Philosophers
124 philosophers
Thales泰勒斯
The first to explain the world by nature rather than myth; traditionally called the father of philosophy.
Anaximander阿那克西曼德
Proposed the Boundless as first principle, drew the first world map, and guessed that life began in the sea.
Anaximenes阿那克西美尼
Made air the first principle and explained all differences by condensation and rarefaction, giving change its first mechanism.
Pythagoras毕达哥拉斯
Declared that number is the principle of all things, fusing mathematics, music and purification of the soul into a religious way of life.
Heraclitus赫拉克利特
'The Obscure', who declared that everything flows, that opposites are one, and that the Logos is the law behind all change.
Parmenides巴门尼德
Argued that Being is one, ungenerated, motionless and unchanging, and that change is illusion; the beginning of metaphysics and of logical argument.
Anaxagoras阿那克萨戈拉
Brought philosophy to Athens, proposed Nous or Mind as the cause that orders all things, and was charged with impiety for calling the sun a red-hot stone.
Empedocles恩培多克勒
Proposed the four roots, earth, air, fire and water, mixed and parted by Love and Strife, reconciling Parmenides with the world of experience.
Zeno of Elea芝诺（爱利亚）
Defended Parmenides with paradoxes such as Achilles and the tortoise; Aristotle called him the inventor of dialectic.
Protagoras普罗泰戈拉
The most famous Sophist; 'man is the measure of all things' made truth relative to each person and turned philosophy toward human affairs.
Gorgias高尔吉亚
Master of rhetoric who denied being, knowledge and communication in three theses, and treated language as a kind of spell.
Socrates苏格拉底
Brought philosophy down from the heavens to the marketplace, replaced teaching with questioning, and drank hemlock for it.
Democritus德谟克利特
Completed atomism: nothing exists but atoms and void, all else is convention.
Plato柏拉图
Built Socrates' questions into the theory of Forms, founded the Academy, and set the agenda of Western philosophy in dialogue form.
Diogenes of Sinope第欧根尼
The Cynic who lived in a jar, carried a lamp in daylight looking for an honest man, and asked Alexander to step out of his sunlight.
Aristotle亚里士多德
Plato's greatest student and most thorough critic; divided philosophy into its disciplines and ruled thought for the next two millennia.
Pyrrho皮浪
Returned from Alexander's expedition to India teaching suspension of judgement about everything as the road to peace of mind.
Epicurus伊壁鸠鲁
Taught in the Garden that pleasure is tranquillity, and used atomism to banish fear of the gods and of death.
Zeno of Citium芝诺（季蒂昂）
Shipwrecked into philosophy, founded Stoicism under a painted colonnade in Athens, teaching that virtue is the only good and that one should live in accord with nature.
Chrysippus克吕西波
The second founder of Stoicism, author of over seven hundred books, who built propositional logic and defended the compatibility of fate and freedom.
Cicero西塞罗
Rome's greatest orator, who rendered Greek philosophy into Latin and gave Europe its philosophical vocabulary.
Lucretius卢克莱修
Set out Epicurean atomism in over seven thousand lines of Latin verse; On the Nature of Things is antiquity's greatest philosophical poem.
Seneca塞涅卡
Nero's tutor and one of Rome's richest men, who taught in his letters how to face death and fortune, and died by imperial order.
Epictetus爱比克泰德
From slave to Stoic teacher, he taught that only one thing is in our control: our own judgements.
Marcus Aurelius马可·奥勒留
The philosopher-emperor who wrote the Meditations, addressed to himself alone, in army camps on the Danube frontier.
Sextus Empiricus塞克斯都·恩披里柯
The compiler of ancient scepticism, whose works, rediscovered in the Renaissance, set off the sceptical crisis of early modern philosophy.
Plotinus普罗提诺
Founder of Neoplatonism, who raised Plato's Forms toward the One, from which all things emanate and to which the soul longs to return.
Augustine of Hippo奥古斯丁
Grafted Platonism onto Christianity, wrote the first autobiography, and shaped the Western mind for a thousand years with his reflections on sin, grace and time.
Boethius波爱修斯
The last Roman and the first scholastic, who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in a condemned cell and preserved Aristotle's logic for the Middle Ages.
John Scotus Eriugena爱留根纳
The one original philosopher of the Carolingian age, who brought Greek mystical theology into Latin and built a vast system in which God and nature are one.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina)阿维森纳（伊本·西那）
Giant of Islamic philosophy and medicine, who distinguished essence from existence, devised the 'flying man' thought experiment, and shaped Latin scholastic metaphysics.
Anselm of Canterbury安瑟伦
Father of scholasticism, who proposed the ontological argument: that than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist.
Peter Abelard阿伯拉尔
The sharpest logician of the twelfth century, a conceptualist on universals, and through his tragedy with Héloïse the most famous man of the Middle Ages.
Averroes (Ibn Rushd)阿威罗伊（伊本·鲁世德）
'The Commentator', who annotated the whole of Aristotle, defended the harmony of philosophy and religion, and set the University of Paris ablaze.
Maimonides迈蒙尼德
The greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, who reconciled the Torah with Aristotle in the Guide for the Perplexed.
Thomas Aquinas托马斯·阿奎那
The summit of scholasticism, who rebuilt Christian theology with Aristotle; the Summa Theologiae is the grandest edifice of medieval thought.
Meister Eckhart埃克哈特大师
Father of German mysticism, who preached that in the soul's depths there is a spark no different from God, and taught 'letting go' of all things so that God may be born within.
John Duns Scotus邓斯·司各脱
'The Subtle Doctor', who proposed the univocity of being and the notion of haecceity, placed will above intellect, and opened a second road for scholasticism.
William of Ockham奥卡姆的威廉
Nominalist author of 'do not multiply entities beyond necessity', who separated theology from philosophy and paved the way for modern empiricism and the separation of church and state.
Nicholas of Cusa库萨的尼古拉
'Learned ignorance': God is the coincidence of opposites, the universe has neither centre nor edge, and the infinite is to be approached through mathematical figures.
Pico della Mirandola皮科·德拉·米兰多拉
At twenty-three he challenged all Europe to debate nine hundred theses; his Oration on the Dignity of Man declared that humans may make of themselves whatever they choose.
Erasmus伊拉斯谟
Prince of the northern humanists, who edited the Greek New Testament, mocked the whole age in The Praise of Folly, and defended free will between Luther and Rome.
Niccolò Machiavelli马基雅维利
Stripped politics of morality and asked only how power is won and kept; The Prince still unsettles its readers.
Michel de Montaigne蒙田
Invented the essay, took 'What do I know?' as his motto, and made himself the subject of a book about humanity.
Giordano Bruno布鲁诺
Preached an infinite universe with countless worlds; the Inquisition burned him in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, and he became the martyr of free thought.
Francis Bacon弗朗西斯·培根
'Knowledge is power': set out the programme of induction and experimental science, and proposed to rebuild all human knowledge.
Thomas Hobbes霍布斯
A thoroughgoing materialist who derived absolute sovereignty from a state of nature where life is 'nasty, brutish and short'; Leviathan begins modern political philosophy.
René Descartes笛卡尔
Father of modern philosophy, who found 'I think, therefore I am' through universal doubt, split mind from matter, and invented analytic geometry.
Blaise Pascal帕斯卡尔
Mathematical prodigy, co-founder of probability, defender of Jansenism; the Pensées ask, with the 'thinking reed' and the 'wager', where humanity stands amid the infinite.
Baruch Spinoza斯宾诺莎
The lens-grinder expelled by his synagogue, who proved by geometrical method that God is Nature and that freedom is the understanding of necessity.
John Locke洛克
Founder of empiricism and father of liberalism: the mind is a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
Nicolas Malebranche马勒伯朗士
The Oratorian who fused Descartes with Augustine, holding that we see all things in God and that God is the only true cause.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz莱布尼茨
The last universal genius: inventor of calculus and binary arithmetic, author of the monadology and 'the best of all possible worlds', who dreamed of a universal language in which every dispute could be calculated.
George Berkeley贝克莱
'To be is to be perceived': matter does not exist, only minds and ideas, and God guarantees that things persist.
Montesquieu孟德斯鸠
The Spirit of the Laws proposed the separation of powers and tied political institutions to climate, custom and history, founding comparative politics.
Voltaire伏尔泰
The embodiment of the Enlightenment, who wielded wit against superstition, fanaticism and intolerance: 'crush the infamous thing'.
David Hume休谟
Took empiricism to its limit: causation is habit, the self a bundle of perceptions, reason the slave of the passions. Kant said he woke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau卢梭
'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains': civilisation corrupted us, the general will is the only legitimate sovereign, and the Enlightenment's rebel from within.
Denis Diderot狄德罗
Editor of the Encyclopédie, who spent twenty-five years gathering all knowledge into one work and explored every forbidden question in materialist essays and dialogue-novels.
Adam Smith亚当·斯密
A professor of moral philosophy who wrote The Wealth of Nations: sympathy shapes morality, an invisible hand coordinates markets, and economics became a science.
Immanuel Kant康德
The Copernican revolution of philosophy: objects conform to our forms of knowing, not knowledge to objects. Reason legislates for nature and for itself.
Condorcet孔多塞
The last of the Encyclopedists: mathematician, revolutionary, advocate of women's rights and abolition, who wrote the sketch of humanity's infinite progress while hiding from the guillotine.
Jeremy Bentham边沁
Founder of utilitarianism: 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' is the sole standard of law and morals, and natural rights are 'nonsense upon stilts'.
Mary Wollstonecraft玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women are not naturally weak but educated to be; reason has no sex, and women's rights are the Enlightenment's necessary conclusion.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte费希特
The beginning of German idealism: the I posits itself and posits the not-I, the world is the field of freedom's activity, and philosophy is the science of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel黑格尔
The completer of idealism: reality is Absolute Spirit coming to know itself through contradiction and sublation, history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and philosophy is its own time grasped in thought.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling谢林
The philosopher of Romanticism: nature is slumbering spirit, art is philosophy's summit, and in old age he turned to myth and revelation, asking why there is something rather than nothing.
Arthur Schopenhauer叔本华
The essence of the world is blind Will, life a pendulum between pain and boredom, and release lies in art, compassion and asceticism. He brought Indian thought into the West and made pessimism a system.
Auguste Comte孔德
Founder of positivism and of sociology: human thought passes through theological, metaphysical and positive stages, science replaces theology, and Humanity replaces God.
Ludwig Feuerbach费尔巴哈
'God is the projection of the human essence': the secret of theology is anthropology. He stood Hegel on his head and prepared the ground for Marx.
John Stuart Mill约翰·斯图亚特·密尔
The classic statement of liberalism: coercion of an individual is justified only to prevent harm to others. He refined utilitarianism and cast the first parliamentary vote for women's rights.
Søren Kierkegaard克尔凯郭尔
Father of existentialism: truth is subjectivity, faith is a leap over the absurd, and life has aesthetic, ethical and religious stages, each entered by an irreversible choice.
Karl Marx马克思
The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. History is driven by modes of production, and capitalism breeds its own gravediggers in its contradictions.
Friedrich Engels恩格斯
Marx's collaborator, financier and literary executor, who extended dialectic to nature and brought the origins of family and state into historical materialism.
Wilhelm Dilthey狄尔泰
Founder of the human sciences: nature is to be explained, spirit to be understood; life can be grasped only from within life, and hermeneutics became philosophy.
Charles Sanders Peirce皮尔士
Founder of pragmatism, pioneer of semiotics and the logic of relations, banished from academia in life and recognised after death as America's most original philosopher.
William James威廉·詹姆斯
Founder of American psychology and of pragmatism: truth is the cash-value of an idea, consciousness is a stream, and the will to believe may decide where evidence cannot.
Friedrich Nietzsche尼采
God is dead and all values must be revalued: will to power, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, philosophy with a hammer, and at the end a collapse in a Turin street with his arms around a horse.
Gottlob Frege弗雷格
Inventor of modern logic: quantifiers, function and argument, sense and reference. He set out to reduce arithmetic to logic; a letter from Russell brought the edifice down, but analytic philosophy begins with him.
Edmund Husserl胡塞尔
Founder of phenomenology: back to the things themselves, suspend belief in the world's existence, and describe how consciousness constitutes its objects. Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty all begin with him.
Henri Bergson柏格森
Duration, intuition and the élan vital: time is not the space on a clock face but an indivisible flow, which intellect chops up and only intuition can enter. He was the most famous philosopher of the early twentieth century.
John Dewey杜威
Completer of pragmatism and father of progressive education: knowledge is an instrument of inquiry, democracy a way of life, and the school a society in miniature. He lectured in China for two years.
Alfred North Whitehead怀特海
From mathematical logic to process metaphysics: reality is not substance but event, the universe an organic creative advance, and even God is in becoming.
Bertrand Russell罗素
A founder of analytic philosophy: co-author of Principia Mathematica, inventor of the theory of descriptions, lifelong campaigner for peace, reason and liberty, Nobel laureate in literature, leader of the anti-nuclear movement in old age.
G. E. Moore摩尔
Common sense against metaphysics: he proved the external world by holding up his hands, showed that 'good' is indefinable, and was the spiritual guide of the Bloomsbury group.
Karl Jaspers雅斯贝尔斯
From psychiatry to the philosophy of existence: in limit situations one meets oneself and the Transcendent, reason and communication are philosophy's faith; he coined the 'Axial Age' and after the war asked about German guilt.
Ludwig Wittgenstein维特根斯坦
He changed philosophy twice: the Tractatus says language pictures the world and whereof one cannot speak one must be silent; the Investigations say meaning is use and philosophy is therapy for the diseases language causes.
Martin Heidegger海德格尔
He raised anew the question of the meaning of Being: the human being is Dasein, thrown into the world, caring, being-toward-death; later he turned to language, technology and the history of Being. His entanglement with Nazism remains contested.
Rudolf Carnap卡尔纳普
Leading figure of the Vienna Circle: meaningful propositions must be verifiable, metaphysics consists of meaningless pseudo-propositions, and philosophy is the logical syntax of the language of science.
Walter Benjamin本雅明
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the fading aura, the flâneur of the arcades, brushing history against the grain: critic, translator and untimely thinker, who took his own life in flight.
Max Horkheimer霍克海默
Founder of critical theory and organiser of the Frankfurt School: Enlightenment turns into its opposite, reason becomes instrumental, and critical theory keeps hope for emancipation alive.
Herbert Marcuse马尔库塞
One-dimensional man, repressive desublimation, the Great Refusal: joining Freud with Marx, he became the mentor of the student movement of 1968, one of its 'three Ms'.
Hans-Georg Gadamer伽达默尔
Philosophical hermeneutics: understanding is not a method but the human way of being, prejudice is its condition, and truth happens in the fusion of horizons and in dialogue with tradition. He lived to a hundred and two.
Karl Popper波普尔
Falsifiability demarcates science from non-science, knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation, and the open society advances by piecemeal social engineering rather than utopian blueprints.
Theodor W. Adorno阿多诺
Negative dialectics and the critique of the culture industry: the whole is the false, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and philosophy's task is to speak for the non-identical. He was also Schoenberg's pupil and a composer.
Jean-Paul Sartre萨特
Existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, hell is other people: he made existentialism a generation's way of life, refused the Nobel Prize, and moved from the café to the street.
Hannah Arendt阿伦特
The origins of totalitarianism, the banality of evil, action and natality: she rescued politics from philosophy's contempt and held that human dignity lies in the capacity to begin something new.
Emmanuel Levinas列维纳斯
Ethics is first philosophy: the face of the other person commands me before all knowledge, 'thou shalt not kill', and I bear an infinite, asymmetrical responsibility for the Other.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty梅洛-庞蒂
The phenomenology of the body: we do not have bodies, we are our bodies; perception precedes every judgement as our original hold on the world. He was the most patient and least dogmatic of the phenomenologists.
Simone de Beauvoir波伏娃
'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman': The Second Sex applied existentialism to sex and launched second-wave feminism; she herself was the century's most famous intellectual woman.
W. V. O. Quine蒯因
The two dogmas of empiricism overturned: no analytic–synthetic distinction, no isolated statement facing experience; translation is indeterminate, 'to be is to be the value of a variable', and philosophy is continuous with science.
Claude Lévi-Strauss列维-斯特劳斯
Founder of structural anthropology: kinship, myth and totemism all obey unconscious rules like those of language, the savage mind is as rigorous as the scientific, and the final goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him.
Albert Camus加缪
The absurd and revolt: the world is silent and we crave meaning, and that is the absurd; the answer is neither suicide nor faith but revolt, freedom and passion. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'
Paul Ricoeur利科
The third generation of hermeneutics: the hermeneutics of suspicion and of recovery, metaphor and narrative, oneself as another, memory and forgiveness. The most generous and mediating philosopher of the century.
Donald Davidson戴维森
Reasons are causes, anomalous monism, truth-conditional meaning, radical interpretation and the principle of charity, the myth of conceptual schemes: in a series of papers he wove mind, language and action into one whole.
G. E. M. Anscombe安斯康姆
Intention founded the philosophy of action, 'Modern Moral Philosophy' revived virtue ethics and coined 'consequentialism', and she opposed an honorary degree for Truman because he ordered the atomic bombs dropped.
John Rawls罗尔斯
Justice as fairness: behind a veil of ignorance, rational persons would choose equal liberty and only those inequalities that benefit the least advantaged. A Theory of Justice revived normative political philosophy.
Thomas Kuhn库恩
Paradigms, normal science, scientific revolutions, incommensurability: science is not the accumulation of truth but the succession of world-views. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is among the most cited academic books of the century.
Jean-François Lyotard利奥塔
The postmodern condition: incredulity toward grand narratives, knowledge turned into information commodity, incommensurable language-games between which lie differends no tribunal can settle, and philosophy's task to bear witness to the unpresentable.
Gilles Deleuze德勒兹
Difference and repetition, desiring-machines, the rhizome, becoming, the plane of immanence: philosophy is the creation of concepts, and with Guattari he turned it into a machine against every hierarchy.
Michel Foucault福柯
Histories of madness, prison and sexuality: knowledge is a form of power, power produces as well as represses, the subject is a historical product, and 'man' will be erased like a face drawn in sand.
Hilary Putnam普特南
Functionalism, Twin Earth, brains in a vat, internal realism, the entanglement of fact and value: he devised many of the central arguments of contemporary philosophy of mind and language, then criticised them himself.
Alasdair MacIntyre麦金太尔
After Virtue: modern morality is a heap of fragments torn from their context, emotivism is its truth, and the way out is a return to practices, tradition and the virtues, waiting for a new St Benedict.
Jürgen Habermas哈贝马斯
Communicative reason, the public sphere, discourse ethics, modernity as an unfinished project: leader of the second generation of the Frankfurt School and post-war Germany's most influential public intellectual.
Jacques Derrida德里达
Deconstruction: Western metaphysics rests on the privilege of 'presence', and every text is undone by its own difference, différance and supplement; 'there is nothing outside the text'. The most controversial and most cited philosopher of the later twentieth century.
Richard Rorty罗蒂
Philosophy is not the mirror of nature: no representation, no foundations, only conversation and solidarity. Leaving analytic philosophy behind, he turned pragmatism into an ironic liberalism that annoyed every camp.
Alain Badiou巴迪欧
Mathematics is ontology; event, truth and the subject's fidelity: with set theory he rebuilt a Platonism, insisting on truth and the communist Idea when 'postmodernity' had declared truth finished.
Thomas Nagel内格尔
'What is it like to be a bat?', the view from nowhere, the gulf between subjective and objective: in the clearest prose he guards the questions reductionism cannot cover, consciousness, value and the meaning of life.
Robert Nozick诺齐克
The minimal state, rights as side constraints, entitlement theory, the Wilt Chamberlain argument: one book made him the philosophical voice of libertarianism, and then he turned to everything else.
Saul Kripke克里普克
Possible-worlds semantics, rigid designators, necessary a posteriori truths, 'Kripkenstein' rule-scepticism: a prodigy who published a theorem as a teenager and changed metaphysics in a few lectures given without notes.
Derek Parfit帕菲特
Personal identity is not what matters, psychological continuity is; future people count as much as present ones; moral philosophy is a young science and secular ethics has only begun. He wrote two books in his life.
Peter Singer彼得·辛格
Animal liberation, the drowning child and global poverty, effective altruism: he carried utilitarianism from the lecture hall to the street and the wallet, the most influential and most controversial applied ethicist alive.
Slavoj Žižek齐泽克
Lacan plus Hegel plus Hollywood: ideology is the fantasy we act out knowingly, enjoyment is the core of politics, and with jokes, films and obscenities he brought German idealism back into the public square.
Judith Butler朱迪斯·巴特勒
Gender is performative: there is no identity behind the performance, only norms repeatedly cited. Gender Trouble transformed feminism and queer theory, and she then turned to vulnerability, mourning and non-violence.