Most Famous English Philosophers

English philosophy is dominated by the empiricist tradition that runs from Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and by the political and ethical thought that empiricism made possible. Locke's social-contract theory and theory of personal identity, Hobbes's political philosophy, and Hume's analyses of causation, induction, and moral sentiment have shaped almost every subsequent debate in their respective fields. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued the empiricist trajectory with Mill's utilitarianism and liberal political theory, and with Russell and the Cambridge analytic school's foundational work in logic, language, and mind.

English philosophy is characterized by close attention to ordinary language, common-sense observation, and scientific method. The philosophers below include the founders of modern empiricism, liberalism, and analytic philosophy.

English philosophers

John Locke 1632 – 1704 · English
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding he argued tha...
Francis Bacon 1561 – 1626 · English
Francis Bacon was a 16th and early 17th-century English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, regarded as one of the founders of the modern scientific method and a major figure ...
Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797 · English
Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th-century English writer and philosopher, regarded as one of the founding figures of modern feminist political thought. Her 1792 work A Vindication...
Thomas Hobbes 1588 – 1679 · English
Thomas Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher whose 1651 book Leviathan is one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy and social contract theory. Writing du...
Jeremy Bentham 1748 – 1832 · English
Jeremy Bentham was an 18th and 19th-century English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer, the founder of modern utilitarian ethics. His 1789 work An Introduction to the Prin...
Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882 · English
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist whose work transformed the life sciences and reshaped Western thought. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle furnished the observati...
Henry Sidgwick 1838 – 1900 · English
Henry Sidgwick was a 19th-century English philosopher and one of the most rigorous and systematic moral philosophers of the Victorian era. His 1874 work The Methods of Ethics is...
Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903 · English
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist who set himself the task, in his ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy, of unifying biology, ...
Isaac Newton 1642 – 1727 · English
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid the foundation ...
John Henry Newman 1801 – 1890 · English
John Henry Newman was an English theologian, religious philosopher, and one of the great prose stylists of Victorian English. A leader of the Oxford Movement within the Church o...
Julian of Norwich 1343 – 1416 · English
Julian of Norwich was an English anchoress and the author of the Revelations of Divine Love, the first surviving book in English written by a woman. At thirty she received a ser...
Mary Astell 1666 – 1731 · English
Mary Astell was an English philosopher and one of the first advocates in English of the equal education of women. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies she argued for the founding...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834 · English
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, and philosopher and one of the central figures of English Romanticism. After early association with Wordsworth in t...
Thomas More 1478 – 1535 · English
Sir Thomas More was an English Renaissance humanist, lawyer, statesman, and Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. A close friend of Erasmus, he produced the Utopia in 151...
William of Ockham 1287 – 1347 · English
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian, one of the most important figures of late medieval thought. He defended a thoroughgoing nominalis...
Alcuin of York c. 735 – 804 · English
Alcuin of York was an English Anglo-Saxon scholar, deacon, poet, and the principal intellectual adviser of the emperor Charlemagne. After many years as master of the cathedral s...
Bede c. 672 – 735 · English
Bede, called the Venerable, was an English Benedictine monk, scholar, and the most learned writer of the early medieval West. From the age of seven he lived at the joint monaste...
George Boole 1815 – 1864 · English
George Boole was an English mathematician, logician, and philosopher and one of the founders of mathematical logic. Almost entirely self-taught, he became professor of mathemati...
Hannah More 1745 – 1833 · English
Hannah More was an English religious writer, moral philosopher, and educational reformer of the late Georgian era, the most widely read English moral author of her time, and a c...
John Pecham c. 1230 – 1292 · English
John Pecham was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic theologian, and natural philosopher, and from 1279 archbishop of Canterbury. After studies at Paris and Oxford and a long...
John Wyclif c. 1320 – 1384 · English
John Wyclif was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, and reformer, often called the morning star of the Reformation. Master of Balliol College and a doctor of theology...
John of Salisbury c. 1110 – 1180 · English
John of Salisbury was an English humanist scholar, secretary to two archbishops of Canterbury including the martyred Thomas Becket, and finally bishop of Chartres. After studies...
Joseph Glanvill 1636 – 1680 · English
Joseph Glanvill was an English clergyman, philosopher, and an early Fellow of the Royal Society. After studies at Oxford he served as a country parson in Somerset and as chaplai...
Joseph Priestley 1733 – 1804 · English
Joseph Priestley was an English natural philosopher, theologian, and political theorist, and one of the founding figures of English Unitarianism. Best known to the history of sc...
Margaret Fell 1614 – 1702 · English
Margaret Fell was an English philosopher, religious organizer, and the principal early architect of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, alongside her second husband G...
Robert Grosseteste c. 1175 – 1253 · English
Robert Grosseteste was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, and bishop of Lincoln. He served as the first chancellor of the University of Oxford and as the ...
Roger Bacon 1219 – 1292 · English
Roger Bacon was an English Franciscan friar, philosopher, and early advocate of experimental method, sometimes called Doctor Mirabilis. Trained at Oxford and Paris, he produced ...
Thomas Huxley 1825 – 1895 · English
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist, philosopher of science, and public lecturer, famous in his lifetime as Darwin's bulldog for his vigorous defense of evolutionary th...
William Paley 1743 – 1805 · English
William Paley was an English Anglican clergyman, philosopher of religion, and moral philosopher and for half a century one of the most read writers in British religious thought....
William Stanley Jevons 1835 – 1882 · English
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist, logician, and philosopher of science and one of the chief figures of the marginal revolution in economics. Trained at University...
William Whewell 1794 – 1866 · English
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, and philosopher and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge for more than two decades. He coined the modern English term scienti...
Margaret Cavendish 1623 – 1673 · English
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was an English philosopher, poet, and prose writer and the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Working in the thick o...
Henry More 1614 – 1687 · English
Henry More was an English philosopher and one of the foremost Cambridge Platonists. A fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, for nearly half a century, he defended the immateria...
Ralph Cudworth 1617 – 1688 · English
Ralph Cudworth was an English philosopher, theologian, and the leading figure of the Cambridge Platonist school. As Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, he produced The True...
Adelard of Bath c. 1080 – c. 1152 · English
Adelard of Bath was an English natural philosopher, mathematician, and translator and one of the principal channels by which Greek and Arabic scientific learning reached the Lat...
Bathsua Makin c. 1600 – c. 1675 · English
Bathsua Makin was an English educator, philosopher, and the most learned woman of her age in early modern England, tutor to the daughters of Charles I and the author of the most...
Anthony Collins 1676 – 1729 · English
Anthony Collins was an English freethinker, philosopher, and friend and disciple of John Locke in his last years. Independently wealthy and educated at Cambridge, he wrote a ser...
Joseph Butler 1692 – 1752 · English
Joseph Butler was an English Anglican bishop and one of the most important moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. His Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel develop...
Samuel Clarke 1675 – 1729 · English
Samuel Clarke was an English Anglican clergyman and philosopher of religion, a close associate of Newton and the foremost rationalist theologian of his age. His Boyle Lectures o...
T. H. Green 1836 – 1882 · English
Thomas Hill Green was an English philosopher, social reformer, and tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, who shaped a generation of British political and ethical thinking. Drawing o...
Thomas Bradwardine c. 1300 – 1349 · English
Thomas Bradwardine was an English theologian, mathematician, and Archbishop of Canterbury, known to scholastic posterity as the Doctor Profundus. As one of the Oxford Calculator...
Aelred of Rievaulx 1110 – 1167 · English
Aelred of Rievaulx was an English Cistercian abbot, theologian, and one of the most beloved spiritual writers of the twelfth century. After service at the Scottish royal court, ...
Alexander of Hales c. 1185 – 1245 · English
Alexander of Hales was an English Franciscan theologian and the first holder of the Franciscan chair of theology at the University of Paris. After training in the arts and theol...
Anne Conway 1631 – 1679 · English
Anne Conway was an English philosopher and one of the most original metaphysicians of the seventeenth century. Largely confined to her family estate by chronic and debilitating ...
Catharine Macaulay 1731 – 1791 · English
Catharine Macaulay was an English historian and republican political philosopher whose eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to the Hanoverian Succession...
Catharine Trotter Cockburn 1679 – 1749 · English
Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English moral philosopher, essayist, and dramatist and one of the most accomplished women philosophers of the early eighteenth century. After e...
Damaris Cudworth Masham 1659 – 1708 · English
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, was an English philosopher and one of the most accomplished women thinkers of the late seventeenth century. The daughter of the Cambridge Platonis...
Lord Bolingbroke 1678 – 1751 · English
Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, was an English Tory statesman, political philosopher, and one of the most influential public writers of his generation. Secretary of ...
Lord Shaftesbury 1671 – 1713 · English
Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was an English philosopher and one of the most influential moral theorists of the early eighteenth century. His Characteristics...
Richard Cumberland 1631 – 1718 · English
Richard Cumberland was an English moral and political philosopher, mathematician, and from 1691 Anglican bishop of Peterborough. His major philosophical work, De Legibus Naturae...
Robert Kilwardby c. 1215 – 1279 · English
Robert Kilwardby was an English Dominican philosopher, archbishop of Canterbury from 1273 to 1278, and finally a cardinal of the Roman Church. After teaching the arts at Paris a...
Walter Burley c. 1275 – c. 1344 · English
Walter Burley was an English scholastic philosopher and logician, fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a leading representative of the realist tradition that stood against the ...
William Wollaston 1659 – 1724 · English
William Wollaston was an English Anglican priest, philosopher, and one of the leading early Enlightenment moralists. He spent the last decades of his life as a private scholar i...