Ethics — Paul Maxwell

A Theory of JusticeRawls's 1971 systematic statement of justice as fairness, developing the original position thought experiment, the two principles of justice, and the framework that revived political philosophy as a major analytic subfield.BooksPhilosophy

Alasdair MacIntyreScottish-American moral philosopher (1929–2025) whose After Virtue, Whose Justice?FiguresPhilosophyContemporary

Albert CamusThe French-Algerian writer and philosopher whose work on the absurd, revolt, and the limits of revolutionary politics made him the canonical philosophical voice of mid-century European disenchantment and one of the few twentieth-century writers to receive the Nobel Prize for fundamentally philosophical work.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Amor FatiThe Stoic doctrine of loving fate — actively accepting whatever happens as the working of cosmic logos, rather than merely tolerating it.ConceptsPhilosophyCross-Era

ApatheiaThe Stoic doctrine of freedom from passion — not the absence of feeling, but the absence of the disturbing emotions that arise from mistaken judgments about what is good and bad.ConceptsPhilosophyHellenistic

AristotelianismThe tradition founded by Aristotle: forms are immanent in things, knowledge starts with observation, ethics aims at virtuous activity, and reality is best studied through its causes and ends.TraditionsPhilosophyClassical Greek

AristotlePlato's most consequential student, who systematized philosophy, founded biology, invented Western formal logic, and gave virtue ethics its canonical form.FiguresPhilosophyClassical Greek

Arthur SchopenhauerThe German philosopher whose World as Will and Representation developed the post-Kantian metaphysics of the irrational Will as ultimate reality, integrated Western philosophy with Buddhist and Hindu thought, and shaped Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Freud, and the broader European cultural engagement with pessimism and the unconscious.FiguresPhilosophy19th Century

AtaraxiaThe Hellenistic ideal of mental tranquility — the settled, undisturbed state of soul that Epicureans and Skeptics took to be the goal of philosophy.ConceptsPhilosophyHellenistic

AuthenticityThe existentialist value of being what one is in the deepest sense — living from one's own freedom and recognition of finitude rather than from inherited roles, social conformity, or self-deception.ConceptsTransitions20th Century

Bad FaithSartre's name for the mode of consciousness that flees its own freedom by treating itself as a fixed thing rather than the open activity it actually is — self-deception that requires simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same thing.ConceptsPhilosophy20th Century

Being and NothingnessSartre's 1943 major work of phenomenological-existentialist philosophy, developing systematic analyses of consciousness, freedom, bad faith, interpersonal experience, and the structures of human existence.BooksPhilosophy

Being and TimeHeidegger's 1927 foundational work, the major philosophical event of the twentieth century in continental philosophy: a systematic phenomenological analysis of Dasein as the entry point into the question of the meaning of being.BooksPhilosophy

Categorical ImperativeKant's formulation of the moral law as an unconditional principle of action — act only on that maxim which you can will to be a universal law — the foundational doctrine of deontological ethics.ConceptsPhilosophyEnlightenment

Charles TaylorCanadian philosopher (b. 1931) whose work bridges analytic and continental traditions, whose Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007) are major works of philosophical history, and whose essays on multiculturalism and the politics of recognition have shaped late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century political theory.FiguresPhilosophyContemporary

CiceroRoman statesman and orator (106–43 BCE) whose philosophical dialogues — De Officiis, De Finibus, De Natura Deorum, Tusculan Disputations — created a Latin philosophical vocabulary, preserved the systems of Hellenistic schools otherwise lost, and shaped every subsequent Western reception of Greek thought.FiguresPhilosophyRoman

CynicismA Greek school holding that virtue alone is good and is reached by living according to nature — refusing wealth, status and convention as sources of anxiety rather than security.TraditionsPhilosophyc. 400 BC – 500 AD

De AnimaAristotle's treatise on the soul as the form of a living body, analyzing the faculties of nutrition, sensation, and intellect across plants, animals, and human beings.BooksPhilosophy

DeontologyDuty-based ethics: actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of consequences.ConceptsPhilosophy

Diogenes of SinopeThe Greek philosopher whose ostentatious rejection of conventional propriety produced the canonical exemplification of Cynic philosophy and whose anecdotes have made him one of the most-recognized single figures from the ancient philosophical tradition.FiguresPhilosophyClassical Greek

Doctrine of the MeanAristotle's doctrine that each moral virtue lies as a mean between two vices — one of excess and one of deficiency — found by practical wisdom in the particular situation.ConceptsPhilosophyClassical Greek

EnchiridionEpictetus's handbook of Stoic ethics, compiled by his student Arrian as a short, portable distillation of the longer Discourses.BooksPhilosophy

EpictetusThe Stoic philosopher, born a slave, whose Discourses and Enchiridion are the most rigorous surviving applications of Stoic ethics to daily life.FiguresPhilosophyRoman

EpicureanismA Greek school holding that pleasure — understood as freedom from pain and mental disturbance — is the highest good, reached through simple needs, friendship and the removal of fear.TraditionsPhilosophy307 BC – 3rd century AD

EpicurusThe Greek philosopher who founded Epicureanism in his Athenian Garden, developed a comprehensive philosophy integrating atomist physics with hedonistic ethics, and produced one of the most influential ethical traditions of the ancient world.FiguresPhilosophyHellenistic

EthicsThe systematic study of right action, good character, and the structure of moral claims.ConceptsPhilosophy

EudaimoniaThe Greek term for a life that has gone well taken as a whole — usually rendered happiness, which is misleading.ConceptsPhilosophyClassical Greek

ExistentialismExistence precedes essence: humans must create meaning in a universe that doesn't supply it.ConceptsPhilosophy

ExistentialismThe mid-20th century philosophy that insists existence precedes essence — we are not what we are because of some fixed nature, but because of what we choose to make of ourselves.TraditionsPhilosophy20th Century

Friedrich NietzscheThe German philosopher and philologist whose late nineteenth-century works on morality, religion, art, and the will to power produced one of the most influential and most contested philosophical bodies of work in modern thought.FiguresPhilosophy19th Century

G. E. MooreThe open question argument and the naturalistic fallacy in ethics; the defence of common sense against scepticism.FiguresPhilosophy1873–1958

G.E.M. AnscombeEnglish analytic philosopher (1919–2001), Wittgenstein's literary executor and translator, professor at Cambridge after Wittgenstein and Anscombe's own Oxford career, whose Intention (1957) founded modern philosophy of action and whose 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy initiated the late-twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics and reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of MoralsKant's 1785 short foundational work of moral philosophy, presenting the categorical imperative and the structure of autonomous rational will in their most concise and accessible form.BooksPhilosophy

Immanuel KantThe Königsberg philosopher whose Critical philosophy redrew the map of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and whose work organized nearly all subsequent Continental thought.FiguresPhilosophyEnlightenment

Iris MurdochAnglo-Irish novelist and moral philosopher (1919–1999), Oxford fellow and tutor, whose moral philosophy defended a Platonic conception of attention to the good against the prevailing analytic moral theory of the postwar period and whose twenty-six novels are among the major achievements of twentieth-century English fiction.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Is-Ought GapHume's observation that moral writers regularly slide from descriptive (is) claims to normative (ought) claims without justifying the inference — sometimes called Hume's Law or the naturalistic fallacy.ConceptsPhilosophyEnlightenment

Jean-Paul SartreThe French philosopher, novelist, and playwright whose Being and Nothingness gave existentialism its most systematic philosophical formulation and whose public-intellectual career defined the mid-twentieth-century figure of the engaged philosopher.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Jeremy BenthamFounder of utilitarianism and of the principle that actions are right as they tend to promote happiness.FiguresPhilosophy1748–1832

John RawlsThe American philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy as a major analytic subfield and whose subsequent work on political liberalism and the law of peoples produced the most influential single body of work in twentieth-century English-language political theory.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Leo StraussGerman-American political philosopher (1899–1973), University of Chicago professor and author of Natural Right and History, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Thoughts on Machiavelli, and many other works, whose esoteric hermeneutic and reading of classical and medieval political philosophy founded the Straussian school of political philosophy.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

Letters to LuciliusSeneca's 124 surviving philosophical letters to his friend Lucilius, the most extensive and accessible body of practical Stoic ethical writing in the Roman corpus.BooksPhilosophy

LucretiusThe Roman poet whose six-book hexameter poem De Rerum Natura is the most comprehensive surviving exposition of Epicurean philosophy and the principal channel through which Epicurean thought reached the Renaissance and modern world.FiguresPhilosophyRoman

Marcus AureliusRoman emperor (161–180 CE) and Stoic practitioner whose private notebooks, the Meditations, are the most influential single text in the practical Stoic tradition.FiguresPhilosophyRoman

Martha NussbaumBuilt the capabilities approach, and argued that emotions are judgements rather than interruptions of reason.FiguresPhilosophyb. 1947

Martin HeideggerThe German philosopher whose Being and Time (1927) reframed the central question of Western philosophy as the question of the meaning of being, and whose later work pursued the same question through a sustained meditation on language, technology, and the history of metaphysics.FiguresPhilosophy20th Century

MarxismThe substantial philosophical and political tradition founded by Marx and Engels that takes the analysis of historical material conditions, class structure, and economic production as the foundation of social theory and political practice.TraditionsPhilosophy19th Century

MeditationsMarcus Aurelius's private philosophical notebooks, twelve books of Stoic reflections composed during the later years of his reign as Roman emperor.BooksPhilosophy

MetaphysicsAristotle's foundational treatise on being qua being, substance, causation, potentiality and actuality, and the unmoved mover — the work that gave Western metaphysics its name and most of its categories.BooksPhilosophy

Michel de MontaigneInvented the essay, and revived ancient scepticism in a form that set the problem Descartes tried to answer.FiguresPhilosophy1533–1592

Natural LawThe doctrine that there is a moral law accessible to human reason, grounded in human nature and the rational structure of reality, distinct from but related to divine command and positive law.ConceptsPhilosophyCross-Era