Who thought what, and what each one is useful for. Dates, texts and the standing objections, rather than biography.
- Adam SmithScottish moral philosopher and political economist (1723–1790), professor at Glasgow and confidant of David Hume, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments grounded ethics in sympathy and whose Wealth of Nations founded the modern discipline of political economy, providing the framework within which commercial society has been understood for two centuries.PhilosophyEnlightenment
- al-FarabiKhorasanian philosopher (c. 870–950) commonly regarded as the founder of Arabic-Islamic Aristotelianism, whose commentaries on Aristotle and original works of political philosophy, logic, and metaphysics established the Arabic falsafa tradition and supplied the framework Avicenna would systematize.PhilosophyMedieval
- al-GhazaliPersian Ashʿarite theologian, jurist, and Sufi (1058–1111) whose Tahāfut al-Falāsifa challenged the rationalist program of Avicenna and whose Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn became the most influential work of Sunni piety, reshaping the relationship of philosophy, theology, and mystical practice in Islam.PhilosophyMedieval
- Alasdair MacIntyreScottish-American moral philosopher (1929–2025) whose After Virtue, Whose Justice?PhilosophyContemporary
- 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.Philosophy20th Century
- Alexis de TocquevilleFrench aristocrat, magistrate, and political writer (1805–1859) whose Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) produced the deepest nineteenth-century analyses of the transformation of European and American societies by the equalizing logic of democracy.Philosophy19th Century
- AnaxagorasIntroduced Mind as the ordering principle of the cosmos, and was prosecuted for saying the sun is a burning stone.Philosophyc. 500–428 BC
- AnaximanderThe second Milesian philosopher, whose doctrine of the apeiron (boundless) introduced abstract metaphysical thinking into the Western tradition and whose cosmology proposed substantively novel ideas about the structure of the universe and the evolutionary origin of living things.PhilosophyPre-Socratic
- AnaximenesThe third Milesian, who proposed air as the origin of everything and supplied a mechanism for how it becomes other things.Philosophyc. 586–526 BC
- Anselm of CanterburyThe Italian-born Benedictine theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury whose ontological argument for God's existence and account of the atonement shaped the entire subsequent medieval tradition.PhilosophyMedieval
- AristotlePlato's most consequential student, who systematized philosophy, founded biology, invented Western formal logic, and gave virtue ethics its canonical form.PhilosophyClassical 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.Philosophy19th Century
- Augustine of HippoThe North African bishop whose synthesis of Christianity and Neoplatonism became the foundation of Latin Christian theology and shaped the metaphysical inheritance of the medieval West.PhilosophyLate Antiquity
- AverroesCommentaries on Aristotle that transmitted Aristotelian philosophy to medieval Europe, and the argument that philosophy and revelation cannot conflict.Philosophy1126–1198
- AvicennaThe distinction between essence and existence, the argument from contingency to a necessary being, and the Canon of Medicine.Philosophyc. 980–1037
- Baruch SpinozaThe Dutch-Jewish philosopher whose Ethics applied geometrical method to substance, mind, and freedom and concluded that there is only one substance, identified with God or Nature.PhilosophyEarly Modern
- Bernard WilliamsEnglish moral philosopher (1929–2003), Cambridge Knightbridge Professor and Oxford White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose Problems of the Self, Moral Luck, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness defended a humanistic moral philosophy against both the Kantian deontological and the utilitarian-consequentialist traditions.Philosophy20th Century
- Bertrand RussellThe British philosopher, mathematician, logician, social critic, and public intellectual whose work in the foundations of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the broader analytic tradition shaped twentieth-century philosophy more than any other single figure.Philosophy20th Century
- Blaise PascalFrench mathematician, physicist, and Jansenist Catholic apologist (1623–1662) whose Pensées presented Christianity as the only adequate account of human contradiction, whose wager argument introduced decision theory to natural theology, and whose Provincial Letters established modern French prose.PhilosophyEarly Modern
- BoethiusThe late-antique Roman philosopher whose Consolation of Philosophy, written while awaiting execution, became one of the most-read texts in the medieval West, and whose translations and commentaries on Aristotle were the principal source for Latin scholastic logic for seven centuries.PhilosophyLate Antiquity
- BonaventureThe Italian Franciscan whose Augustinian-Neoplatonist synthesis was the major thirteenth-century theological alternative to Aquinas's Aristotelian framework, and whose Itinerarium Mentis in Deum is the canonical Franciscan mystical theology.PhilosophyMedieval
- Carol DweckThe distinction between fixed and growth mindsets, and research on how beliefs about ability shape responses to failure.Businessb. 1946
- Charles DarwinExplained the appearance of design without a designer, which reshaped philosophy as much as biology.Philosophy1809–1882
- Charles Sanders PeirceThe American polymath who founded pragmatism with the 1878 paper How to Make Our Ideas Clear, made fundamental contributions to formal logic and semiotics, and produced one of the most original philosophical bodies of work in the nineteenth century — most of it published only after his death.Philosophy19th Century
- 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.PhilosophyContemporary
- Charlie MungerMultidisciplinary mental models, inversion as a problem-solving method, and the psychology of misjudgement.Business1924–2023
- 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.PhilosophyRoman
- Clayton ChristensenThe theory of disruptive innovation and the jobs-to-be-done framing of customer demand.Business1952–2020
- Daniel DennettArgued that consciousness is not what it seems to be, and that the appearance of a unified inner theatre is itself what needs explaining.Philosophy1942–2024
- Daniel KahnemanHeuristics and biases, prospect theory, loss aversion, and the two-systems account of judgement.Business1934–2024
- David ChalmersNamed the hard problem of consciousness and argued that explaining function leaves experience untouched.Philosophyb. 1966
- David HumeThe Scottish empiricist whose analysis of causation, induction, and the self produced some of the most consequential skeptical arguments in modern philosophy.PhilosophyEnlightenment
- DemocritusThe Pre-Socratic philosopher who developed atomism with his teacher Leucippus, producing the substantial framework that the substantial Hellenistic Epicurean tradition would inherit and that substantial twentieth-century physics would vindicate in modified form.PhilosophyPre-Socratic
- 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.PhilosophyClassical Greek
- Duns ScotusThe Scottish Franciscan whose technical revisions to the dominant Thomist framework — the univocity of being, the formal distinction, the primacy of the will, the haecceity of individuation — produced the major Franciscan alternative to Thomism in late-medieval and early-modern scholasticism.PhilosophyMedieval
- Edmund BurkeAnglo-Irish statesman, orator, and political thinker (1729–1797) whose Reflections on the Revolution in France founded modern conservative political thought, whose decades in Parliament addressed American, Indian, and Irish questions with sustained moral seriousness, and whose theory of the political tradition shaped Anglo-American conservatism from the nineteenth century to the present.PhilosophyEnlightenment
- Edmund HusserlThe Moravian-German philosopher who founded the phenomenological tradition, developed the method of bracketing (epoché) and transcendental phenomenology, and shaped twentieth-century continental philosophy more decisively than any other single figure.Philosophy20th Century
- Eliyahu M. GoldrattThe theory of constraints, the five focusing steps, and the critique of local optimisation.Business1947–2011
- Emmanuel LevinasThe French-Lithuanian philosopher whose work recentered phenomenology on the ethical encounter with the Other, made ethics first philosophy, and produced one of the most distinctive philosophical projects of the postwar period.Philosophy20th Century
- EmpedoclesThe Pre-Socratic philosopher whose four-element cosmology shaped Western natural philosophy for two thousand years, and whose substantial poetic-philosophical works (Physics and Purifications) substantially integrated cosmological speculation with religious-ethical doctrine.PhilosophyPre-Socratic
- EpictetusThe Stoic philosopher, born a slave, whose Discourses and Enchiridion are the most rigorous surviving applications of Stoic ethics to daily life.PhilosophyRoman
- 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.PhilosophyHellenistic
- F.W.J. SchellingGerman Idealist philosopher (1775–1854) whose early Naturphilosophie and System of Transcendental Idealism completed the Kantian-Fichtean project from the side of nature, whose middle-period Identity Philosophy proposed an absolute identity of nature and spirit, and whose late Positive Philosophy at Berlin (1841) opened existentialist themes that shaped Kierkegaard, the late Schelling himself, and twentieth-century continental thought.Philosophy19th Century
- Francis BaconEnglish Lord Chancellor and philosopher (1561–1626) whose Novum Organum proposed inductive natural philosophy against the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, whose Great Instauration projected an encyclopedic scientific reform, and whose programmatic vision shaped the founding of the Royal Society and the institutional form of modern science.PhilosophyEarly Modern
- Francis of AssisiFounding the Franciscan order on voluntary poverty, and the Canticle of the Creatures.Philosophyc. 1181–1226
- 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.Philosophy19th Century
- G. E. MooreThe open question argument and the naturalistic fallacy in ethics; the defence of common sense against scepticism.Philosophy1873–1958
- 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.Philosophy20th Century
- G.W. LeibnizThe German polymath philosopher and mathematician whose Monadology developed a metaphysics of simple substances and whose work in logic, mathematics, and the principle of sufficient reason shaped both rationalist philosophy and modern logic.PhilosophyEnlightenment
- G.W.F. HegelThe German Idealist philosopher whose dialectical system attempted to articulate the unfolding of absolute spirit through history, nature, and consciousness as a single rational structure.Philosophy19th Century