58 profiles
Thinkers
The people behind the ideas, in order of when they lived. Each profile covers what they argued, a short life, and where they appear on this site.
Ancient
Heraclitus
The philosopher of change, who held that everything flows and that the world is held together by the tension of opposites.
c. 5th century BCESiddhartha Gautama (the Buddha)
The founder of Buddhism, whose teaching that there is no permanent self remains one of the most radical answers to the question of personal identity.
c. 515 – after 450 BCEParmenides
The thinker who argued, from pure logic, that change and plurality are impossible, and so set the problem that Western metaphysics spent centuries answering.
c. 470 – 399 BCESocrates
The Athenian who wrote nothing, questioned everyone, and was executed for it, becoming the model of philosophy as a way of life.
c. 490 – c. 430 BCEZeno of Elea
The inventor of the paradoxes of motion, which used ordinary assumptions about space and time to prove that nothing can move.
c. 428 – 348 BCEPlato
Socrates' student and Aristotle's teacher, whose dialogues set the agenda for almost every branch of Western philosophy.
384 – 322 BCEAristotle
The great systematiser, who founded formal logic, wrote on almost everything, and gave ethics the question of what makes a whole life go well.
c. 369 – c. 286 BCEZhuangzi
The Daoist sceptic who dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure whether he was a man who had dreamed or a butterfly now dreaming.
c. 365 – c. 275 BCEPyrrho of Elis
The founder of Greek scepticism, who taught that suspending judgement about how things really are brings peace of mind.
341 – 270 BCEEpicurus
The philosopher who made pleasure the goal of life, defined it as freedom from pain and fear, and argued that death is nothing to us.
c. 99 – c. 55 BCELucretius
A Roman poet who set out Epicurus' philosophy in a long poem, including the argument that death is no more to be feared than the time before we were born.
c. 4 BCE – 65 CESeneca
A Roman Stoic, statesman and playwright whose letters on time, anger and death remain some of the most readable philosophy ever written.
c. 50 – c. 135 CEEpictetus
A former slave who became the most influential Stoic teacher, built around one distinction: what is up to us and what is not.
121 – 180 CEMarcus Aurelius
A Roman emperor whose private notebook, never meant for publication, became one of the most widely read works of Stoic philosophy.
c. 2nd – 3rd century CESextus Empiricus
A physician whose handbooks preserve the arguments of ancient Pyrrhonian scepticism, and shaped modern philosophy when they were rediscovered.
Late antiquity and medieval
Augustine of Hippo
A North African bishop whose Confessions gave philosophy its most famous puzzle about time and an early version of 'I think, therefore I am'.
c. 980 – 1037Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
A physician and philosopher whose 'floating man' argument and distinction between essence and existence shaped philosophy in both the Islamic world and Latin Europe.
c. 1058 – 1111Al-Ghazali
A theologian and philosopher who attacked the philosophers of his day with their own logic and anticipated Hume's doubts about causation.
1126 – 1198Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
A judge and philosopher from Córdoba whose commentaries on Aristotle made him known in medieval Europe simply as 'the Commentator'.
1225 – 1274Thomas Aquinas
The medieval thinker who built a vast synthesis of Aristotle and Christian theology, and first stated the doctrine of double effect.
c. 1301 – c. 1360Jean Buridan
A Paris logician and natural philosopher, best remembered for a hungry donkey that does not appear in any of his writings.
Early modern
Thomas Hobbes
The materialist who argued that without government human life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', and that free will is compatible with necessity.
1596 – 1650René Descartes
The founder of modern philosophy, who doubted everything he could and found one thing he could not: that he was thinking.
1623 – 1662Blaise Pascal
A mathematician who helped invent probability theory, then used it in a famous wager about belief in God.
1632 – 1677Baruch Spinoza
A lens grinder who argued, in the style of a geometry textbook, that God and Nature are one and that everything happens by necessity.
1632 – 1704John Locke
The empiricist who argued that the mind starts as a blank slate and that personal identity is a matter of consciousness and memory.
1646 – 1716Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
A universal genius who co-invented calculus, insisted that everything has a reason, and asked why there is something rather than nothing.
1685 – 1753George Berkeley
An Irish bishop who argued that there is no such thing as matter: to be is to be perceived.
1711 – 1776David Hume
The Scottish sceptic who questioned causation, induction and the self, and argued that reason alone cannot tell us what we ought to do.
1724 – 1804Immanuel Kant
The thinker who tried to reconcile reason and experience, and grounded morality in duties that bind every rational being.
1749 – 1827Pierre-Simon Laplace
A mathematician and astronomer who gave determinism its most famous image: an intellect that could know the whole future from the present.
Nineteenth century
Jeremy Bentham
The founder of modern utilitarianism, who held that the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness, and counted animals in the sum.
1788 – 1860Arthur Schopenhauer
The pessimist who saw the world as the expression of a blind, striving will, and found relief only in art, compassion and the quieting of desire.
1806 – 1873John Stuart Mill
The most influential utilitarian, who refined Bentham's theory with higher pleasures and defended individual liberty against the tyranny of the majority.
1813 – 1855Søren Kierkegaard
The Danish writer often called the first existentialist, who insisted that truth must be lived by an individual, not just understood.
1842 – 1910William James
A founder of American psychology and of pragmatism, who described the stream of consciousness and argued for the right to believe.
1844 – 1900Friedrich Nietzsche
The philosopher who announced the death of God, attacked conventional morality, and asked whether you could will your life to recur forever.
Twentieth century
Bertrand Russell
A logician who found a contradiction at the heart of mathematics, and a public philosopher who wrote clearly about almost everything.
1889 – 1951Ludwig Wittgenstein
The philosopher who twice changed the subject: first by mapping the limits of language, then by arguing that meaning is use.
1902 – 1994Karl Popper
The philosopher of science who argued that a theory is scientific only if it could, in principle, be proved false.
1905 – 1980Jean-Paul Sartre
The leading voice of existentialism, who argued that we are 'condemned to be free' and responsible for everything we make of ourselves.
1908 – 1986Simone de Beauvoir
An existentialist philosopher and novelist who showed how freedom is shaped by situation, and wrote the founding text of modern feminism.
1912 – 1954Alan Turing
The mathematician who defined what computation is and asked, in plain terms, whether machines can think.
1913 – 1960Albert Camus
The novelist and essayist who named the absurd, and argued that we should face it with revolt rather than despair or false hope.
1921 – 2002John Rawls
The most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, who asked what rules we would choose if we did not know who we would be.
1922 – 1996Thomas Kuhn
The historian of science who argued that science advances not smoothly but through revolutions, and coined the 'paradigm shift'.
1927 – 2021Edmund Gettier
A philosopher who wrote one three-page paper and changed the theory of knowledge for good.
1929 – 2023Harry Frankfurt
A philosopher of the will who argued that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise.
1938 – 2002Robert Nozick
A restless, inventive philosopher who gave us the experience machine, popularised Newcomb's problem, and defended a minimal state.
Contemporary
John Searle
The philosopher of the Chinese room, who argued that running a program, however clever, is not the same as understanding.
born 1937Thomas Nagel
The philosopher who asked what it is like to be a bat, and has spent a career on the clash between subjective and objective points of view.
1941 – 2001David Lewis
A systematic metaphysician who argued that every possible world is as real as ours, and wrote classic papers on time travel and personal identity.
1942 – 2024Daniel Dennett
A naturalist who argued that consciousness and free will are real but not what we think, and that the hard problem is a kind of illusion.
1942 – 2017Derek Parfit
The philosopher who argued that personal identity is not what matters, and found that conclusion liberating.
born 1943Frank Jackson
The Australian philosopher who created Mary, the scientist who knows everything about colour but has never seen red, and later changed his mind about her.
born 1946Peter Singer
A utilitarian whose arguments about animals and about distant poverty have changed how millions of people eat and give.
born 1966David Chalmers
The philosopher who named the hard problem of consciousness and argued that we cannot rule out living in a simulation, and that it might not matter if we did.
born 1973Nick Bostrom
The philosopher behind the simulation argument and much of the modern study of existential risk and superintelligent AI.