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