1858–1917). Social philosopher.
• William James
  William James
  William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
  
   (c. 1842-1910). Pragmatist.
• Josiah Royce
  Josiah Royce
  Josiah Royce was an American objective idealist philosopher.-Life:Royce, born in Grass Valley, California, grew up in pioneer California very soon after the California Gold Rush. He received the B.A...
  
   (c. 1855-1916). Idealist.
• F.H. Bradley (c. 1846-1924) . Idealist.
• Vilfredo Pareto
  Vilfredo Pareto
  Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices....
  
   (c. 1848-1923). Social philosopher.
• Thorstein Veblen
  Thorstein Veblen
  Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, and a leader of the so-called institutional economics movement...
  
   (c. 1857-1929). Social philosopher.
• Sigmund Freud
  Sigmund Freud
  Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
  
   (c. 1856-1939). Creator of psychodynamic philosophy of mind
  Philosophy of mind
  Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
  
  .
• Max Weber
  Max Weber
  Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
  
   (c. 1864-1920). Social philosopher.
• Henri Bergson
  Henri Bergson
  Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
  
   (c. 1859-1941).
• John Dewey
  John Dewey
  John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
  
   (c. 1859-1952). Pragmatist
  Pragmatist
  Pragmatist may refer to:*A person who subscribes to pragmatism, a field of philosophy*A person who subscribes to pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy...
  
  .
• Alexius Meinong
  Alexius Meinong
  Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology...
  
   (c. 1853-1920). Logical realist.
• Cook Wilson.
• Henri Poincaré
  Henri Poincaré
  Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science...
  
   (c. 1854-1912).
• Pierre Duhem
  Pierre Duhem
  Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem was a French physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages...
  
   (c. 1861-1916).
• Edmund Husserl
  Edmund Husserl
  Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
  
   (c. 1859-1938). Founder of phenomenology.
• Samuel Alexander
  Samuel Alexander
  Samuel Alexander OM was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college.-Early life:...
  
   (c. 1859-1938). Perceptual realist.
• Jane Addams
  Jane Addams
  Jane Addams was a pioneer settlement worker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in woman suffrage and world peace...
  
   (c. 1860-1935). Pragmatist
  Pragmatist
  Pragmatist may refer to:*A person who subscribes to pragmatism, a field of philosophy*A person who subscribes to pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy...
  
  .
• Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
  Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
  Andrew Seth , who changed his name to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison to fulfill the terms of a bequest, was a Scottish philosopher....
  
   (c. 1856-1931).
• G.E. Moore (c. 1873-1958). Common sense theorist, ethical non-naturalist.
• Benedetto Croce
  Benedetto Croce
  Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
  
   (c. 1866-1952).
• Carl Jung
  Carl Jung
  Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
  
   (c. 1875-1961). Founded analytical psychology
  Analytical psychology
  Analytical psychology is the school of psychology originating from the ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. His theoretical orientation has been advanced by his students and other thinkers who followed in his tradition. Though they share similarities, analytical psychology is distinct from...
  
  .
• Emma Goldman
  Emma Goldman
  Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....
  
   (c. 1869-1940). Anarchist.
• Hans Vaihinger
  Hans Vaihinger
  Hans Vaihinger was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his Philosophie des Als Ob , published in 1911, but written more than thirty years earlier....
  
   (c. 1852-1933). Specialist in counterfactual
  Counterfactual
  Counterfactual may refer to:* Counterfactual conditional, a grammatical form * Counterfactual subjunctive, grammatical forms which in English are known as the past and pluperfect forms of the subjunctive mood* Counterfactual thinking* Counterfactual history* Alternate history, a literary genre*...
  
  s.
• Rosa Luxemburg
  Rosa Luxemburg
  Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
  
   (c. 1870-1919). Marxist political philosopher.
• Miguel de Unamuno
  Miguel de Unamuno
  Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.-Biography:...
  
   (c. 1864-1936).
• Ferdinand de Saussure
  Ferdinand de Saussure
  Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
  
   (c. 1857-1913). Linguistic structuralist
  Structural Linguistics
  Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
  
  .
• J. M. E. McTaggart
  J. M. E. McTaggart
  John McTaggart was an idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists.-Personal life:J. M. E. McTaggart was born in 1866...
  
   (c. 1866-1925). Idealist.
• George Herbert Mead
  George Herbert Mead
  George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
  
   (c. 1863-1931). Pragmatist
  Pragmatist
  Pragmatist may refer to:*A person who subscribes to pragmatism, a field of philosophy*A person who subscribes to pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy...
  
  , symbolic interactionist.
• Alfred North Whitehead
  Alfred North Whitehead
  Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education...
  
   (c. 1861-1947). Logician.
• Martin Buber
  Martin Buber
  Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship....
  
   (c. 1878-1965). Jewish philosopher, existentialist.

1900-2000 CE

• George Santayana
  George Santayana
  George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters...
  
   (c. 1863-1952). Pragmatist
  Pragmatist
  Pragmatist may refer to:*A person who subscribes to pragmatism, a field of philosophy*A person who subscribes to pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy...
  
  , naturalist
  Naturalist
  Naturalist may refer to:* Practitioner of natural history* Conservationist* Advocate of naturalism * Naturalist , autobiography-See also:* The American Naturalist, periodical* Naturalism...
  
  ; known for many aphorisms
• Bertrand Russell
  Bertrand Russell
  Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
  
   (c. 1872-1970). Analytic philosopher, extremely influential
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
  Ludwig Wittgenstein
  Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
  
   (c. 1889-1951). Analytic philosopher, philosophy of language
  Philosophy of language
  Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
  
  , philosophy of mind
  Philosophy of mind
  Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
  
  , influential
• Giovanni Gentile
  Giovanni Gentile
  Giovanni Gentile was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism.- Life and thought :Giovanni...
  
   (c. 1875-1944). Idealist and Fascist philosopher
• Georg Lukács
  Georg Lukács
  György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...
  
   (c. 1885-1971). Marxist philosopher.
• C. D. Broad (c. 1887-1971).
• A.O. Lovejoy
  Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
  Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an influential American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the field known as the history of ideas....
  
   (c. 1873-1962).
• W.D. Ross (c. 1877-1971). Deontologist.
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of both Piltdown Man and Peking Man. Teilhard conceived the idea of the Omega Point and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of Noosphere...
  
   (c. 1881-1955). Christian evolutionist.
• Nikolai Berdyaev
  Nikolai Berdyaev
  Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian religious and political philosopher.-Early life and education:Berdyaev was born in Kiev into an aristocratic military family. He spent a solitary childhood at home, where his father's library allowed him to read widely...
  
   (c. 1874-1948). Existentialist.
• Hans Kelsen (c. 1881-1973). Legal positivist.
• Moritz Schlick
  Moritz Schlick
  Friedrich Albert Moritz Schlick was a German philosopher, physicist and the founding father of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle.-Early life and works:...
  
   (c. 1882-1936). Founder of Vienna Circle
  Vienna Circle
  The Vienna Circle was an association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922, chaired by Moritz Schlick, also known as the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach...
  
  , logical positivism
  Logical positivism
  Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
  
  .
• Otto Neurath
  Otto Neurath
  Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist...
  
   (c. 1882-1945). Member of Vienna Circle
  Vienna Circle
  The Vienna Circle was an association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922, chaired by Moritz Schlick, also known as the Ernst Mach Society in honour of Ernst Mach...
  
  .
• Frank P. Ramsey
  Frank P. Ramsey
  Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British mathematician who, in addition to mathematics, made significant and precocious contributions in philosophy and economics before his death at the age of 26...
  
   (c. 1903-1930). Proposed redundancy theory of truth
  Redundancy theory of truth
  According to the redundancy theory of truth, or the disquotational theory of truth, asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, asserting the sentence " 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting the sentence "Snow is...
  
  .
• Ernst Cassirer
  Ernst Cassirer
  Ernst Cassirer was a German philosopher. He was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the 20th century...
  
   (c. 1874-1945).
• Nicolai Hartmann
  Nicolai Hartmann
  -Biography:Hartmann was born of German descent in Riga, which was then the capital of the Russian province of Livonia, and which is now in Latvia. He studied Medicine at the University of Tartu , then Philosophy in St. Petersburg and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he took his Ph.D....
  
   (c. 1882-1950).
• Karl Barth
  Karl Barth
  Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom critics hold to be among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas...
  
   (c. 1886-1968).
• Walter Terence Stace
  Walter Terence Stace
  Walter Terence Stace was a British civil servant, educator, philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, Mysticism, and Moral relativism...
  
   (c. 1886-1967)
• Martin Heidegger (c. 1889-1976). Phenomenologist.
• Kurt Gödel
  Kurt Gödel
  Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the...
  
   (c. 1906-1978). Vienna Circle.
• Ralph Barton Perry
  Ralph Barton Perry
  Ralph Barton Perry was an American philosopher.-Career:...
  
   (c. 1876-1957).
• Antonio Gramsci
  Antonio Gramsci
  Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
  
   (c. 1891-1937). Marxist philosopher.
• Roman Ingarden
  Roman Ingarden
  Roman Witold Ingarden was a Polish philosopher who worked in phenomenology, ontology and aesthetics.Before World War II, Ingarden published his works mainly in the German language...
  
   (c. 1893-1970). Perceptual realist, phenomenalist.
• C.I. Lewis (c. 1883-1964). Conceptual pragmatist.
• Gaston Bachelard
  Gaston Bachelard
  Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break...
  
   (c. 1884-1962).
• A.J. Ayer (c. 1910-1989). Logical positivist, emotivist.
• Friedrich Waismann
  Friedrich Waismann
  Friedrich Waismann was an Austrian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle and one of the key theorists in logical positivism.-Birth & Early Interest in Philosophy:...
  
   (c. 1896-1959). Vienna Circle. Logical positivist.
• Jacques Maritain
  Jacques Maritain
  Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
  
   (c. 1882-1973). Human rights theorist.
• José Ortega y Gasset
  José Ortega y Gasset
  José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. He was, along with Nietzsche, a proponent of the idea of perspectivism.-Biography:José Ortega y Gasset was...
  
   (c. 1883-1955). Philosopher of History.
• Alfred Tarski
  Alfred Tarski
  Alfred Tarski was a Polish logician and mathematician. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic and the Warsaw School of Mathematics and philosophy, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, and taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of...
  
   (c. 1901-1983). Created T-Convention in semantics.
• Rudolf Carnap
  Rudolf Carnap
  Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
  
   (c. 1891-1970). Vienna Circle. Logical positivist.
• H.L.A. Hart (c. 1907-1992). Legal positivism
  Legal positivism
  Legal positivism is a school of thought of philosophy of law and jurisprudence, largely developed by nineteenth-century legal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. However, the most prominent figure in the history of legal positivism is H.L.A...
  
  .
• Willard van Orman Quine (c. 1908-2000).
• Brand Blanshard
  Brand Blanshard
  Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of reason. A powerful polemicist, by all accounts he comported himself with courtesy and grace in philosophical controversies and exemplified the "rational temper" he advocated.-Life:Brand Blanshard was born August...
  
   (c. 1892-1987).
• E. Nagel (c. 1901-1985). Logical positivist.
• Karl Popper
  Karl Popper
  Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
  
   (c. 1902-1994). Falsificationist.
• Ernest Addison Moody
  Ernest Addison Moody
  Ernest Addison Moody was a noted philosopher, medievalist, and logician as well as a musician and scientist. He served as professor of philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles , where he also served as department chair, and Columbia University. He has an in his name on the subject of...
  
   (c. 1903-1975).
• Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
  
   (c. 1905-1980). Humanism, existentialism
  Existentialism
  Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
  
  .
• Gilbert Ryle
  Gilbert Ryle
  Gilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...
  
   (c. 1900-1976).
• H.H. Price (c. 1899-1984).
• Susanne Langer
  Susanne Langer
  Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher of mind and of art who was influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. She was one of the first women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first to be popularly and professionally recognized as an American philosopher...
  
   (c. 1895-1985).
• J.L. Austin (1911–1960).
• Albert Camus
  Albert Camus
  Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
  
   (c. 1913-1960). Absurdist
  Absurdism
  In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
  
  .
• Mortimer Adler
  Mortimer Adler
  Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California...
  
   (c. 1902-2001).
• Karl Jaspers
  Karl Jaspers
  Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
  
   (c. 1905-1982). Existentialist.
• Ayn Rand
  Ayn Rand
  Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
  
   (c. 1905-1982). Objectivist
  Objectivism (Ayn Rand)
  Objectivism is a philosophy created by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand . Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception...
  
  , Individualist.
• C.L. Stevenson (c. 1908-1979).
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
  Ludwig Wittgenstein
  Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
  
   (c. 1889-1951). Analytic philosopher.Extremely influential.
• Theodor Adorno (c. 1903-1969). Frankfurt School
  Frankfurt School
  The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
  
  .
• Alan Turing
  Alan Turing
  Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
  
   (c. 1912-1954). Functionalist in philosophy of mind.
• H.A. Prichard (c. 1871-1947). Moral intuitionist.
• Gabriel Marcel
  Gabriel Marcel
  Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and author of about 30 plays.He focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society...
  
   (c. 1889-1973). Christian existentialist.
• Herbert Marcuse
  Herbert Marcuse
  Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
  
   (1898-1979). Frankfurt School
  Frankfurt School
  The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
  
  .
• Simone Weil
  Simone Weil
  Simone Weil , was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.-Biography:Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, and her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was...
  
   (c. 1909-1943).
• Simone de Beauvoir
  Simone de Beauvoir
  Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
  
   (c. 1908-1986). Existentialist, feminist.
• J. L. Mackie
  J. L. Mackie
  John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on meta-ethics, especially his defence of moral skepticism.He authored six...
  
   (1917-1981). Moral skeptic.
• Donald Davidson
  Donald Davidson (philosopher)
  Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...
  
   (1917–2003).
• P. F. Strawson
  P. F. Strawson
  Sir Peter Frederick Strawson FBA was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1968 to 1987. Before that he was appointed as a college lecturer at University College, Oxford in 1947 and became a tutorial fellow the...
  
   (1919-2006).
• R. M. Hare
  R. M. Hare
  Richard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
  
   (1919-2002).
• John Rawls
  John Rawls
  John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
  
   (1921-2002). Liberal
  Liberalism
  Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
  
  .
• Frantz Fanon
  Frantz Fanon
  Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
  
   (c. 1925-1961). Post-colonialism
• Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
  
   (1926-1984). Structuralism
  Structuralism
  Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
  
  , Post-structuralism
  Post-structuralism
  Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
  
  , Postmodernism
  Postmodernism
  Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
  
  , Queer theory
  Queer theory
  Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
  
  .
• Hilary Putnam
  Hilary Putnam
  Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science...
  
   (b. 1926).
• David Malet Armstrong
  David Malet Armstrong
  David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the...
  
   (b. 1926).
• John Howard Yoder
  John Howard Yoder
  John Howard Yoder was a Christian theologian, ethicist, and Biblical scholar best known for his radical Christian pacifism, his mentoring of future theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, his loyalty to his Mennonite faith, and his 1972 magnum opus, The Politics of Jesus.-Life:Yoder earned his...
  
   (c. 1927-1997) . Pacifist.
• Noam Chomsky
  Noam Chomsky
  Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
  
   (b. 1928).
• Alasdair MacIntyre
  Alasdair MacIntyre
  Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre is a British philosopher primarily known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy but known also for his work in history of philosophy and theology...
  
   (b. 1929). Aristotelian.
• Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
  
   (1930-2004). Deconstruction
  Deconstruction
  Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
  
  .
• Richard Rorty
  Richard Rorty
  Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
  
   (1931-2007). Pragmatism
  Pragmatism
  Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
  
  , Postanalytic philosophy
  Postanalytic philosophy
  Post-analytic philosophy describes a detachment from the mainstream philosophical movement of analytic philosophy, which is the predominant school of thought in English-speaking countries. Postanalytic philosophy derives mainly from contemporary American thought, especially from the works of...
  
  .
• Robert Nozick
  Robert Nozick
  Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...
  
   (1938-2002). Libertarian
  Libertarianism
  Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
  
  .
• John Searle
  John Searle
  John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
  
   (b. 1932).
• Jerry Fodor
  Jerry Fodor
  Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
  
   (b. 1935).
• Thomas Nagel
  Thomas Nagel
  Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
  
   (b. 1937).
• Saul Kripke
  Saul Kripke
  Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
  
   (b. 1940).
• David K. Lewis (1941-2001). Modal realism
  Modal realism
  Modal realism is the view, notably propounded by David Kellogg Lewis, that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. It is based on the following tenets: possible worlds exist; possible worlds are not different in kind from the actual world; possible worlds are irreducible entities; the...
  
  .
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...
  
   (b. 1942). Post-colonialism, Feminism
  Feminism
  Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
  
  , Literary theory
  Literary theory
  Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
  
  
• Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
  
   (b. 1949). Hegelianism
  Hegelianism
  Hegelianism is a collective term for schools of thought following or referring to G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy which can be summed up by the dictum that "the rational alone is real", which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories...
  
  , Marxism
  Marxism
  Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
  
   and Lacanian
  Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
  
   psychoanalysis
  Psychoanalysis
  Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
  
  
• Judith Butler
  Judith Butler
  Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
  
   (b. 1956). Poststructuralist, feminist, queer theory
  Queer theory
  Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
  
  

See also

• From this point in time forward, see Contemporary philosophy
  Contemporary philosophy
  Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the end of the 19th century with the professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy....
  
  .

:Category:21st century philosophers

External links

• Jewish Intellectual Timeline, a parallel history of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual ideas