Timeline of Western philosophers

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

Timeline of eastern | western | global 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, 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 1 Western & Middle Eastern Philosophers 1.1 Classical Philosophers 1.1.1 600-500 BC 1.1.2 500-400 BC 1.1.3 400-300 BC 1.2 Hellenistic Philosophers 1.2.1 300-200 BC 1.2.2 200-100 BC 1.2.3 100-0 BC 1.3 Roman era philosophers 1.3.1 0-100 AD 1.3.2 100-200 AD 1.3.3 200-400 AD 1.4 Western Medieval era philosophers 1.4.1 400-500 AD 1.4.2 500-800 AD 1.4.3 800-900 AD 1.4.4 900-1000 AD 1.4.5 1000-1100 AD 1.4.6 1100-1200 AD 1.4.7 1200-1300 AD 1.4.8 1300-1400 AD 1.4.9 1400-1500 AD 1.5 Early Modern philosophers 1.5.1 1500-1550 AD 1.5.2 1550-1600 AD 1.5.3 1600-1700 AD 1.5.4 1600-1650 AD 1.5.5 1650-1700 1.5.6 1700-1750 1.5.7 1750-1800 1.6 Modern philosophers 1.6.1 1800-1850 1.6.2 1850-1875 1.6.3 1875-1900 1.7 Late modern Philosophers 1.7.1 1900-1925 1.7.2 1925-1950 2 See also 3 External links

Western & Middle Eastern Philosophers

Classical Philosophers

600-500 BC

• Thales of Miletus (ca. 624-546 BC). Of the Ionic school. Believed that all was made of water.
• Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610-546 BC). Of the Ionic school. Famous for the concept of Apeiron, or "the boundless".
• Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 585-525 BC). Of the Ionic school. Believed that all was made of air.
• Pythagoras of Samos (c. approx. 580–500 BC). Of the Ionic school. Understood the deepest reality to be composed of numbers; believed that souls are immortal.
• Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570-480 BC). Sometimes associated with the Eleatic school. Politically anti-militant, and epistemically skeptical.

500-400 BC

• Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. approx. 535-475 BC). Of the Ionians. Emphasized the mutability of the world, which he understood to be analogous to fire.
• Parmenides of Elea (c. early 5th century BC). Of the Eleatics.
• Protagoras of Abdera (c. 481–420 BC). Sophist. Early advocate of relativism.
• Zeno (c. approx. 490-430 BC). Of the Eleatics. Famous for Zeno's paradoxes.
• Empedocles of Acragas (c. 490–430 BCE). Believed in metaphysical doctrine of four elements. Advocate of ethical vegetarianism.
• Hippias (middle of the 5th century BC). Sophist.
• Leucippus of Miletus (First half of 5th century BC). Atomist, Determinist.
• Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500–428 BC). Of the Ionians. Atomist.
• Archelaus. A pupil of Anaxagoras.
• Democritus of Abdera (c. 450 BC- 370 BC). Atomist.
• Socrates of Athens (ca. 470 — 399 BC). Emphasized virtue ethics. In epistemology, understood dialectic to be central to the pursuit of truth.

400-300 BC

• Aristippus of North Africa (c. 435-366 BC). A Cyreniac. Advocate of ethical hedonism.
• Antisthenes of Athens (c. 444-365 BC). Founder of Cynicism. Maintained that the wise cannot be fooled. Pupil of Socrates.
• Xenophon of Greece (c. 427-355 BC). Philosopher of history.
• Plato of Athens (c. 427–347 BC). Famed for view of the transcendental forms. Advocated polity governed by philosophers.
• Diogenes of Sinope (c. approx. 399 BC-323 BC). Cynic.
• Euclid of Greece (c. 325–265 BC). Founder of Euclidean geometry.
• Aristotle of Stageira (c. 384–322 BC). A polymath whose works ranged across all philosophical fields.
• Xenocrates (c. 396–314 BC). Understood the soul to be numerical.
• Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-270 BC). Skeptic.

Hellenistic Philosophers

300-200 BC

• Epicurus of Samos (c. 341- 270 BC). Atomist, atheist, hedonist.
• Zeno of Citium (c. 333-264 BC). Founder of Stoicism. Anarchist. Held that the acceptance of objectivity allows the overcoming of passions.
• Timon (c. 320-230 BC). Pyrrhonist, skeptic.
• Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212 BC). Renouned engineer and mathematician.
• Chrysippus of Soli (c.280-207 BC). Major figure in Stoicism.

200-100 BC

• Carneades (c. 214-129 BC). Academic skeptic. Understood probability as the purveyor of truth.

100-0 BC

• Lucretius (c. 99-55 BC). Epicurean.

Roman era philosophers

0-100 AD

• Jesus of Nazareth (c. approx. 8-2 BC/BCE– 29-36 AD/CE). Emphasized ethics of love, forgiveness, and the separation of wrongdoing from person.
• Philo (c. 20 BC - 40 AD). Believed in the allegorical method of reading texts.
• Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BC–AD 65). Stoic.

100-200 AD

• Epictetus (c.55–c.135). Stoic. Emphasized ethics of self-determination.
• Marcus Aurelius (121 –180). Stoic.

200-400 AD

• Sextus Empiricus (fl. during the 2nd and possibly the 3rd centuries AD). Skeptic, Pyrrhonist.
• Plotinus (ca. 205–270 CE). Neoplatonist. Had a holistic metaphysics.
• Porphyry (c.232–c. 304 AD). Student of Plotinus.
• Iamblichus of Syria (ca. 245 - ca. 325). Late neoplatonist. Espoused theurgy.

Western Medieval era philosophers

400-500 AD

• Saint Augustine - everything is in the present tense, original sin
• Hypatia - Platonism, mathematics, "heretic"
• Pelagius - free will, anti-original sin
• Cyril of Alexandria - Christ as a single person with two aspects, persecuted opposing philosophers
• Nestorius - Christ as a dual man/God, "heretic"
• Proclus - late Neoplatonist

500-800 AD

• Boethius - logic, rationalist
• Muhammad - founder of Islam

800-900 AD

• al-Kindi - faith over reason
• John the Scot - free will, Pelagian, realist, pantheism, predestination, neoplatonic

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

1000-1100 AD

• Ibn Sina - proof of God through cause
• Ibn Gabirol - essence vs will of God
• Anselm - ontological argument for the existence of god faith over reason, atonement
• al-Ghazali - revelationist

1100-1200 AD

• Abelard - general turns universal after abstraction, intention over consequence
• Ibn Daud - free will
• Peter Lombard - history of philosophy
• Averroes (Ibn Rushd, "The Commentator") - God's existence can be proven by reason alone
• Maimonides - reason to its extent, then faith
• St Francis of Assisi - ascetism

1200-1300 AD

• Robert Grosseteste - origin of light
• Albert the Great - empiricism
• Roger Bacon - empiricism and mathematics
• Thomas Aquinas - faith over reason, proofs of God
• Bonaventure - reason legitimate only as extension of faith, humans as footprints of divinity
• Siger - moral assessments: intuitive, egoistic, and normative
• Boetius of Dacia - religion as irrational

1300-1400 AD

• Duns Scotus - formal distinctions
• Meister Eckhart - pantheist revelationist
• John Wycliffe - secularism
• Marsilius of Padua - chief function of gov't as mediator
• William of Ockham - nominalist, demands necessity of an entity 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

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

Early Modern philosophers

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

1550-1600 AD

• Teresa of Avila - mystic
• Montaigne - classical skeptic
• Bruno - heliocentrism, pantheism, infinite matter
• Suarez - voluntaristic law
• John Calvin - theism, divine sovereignty

1600-1700 AD

• 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

1600-1650 AD

• Queen Kristina - skepticism
• René Descartes - heliocentrism dualism, rationalist, skepticism overcome by certainty
• Pierre de Fermat - mathematics, probability
• Thomas Hobbes - pessimistic about human nature, obedience, Leviathan
• Filmer - divine monarchy

1650-1700

• Joseph Glanvill - anti-empirical skeptic, anti-atheist
• Arnold Geulincx - anti-dualist
• 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

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

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

Modern philosophers

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

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

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 arithmetic
• Elizabeth Stanton - separation of church and state, egalitarian
• David George Ritchie - idealism, natural rights
• Émile Durkheim - sociology as transcendent of biological and psychological explanation
• William James - pragmatism
• Josiah Royce - absolute idealism
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman - feminist, matriarchical
• F.H. Bradley - absolute idealism
• Vilfredo Pareto - elitism
• Thorstein Veblen - sociology, liberal education

Late modern Philosophers

1900-1925

• 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

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

See also

• From this point in time forward, see the Timeline of global philosophers.

External links

• http://www.philosophypages.com - an excellent resource by Garth Kemerling which informed much of this encyclopedia entry.