1001Philosophers

Most Famous Modern Philosophers

Modern philosophy runs from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth, opening with the methodological revolutions of Descartes, Bacon, and Galileo and closing with the rise of the analytic and continental traditions. The period is defined by the rationalist and empiricist debates over the sources of knowledge, by the emergence of social-contract political theory, and by Kant's attempt to reconcile freedom with natural causation. Hegel, Marx, Mill, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche each set in motion a tradition that the twentieth century inherited. Modern philosophy also produced the philosophical foundations for the natural sciences, modern political institutions, and secular ethics.

Modern philosophers

  • Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 · German

    Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, classical philologist, and cultural critic. He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, declaring that ...

  • David Hume 1711 – 1776 · Scottish

    David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist of the Scottish Enlightenment. In A Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he ad...

  • Soren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855 · Danish

    Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author, widely regarded as the first existentialist thinker. His pseudonymous works, including...

  • Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804 · German

    Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher of the Enlightenment born in Konigsberg, Prussia. His Critique of Pure Reason sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by arguing th...

  • 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...

  • Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650 · French

    Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist often called the father of modern philosophy. In the Meditations on First Philosophy he applied methodic do...

  • Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 · German

    Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19th-century German philosopher best known for his metaphysical pessimism and his theory of the world as will and representation. The World as Will and...

  • Baruch Spinoza 1632 – 1677 · Dutch

    Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, regarded as one of the leading rationalists of the early modern period. His major work, the Eth...

  • 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 ...

  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831 · German

    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and the most influential systematic thinker of the German Idealist tradition. His Phenomenology of Spirit traces the devel...

  • Gottfried Leibniz 1646 – 1716 · German

    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a 17th-century German polymath and one of the leading rationalist philosophers of the early modern period. He invented infinitesimal calculus indep...

  • Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 · American

    Henry David Thoreau was a 19th-century American philosopher, essayist, and naturalist, the second major figure of the Transcendentalist movement after Ralph Waldo Emerson, his m...

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778 · Genevan

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an 18th-century Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer whose work profoundly influenced political theory, education, literature, and the French Revo...

  • John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873 · British

    John Stuart Mill was a 19th-century British philosopher and political economist, the most influential English-language thinker of the Victorian era. He refined and defended the ...

  • Karl Marx 1818 – 1883 · German

    Karl Marx was a 19th-century German philosopher, economist, historian, and revolutionary socialist whose work founded the tradition of thought that bears his name. With Friedric...

  • 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...

  • Niccolo Machiavelli 1469 – 1527 · Italian

    Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, historian, and political philosopher of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, often described as the founder of modern...

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882 · American

    Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th-century American essayist, lecturer, and poet, the leading figure of the Transcendentalist movement in New England. His 1841 collection Essays: Fi...

  • 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...

  • Voltaire 1694 – 1778 · French

    Francois-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit and his advocacy of civil liberties. He a...

  • Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895 · German

    Friedrich Engels was a 19th-century German philosopher, social scientist, and revolutionary, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx and a co-founder of the tradition of thought t...

  • Adam Smith 1723 – 1790 · Scottish

    Adam Smith was an 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher and political economist, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the founder of modern economics. His 1759 ...

  • Charles Sanders Peirce 1839 – 1914 · American

    Charles Sanders Peirce was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, regarded as the founder of pragmatism and one of the most ...

  • Erasmus 1466 – 1536 · Dutch

    Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and one of the most influential European intellectuals of the early 16th century. His critical...

  • George Berkeley 1685 – 1753 · Irish

    George Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop best known for his theory of immaterialism, sometimes called subjective idealism. His Principles of Human Know...

  • 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...

  • Margaret Fuller 1810 – 1850 · American

    Margaret Fuller was a 19th-century American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate, the first major figure of American feminist political thought and a central figure o...

  • William James 1842 – 1910 · American

    William James was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher and psychologist, one of the founders of pragmatism and a central figure in the early development of modern ...

  • Adam Ferguson 1723 – 1816 · Scottish

    Adam Ferguson was an 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian, often regarded as one of the founders of modern sociology. His 1767 work An Essay on the Hist...

  • Blaise Pascal 1623 – 1662 · French

    Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Christian philosopher who made foundational contributions to projective geometry, probability theory, and hydr...

  • Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797 · Irish

    Edmund Burke was an Irish-born British statesman and political philosopher, often regarded as the founder of modern conservatism. As a member of Parliament he supported concilia...

  • Friedrich Schelling 1775 – 1854 · German

    Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was a 19th-century German philosopher and a leading figure of German Idealism alongside Fichte and Hegel. His early Naturphilosophie sought to...

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881 · Russian

    Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist and essayist whose late masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, place him among ...

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749 – 1832 · German

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, scientist, and the towering figure of German Classicism. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made him famou...

  • Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910 · Russian

    Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher whose two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are among the supreme achievements of world litera...

  • Michel de Montaigne 1533 – 1592 · French

    Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance philosopher and the inventor of the modern essay. Withdrawing in middle age to his tower library, he composed the three books of the...

  • Montesquieu 1689 – 1755 · French

    Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French philosopher and one of the architects of Enlightenment political thought. His Persian Letters satirized European cu...

  • Alexis de Tocqueville 1805 – 1859 · French

    Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat, political philosopher, and historian. After a long study tour of the United States, undertaken nominally to examine its prison sys...

  • Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857 · French

    Auguste Comte was a French philosopher and one of the founders of sociology, a term he coined. He developed the doctrine of positivism, according to which authentic knowledge pr...

  • 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...

  • Denis Diderot 1713 – 1784 · French

    Denis Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, novelist, and art critic, and the chief editor of the Encyclopedie, a vast collaborative work that aimed to gather and prop...

  • F. H. Bradley 1846 – 1924 · British

    Francis Herbert Bradley was an English philosopher and the leading representative of British absolute idealism. A fellow of Merton College, Oxford, he wrote almost in solitude, ...

  • Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805 · German

    Friedrich Schiller was a German philosopher, poet, and playwright, the close collaborator of Goethe at Weimar and one of the most important Kantian thinkers of his generation. H...

  • Friedrich Schleiermacher 1768 – 1834 · German

    Friedrich Schleiermacher was a German theologian and philosopher, often regarded as the father of modern Protestant theology and modern hermeneutics. His Speeches on Religion to...

  • Galileo Galilei 1564 – 1642 · Italian

    Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and philosopher of science whose work helped to inaugurate the scientific revolution. He improved the telescope and used it...

  • Giordano Bruno 1548 – 1600 · Italian

    Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, cosmologist, and former Dominican friar. Drawing on the new heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and on Hermetic and Neoplatonic sourc...

  • Gottlob Frege 1848 – 1925 · German

    Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a 19th and early 20th-century German mathematician, logician, and philosopher, regarded as the founder of modern formal logic and one of the f...

  • 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 ...

  • Johann Gottfried Herder 1744 – 1803 · German

    Johann Gottfried Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, and literary critic and a central figure of the Sturm und Drang movement and the broader counter-Enlightenment. A s...

  • Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762 – 1814 · German

    Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Beginning from Kant's critical philosophy, he developed the Wissenschaftslehr...

  • 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...

  • John of the Cross 1542 – 1591 · Spanish

    John of the Cross was a Spanish Carmelite friar, mystic, and poet, co-founder of the Discalced Carmelite reform with Teresa of Avila. Imprisoned by his own order during the conf...

  • Joseph de Maistre 1753 – 1821 · Savoyard

    Joseph-Marie, Count de Maistre, was a Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, and political philosopher and one of the most powerful counter-Enlightenment voices of the early nineteenth cent...

  • Madame de Stael 1766 – 1817 · French-Swiss

    Anne-Louise-Germaine de Stael, known as Madame de Stael, was a French-Swiss writer, philosopher, and woman of letters who shaped the literary and political thought of her age. D...

  • 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...

  • Teresa of Avila 1515 – 1582 · Spanish

    Teresa of Avila was a Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, and reformer of religious life. Together with John of the Cross, she founded the Discalced Carmelite reform, which spread ra...

  • Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881 · Scottish

    Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher and one of the most prominent Victorian moral voices. After early labors as the introducer of German Romantic ...

  • 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...

  • Alexander Herzen 1812 – 1870 · Russian

    Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer, philosopher, and revolutionary, often called the father of Russian socialism. The illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, he was...

  • Anna Julia Cooper 1858 – 1964 · American

    Anna Julia Cooper was an American philosopher, educator, and one of the founding voices of African-American feminist thought, the fourth African-American woman to receive a doct...

  • Baron d'Holbach 1723 – 1789 · French

    Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, was a German-born French philosopher who became one of the most outspoken atheist and materialist voices of the high Enlightenment. His salon ...

  • Bartolome de Las Casas 1484 – 1566 · Spanish

    Bartolome de Las Casas was a Spanish Dominican friar, bishop of Chiapas in New Spain, and the most outspoken sixteenth-century defender of the rights of the indigenous peoples o...

  • Bernard Mandeville 1670 – 1733 · Dutch-English

    Bernard Mandeville was a Dutch-born English physician, satirist, and philosopher whose Fable of the Bees scandalized eighteenth-century moralists by arguing that the private vic...

  • Charles Fourier 1772 – 1837 · French

    Francois Marie Charles Fourier was a French utopian socialist and an extraordinarily original critic of early industrial civilization. Working as a clerk and salesman, he compos...

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 – 1935 · American

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, philosopher, novelist, and one of the leading feminist theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wome...

  • Claude Adrien Helvetius 1715 – 1771 · French

    Claude Adrien Helvetius was a French Enlightenment philosopher, tax-farmer, and patron of the philosophes. His treatise On the Mind, published in 1758, applied Locke's empiricis...

  • Comenius 1592 – 1670 · Czech

    Jan Amos Komensky, known in Latin as Comenius, was a Czech bishop of the Unity of the Brethren, philosopher, theologian, and the principal architect of modern educational though...

  • Eduard von Hartmann 1842 – 1906 · German

    Eduard von Hartmann was a German philosopher whose Philosophy of the Unconscious, published in 1869, became one of the most widely read philosophical books of the late nineteent...

  • Edward Caird 1835 – 1908 · Scottish

    Edward Caird was a Scottish Hegelian philosopher, long-time professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and from 1893 master of Balliol College, Oxford, in succession to Benjamin ...

  • Ernest Renan 1823 – 1892 · French

    Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Semitic philologist, historian, and philosopher of religion and one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of nineteenth...

  • Ernst Mach 1838 – 1916 · Austrian

    Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher of science whose work helped to inaugurate twentieth-century philosophy of science. His Mechanics in Its Development subject...

  • Etienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714 – 1780 · French

    Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac, was a French Enlightenment philosopher and the principal continental developer of empiricism after Locke. His Essay on the Origin of Human Kno...

  • Ferdinand de Saussure 1857 – 1913 · Swiss

    Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician whose posthumously assembled Course in General Linguistics (1916) became the foundational text of structural linguisti...

  • Francesco Guicciardini 1483 – 1540 · Italian

    Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian Renaissance historian, statesman, and political philosopher and one of the founding figures of modern historiography. After a long diplomat...

  • Francis Hutcheson 1694 – 1746 · Irish-Scottish

    Francis Hutcheson was an Irish-born philosopher and the leading figure of the early Scottish Enlightenment. As professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, he taught the young Adam...

  • Friedrich Schlegel 1772 – 1829 · German

    Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German philosopher, literary critic, and one of the central figures of early Romanticism. With his brother August Wilhelm he founded the At...

  • Gabriel Tarde 1843 – 1904 · French

    Jean-Gabriel de Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social philosopher, and the chief rival of Emile Durkheim in the foundation of French sociology. After two dec...

  • 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...

  • Girolamo Cardano 1501 – 1576 · Italian

    Girolamo Cardano was an Italian Renaissance polymath, physician, mathematician, astrologer, and natural philosopher whose life spanned brilliance and scandal. He produced founda...

  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729 – 1781 · German

    Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, and critic and one of the most important figures in the development of modern German letters. As dram...

  • 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...

  • Henri Poincare 1854 – 1912 · French

    Jules Henri Poincare was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science, often described as the last universalist of mathematics. He made foundational...

  • Henri de Saint-Simon 1760 – 1825 · French

    Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, was a French political philosopher, theorist of industrial society, and one of the founders of socialist thought. Born to one of t...

  • Henry Home, Lord Kames 1696 – 1782 · Scottish

    Henry Home, Lord Kames, was a Scottish judge, philosopher, and polymath and one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. From his seat on the Court of Session he ca...

  • Henry James Sr. 1811 – 1882 · American

    Henry James Sr. was an American philosopher and religious thinker and the father of the novelist Henry James and the philosopher William James. Wealthy enough to devote his enti...

  • Hermann Cohen 1842 – 1918 · German

    Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher and the founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Holding the chair of philosophy at Marburg for more than thirty years, he ...

  • Hippolyte Taine 1828 – 1893 · French

    Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher and the principal exponent of positivism in nineteenth-century French humanistic scholarship. Af...

  • Johann Georg Hamann 1730 – 1788 · German

    Johann Georg Hamann was a German philosopher of language and religion, often called the Magus of the North. A Konigsberg contemporary and lifelong interlocutor of Kant, he combi...

  • John Caird 1820 – 1898 · Scottish

    John Caird was a Scottish theologian, philosopher of religion, and Church of Scotland minister, elder brother of Edward Caird, and from 1873 principal of the University of Glasg...

  • John Calvin 1509 – 1564 · French

    John Calvin was a French Protestant theologian, pastor, and the principal architect of the Reformed branch of the Reformation. After legal training at Orleans and a sudden conve...

  • John Toland 1670 – 1722 · Irish

    John Toland was an Irish-born freethinker, political pamphleteer, and one of the most controversial English-language philosophers of the early Enlightenment. Educated at Glasgow...

  • Jonathan Edwards 1703 – 1758 · American

    Jonathan Edwards was an American Puritan theologian, philosopher, and pastor and the leading intellectual of colonial New England. From his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts,...

  • 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...

  • Julien Offray de La Mettrie 1709 – 1751 · French

    Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and Enlightenment philosopher whose uncompromising materialism made him one of the most controversial thinkers of his age. For...

  • Lou Andreas-Salome 1861 – 1937 · Russian-German

    Lou Andreas-Salome was a Russian-born German writer, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, whose intimate intellectual companionship with Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Rainer Maria R...

  • Ludwig Feuerbach 1804 – 1872 · German

    Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German anthropological philosopher and one of the most influential of the Young Hegelians. After training under Hegel at Berlin and a brief univer...

  • 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...

  • Marguerite of Navarre 1492 – 1549 · French

    Marguerite of Navarre, also known as Marguerite of Angouleme, was a French Renaissance queen, poet, and religious philosopher, sister of Francis I of France and queen of Navarre...

  • Martin Luther 1483 – 1546 · German

    Martin Luther was a German Augustinian friar, theologian, and the principal initiator of the Protestant Reformation. After years of monastic struggle over the question of how a ...

  • Max Stirner 1806 – 1856 · German

    Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who wrote under the pen name Max Stirner, was a German philosopher and the principal exponent of philosophical egoism. A regular at the Berlin circle of t...

  • Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876 · Russian

    Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and political philosopher and one of the most colorful figures of nineteenth-century European radicalism. Af...

  • Mir Damad 1561 – 1631 · Persian

    Mir Damad, the Master of the Damad, was an Iranian Twelver Shia philosopher and the founder of the School of Isfahan that would culminate in his pupil Mulla Sadra. Working in di...

  • Muhammad Iqbal 1877 – 1938 · Pakistani

    Sir Muhammad Iqbal was an Indian-Pakistani Islamic philosopher, poet, and political thinker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely regarded as the spiritua...

  • Nikolai Fyodorov 1829 – 1903 · Russian

    Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, librarian, and the founder of the movement of thought known as Russian cosmism. He worked for many dec...

  • Novalis 1772 – 1801 · German

    Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, who published under the pen name Novalis, was a German poet, mystic, and philosopher of early Romanticism. Trained in law and mi...

  • Paracelsus 1493 – 1541 · Swiss

    Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who took the Latinized name Paracelsus, was a Swiss-German physician, alchemist, and natural philosopher and one of the principal figures in the earl...

  • Peter Kropotkin 1842 – 1921 · Russian

    Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian geographer, naturalist, and anarchist philosopher and one of the founders of anarcho-communism. After early fieldwork in Siberia...

  • Philip Melanchthon 1497 – 1560 · German

    Philip Melanchthon was a German humanist scholar, Reformer, and Luther's closest collaborator at the University of Wittenberg. A Greek prodigy of extraordinary learning, he comb...

  • Pierre Charron 1541 – 1603 · French

    Pierre Charron was a French Catholic priest, preacher, and philosopher and the principal successor of Montaigne in the late Renaissance tradition of Christian skepticism. After ...

  • Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809 – 1865 · French

    Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French political philosopher and the first thinker to call himself an anarchist. Born to a working-class family in Besancon, he educated himself by ...

  • Robert Boyle 1627 – 1691 · Anglo-Irish

    Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, and theologian and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His Sceptical Chymist helped to transform alchemy into...

  • Sarah Grimke 1792 – 1873 · American

    Sarah Moore Grimke was an American abolitionist, philosopher, and one of the founding figures of nineteenth-century American feminist thought, the elder sister of Angelina Grimk...

  • Sri Ramakrishna 1836 – 1886 · Indian

    Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a Bengali Hindu mystic and religious teacher and one of the most influential religious figures of nineteenth-century India. As the principal priest a...

  • Theodore Parker 1810 – 1860 · American

    Theodore Parker was an American Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, and abolitionist and one of the leading public intellectuals of antebellum New England. His sermon on The ...

  • 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...

  • Thomas Reid 1710 – 1796 · Scottish

    Thomas Reid was a Scottish philosopher and the founder of the Scottish school of Common Sense. He developed his philosophy in critical reaction to the empiricist tradition of Lo...

  • Vladimir Solovyov 1853 – 1900 · Russian

    Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most important Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century and the founder of modern Russian...

  • William Ellery Channing 1780 – 1842 · American

    William Ellery Channing was an American Unitarian minister, theologian, and one of the most influential moral voices of the early American republic. From his pulpit at the Feder...

  • William Hamilton 1788 – 1856 · Scottish

    Sir William Hamilton, ninth Baronet of Preston, was a Scottish philosopher and the leading British philosophical figure of the mid nineteenth century. Professor of logic and met...

  • 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...

  • Yamamoto Tsunetomo 1659 – 1719 · Japanese

    Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a Japanese samurai and philosopher of the early Edo period, a retainer of the Saga domain who, on the death of his lord in 1700, was forbidden by Tokugawa...

  • George Herbert Mead 1863 – 1931 · American

    George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist and one of the central figures of classical American pragmatism. A colleague of John Dewey at Chic...

  • Dai Zhen 1724 – 1777 · Chinese

    Dai Zhen was a Chinese Confucian philosopher and philologist of the High Qing period, the most influential figure of the school of evidential research, or kaozheng, that dominat...

  • Francisco Suarez 1548 – 1617 · Spanish

    Francisco Suarez was a Spanish Jesuit priest and the leading philosopher of the late scholastic revival. Known as Doctor Eximius, he produced the Disputationes Metaphysicae, the...

  • Hugo Grotius 1583 – 1645 · Dutch

    Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist and philosopher who is widely regarded as the founder of modern international law. Against the religious and dynastic justifications for war that...

  • Josiah Royce 1855 – 1916 · American

    Josiah Royce was an American philosopher and the principal American defender of objective idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A colleague of William J...

  • Nicolas Malebranche 1638 – 1715 · French

    Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and one of the most original Cartesian philosophers of the seventeenth century. His Search After Truth combined Descartes' rati...

  • Pierre Bayle 1647 – 1706 · French

    Pierre Bayle was a French Huguenot philosopher and encyclopedist who lived in exile in Rotterdam after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His Historical and Critical Diction...

  • Raja Ram Mohan Roy 1772 – 1833 · Indian

    Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a Bengali religious and social reformer and one of the founders of the Indian Renaissance of the nineteenth century. Educated in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic...

  • Benjamin Constant 1767 – 1830 · Swiss-French

    Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was a Swiss-French political philosopher, novelist, and statesman and one of the founding theorists of modern liberalism. After an erratic ea...

  • Madeleine de Scudery 1607 – 1701 · French

    Madeleine de Scudery was a French novelist, salonniere, and philosopher of the seventeenth century, the most widely read living writer of her age in any language and the central...

  • 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...

  • Mary Whiton Calkins 1863 – 1930 · American

    Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist and the first woman elected president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophi...

  • Theodore Beza 1519 – 1605 · French

    Theodore Beza was a French Reformed theologian, biblical scholar, and the principal successor of John Calvin as the leader of the Genevan Reformation. After early humanist studi...

  • Victor Cousin 1792 – 1867 · French

    Victor Cousin was a French philosopher and statesman and the dominant figure of academic philosophy in nineteenth-century France. As Minister of Public Instruction in the early ...

  • Wilhelm Wundt 1832 – 1920 · German

    Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher and the principal founder of experimental psychology. In 1879 he opened the first formal labora...

  • 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...

  • Marsilio Ficino 1433 – 1499 · Italian

    Marsilio Ficino was an Italian Renaissance philosopher, priest, and physician at the court of the Medici in Florence. He produced the first complete Latin translation of the dia...

  • 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...

  • Tommaso Campanella 1568 – 1639 · Italian

    Tommaso Campanella was an Italian Dominican philosopher, theologian, and astrologer who spent twenty-seven years in Spanish prisons after participating in a millenarian conspira...

  • Emile Boutroux 1845 – 1921 · French

    Emile Boutroux was a French philosopher whose work in the philosophy of science and religion shaped a generation of French and American thinkers, including his student Henri Ber...

  • Giambattista Vico 1668 – 1744 · Italian

    Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher of history, rhetorician, and jurist working in obscurity at Naples. Against the Cartesian privileging of mathematical natural scienc...

  • Hakuin Ekaku 1686 – 1769 · Japanese

    Hakuin Ekaku was a Japanese Rinzai Zen master, painter, and reformer of the Zen tradition. After a long and intense practice marked by repeated breakthroughs in kensho, he settl...

  • Yan Yuan 1635 – 1704 · Chinese

    Yan Yuan, known as Yan Xizhai, was a Chinese Confucian philosopher of the early Qing dynasty and a sharp critic of the Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucian establishment of his time. He held...

  • 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...

  • Christian Wolff 1679 – 1754 · German

    Christian Wolff was a German philosopher, mathematician, and the most influential continental rationalist between Leibniz and Kant. He developed a vast, systematic philosophy in...

  • Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776 – 1841 · German

    Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist, and educational theorist, and the principal opponent of post-Kantian idealism in the first half of the nineteent...

  • Juan Luis Vives 1493 – 1540 · Spanish

    Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish Renaissance humanist, philosopher, and educational reformer of Jewish converso descent. After studies in Valencia and Paris and a long residence in...

  • Louis de Bonald 1754 – 1840 · French

    Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, was a French traditionalist philosopher and statesman and, with Joseph de Maistre, one of the principal theorists of the post-revoluti...

  • Peter Ramus 1515 – 1572 · French

    Pierre de la Ramee, known as Peter Ramus, was a French humanist philosopher, logician, and educational reformer whose attempt to reorganize the liberal arts on a simplified and ...

  • Wilhelm von Humboldt 1767 – 1835 · German

    Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, and statesman, founder of the modern research university and of the modern philosop...

  • Marquis de Condorcet 1743 – 1794 · French

    Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, mathematician, and political theorist of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. A pi...

  • Olympe de Gouges 1748 – 1793 · French

    Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political philosopher of the Revolution, the author of the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Fem...

  • Pyotr Chaadaev 1794 – 1856 · Russian

    Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev was a Russian philosopher and the catalyst of nineteenth-century Russian self-questioning. A decorated officer in the Napoleonic Wars who left militar...

  • 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...

  • Bruno Bauer 1809 – 1882 · German

    Bruno Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher, and historian of the early Christian church and one of the leading figures of the Young Hegelian movement in the 1830s and 1840...

  • F. C. S. Schiller 1864 – 1937 · British

    Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was a British philosopher of pragmatism, holding for many years a fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He gave pragmatism the alternati...

  • Franz Brentano 1838 – 1917 · German-Austrian

    Franz Brentano was a German-Austrian philosopher, a former Catholic priest, and the teacher of Husserl, Meinong, Stumpf, Twardowski, and many other founders of twentieth-century...

  • 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...

  • Moses Mendelssohn 1729 – 1786 · German

    Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and the central figure of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Largely self-taught, he became a leading representative of th...

  • Sebastian Franck 1499 – 1543 · German

    Sebastian Franck was a German radical Reformer, spiritualist, historian, and one of the most independent voices of the early Reformation. After early ordination as a Catholic pr...

  • Wang Yangming 1472 – 1529 · Chinese

    Wang Yangming was a 15th and early 16th-century Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher, statesman, and military general of the Ming dynasty, the most influential Confucian thinker of...

  • Cesare Beccaria 1738 – 1794 · Italian

    Cesare Beccaria was an Italian philosopher, jurist, and economist and the foundational figure of modern criminology. His treatise On Crimes and Punishments, published anonymousl...

  • David Strauss 1808 – 1874 · German

    David Friedrich Strauss was a German Protestant theologian, philosopher, and biographer and one of the most controversial religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. After stu...

  • Jean le Rond d'Alembert 1717 – 1783 · French

    Jean le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, physicist, and Enlightenment philosopher and the co-editor with Diderot of the Encyclopedie. His Preliminary Discourse to tha...

  • Pierre Gassendi 1592 – 1655 · French

    Pierre Gassendi was a French Catholic priest, astronomer, and philosopher and one of the leading anti-Aristotelian voices of seventeenth-century thought. He observed the transit...

  • Pierre Leroux 1797 – 1871 · French

    Pierre-Henri Leroux was a French philosopher, journalist, and one of the founders of nineteenth-century French socialism. Often credited with introducing the word socialisme int...

  • 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...

  • Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 1648 – 1695 · Mexican

    Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a Mexican Hieronymite nun and the foremost writer of the Spanish Baroque. Self-taught and celebrated as a child prodigy, she chose the convent over...

  • 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...

  • Alexei Khomyakov 1804 – 1860 · Russian

    Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, poet, and the principal founder of the Slavophile movement. A landowner who freed his serfs long before the imper...

  • Alexius Meinong 1853 – 1920 · Austrian

    Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a student of Franz Brentano, and the founder of the Graz school of object theory. Drawing on Brentano's thesis of intentionality, he...

  • Anna Doyle Wheeler 1780 – 1848 · Irish

    Anna Doyle Wheeler was an Irish-born British socialist and feminist philosopher of the early nineteenth century, the principal philosophical collaborator of William Thompson and...

  • Anna Maria van Schurman 1607 – 1678 · Dutch

    Anna Maria van Schurman was a Dutch polymath, painter, and philosopher, widely celebrated in seventeenth-century Europe as the most learned woman of her age. Her Whether a Chris...

  • 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 ...

  • Antoine Arnauld 1612 – 1694 · French

    Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, logician, and philosopher and the leading figure of the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal. With Pierre Nicole he produced the Po...

  • Anton Wilhelm Amo 1703 – 1759 · Akan-German

    Anton Wilhelm Amo was a German philosopher of West African origin, born among the Akan people on what is now the coast of Ghana. Brought to the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel a...

  • Antonio Genovesi 1713 – 1769 · Italian

    Antonio Genovesi was an Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, and economist of the Neapolitan Enlightenment and the first holder in modern Europe of a chair of political economy...

  • Antonio Rosmini 1797 – 1855 · Italian

    Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was an Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, and the founder of the Institute of Charity. His many works, including the New Essay on the Origin of Ideas,...

  • August Cieszkowski 1814 – 1894 · Polish

    Count August Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist, and political reformer and one of the most original of the Young Hegelians of the 1830s and 1840s. His Prolegomena ...

  • Bankei Yotaku 1622 – 1693 · Japanese

    Bankei Yotaku was a Japanese Rinzai Zen master of the Edo period, abbot of the Ryomon-ji and the Korin-ji, and one of the most original Zen teachers of seventeenth-century Japan...

  • Bernard Bolzano 1781 – 1848 · Bohemian

    Bernard Placidus Johann Nepomuk Bolzano was a Bohemian Catholic priest, mathematician, logician, and theologian, often called the great-grandfather of analytic philosophy. Train...

  • Bernard Bosanquet 1848 – 1923 · British

    Bernard Bosanquet was a British philosopher and one of the central figures of British absolute idealism, alongside F. H. Bradley. He produced major works in logic, aesthetics, s...

  • Bernardino Telesio 1509 – 1588 · Italian

    Bernardino Telesio was an Italian Renaissance natural philosopher and one of the principal architects of the late sixteenth-century reaction against scholastic Aristotelianism. ...

  • Borden Parker Bowne 1847 – 1910 · American

    Borden Parker Bowne was an American philosopher and Methodist theologian and the founder of Boston Personalism, the most distinctively American school of idealist personalist ph...

  • Bronson Alcott 1799 – 1888 · American

    Amos Bronson Alcott was an American Transcendentalist philosopher, educator, and social reformer and the father of the novelist Louisa May Alcott. His Temple School in Boston in...

  • Carl Stumpf 1848 – 1936 · German

    Carl Stumpf was a German philosopher, psychologist, and musicologist who taught for many years at Berlin and shaped a generation of phenomenological thought. A student of Brenta...

  • 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...

  • Cesare Cremonini 1550 – 1631 · Italian

    Cesare Cremonini was an Italian philosopher, professor at the University of Padua for more than forty years, and the most prominent academic Aristotelian of his age. A friend an...

  • Charles Renouvier 1815 – 1903 · French

    Charles Renouvier was a French neo-Kantian philosopher and the founder of what he called neo-criticism. Working largely outside the academy, he produced a vast philosophical sys...

  • Christian Garve 1742 – 1798 · German

    Christian Garve was a German philosopher of the late Enlightenment and one of the most widely read German Popularphilosophen of his generation. After a brief professorship at Le...

  • Christian Thomasius 1655 – 1728 · German

    Christian Thomasius was a German jurist, philosopher, and reformer and one of the founders of the German Enlightenment. The first university lecturer in Germany to teach philoso...

  • Coluccio Salutati 1331 – 1406 · Italian

    Coluccio Salutati was an Italian humanist scholar and statesman, chancellor of Florence from 1375 until his death in 1406, and the foremost civic humanist of the generation betw...

  • 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...

  • Domingo de Soto 1494 – 1560 · Spanish

    Domingo de Soto was a Spanish Dominican philosopher, theologian, and jurist of the School of Salamanca. Imperial theologian to Charles V at the Council of Trent and confessor to...

  • Emilie du Chatelet 1706 – 1749 · French

    Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, was a French Enlightenment philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. The translator and commentator on Newton's...

  • Faustus Socinus 1539 – 1604 · Italian

    Fausto Sozzini, Latinized as Faustus Socinus, was an Italian theologian and the principal figure of the radical anti-Trinitarian wing of the Reformation. Drawing on the writings...

  • Felicite de Lamennais 1782 – 1854 · French

    Hugues-Felicite Robert de Lamennais was a French Catholic priest, philosopher, and journalist who moved across his career from ardent ultramontane defense of the Church to a rad...

  • Ferdinand Lassalle 1825 – 1864 · German

    Ferdinand Lassalle was a German jurist, philosopher, and political organizer and the founder of the General German Workers' Association in 1863, the first political party of the...

  • Francesco Patrizi 1529 – 1597 · Italian

    Francesco Patrizi da Cherso was an Italian Renaissance Platonist philosopher, polymath, and the first holder of a chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara, later moving to a corr...

  • Francisco de Vitoria c. 1483 – 1546 · Spanish

    Francisco de Vitoria was a Spanish Dominican philosopher, theologian, and jurist and the founder of the School of Salamanca, the great sixteenth-century revival of Thomistic mor...

  • Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg 1802 – 1872 · German

    Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy and the leading Aristotelian critic of Hegelian idealism in the second quarter of the nineteen...

  • Friedrich Albert Lange 1828 – 1875 · German

    Friedrich Albert Lange was a German neo-Kantian philosopher and social theorist and the author of the most influential nineteenth-century critique of materialism. Trained at Bon...

  • Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi 1743 – 1819 · German

    Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was a German philosopher whose writings precipitated the so-called pantheism controversy of the 1780s and shaped the philosophical agenda of German Ide...

  • Gabrielle Suchon 1632 – 1703 · French

    Gabrielle Suchon was a French philosopher and one of the most original feminist political philosophers of the Grand Siecle, who escaped the Dominican convent into which her fami...

  • Gustav Fechner 1801 – 1887 · German

    Gustav Theodor Fechner was a German experimental psychologist, philosopher, and the principal founder of psychophysics, the systematic study of the relations between physical st...

  • Heinrich Rickert 1863 – 1936 · German

    Heinrich Rickert was a German neo-Kantian philosopher of the Baden school and, with Wilhelm Windelband, the principal theorist of the distinction between the natural sciences an...

  • Hermann Lotze 1817 – 1881 · German

    Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and physician whose work bridged the late idealist and the natural-scientific cultures of nineteenth-century Germany. Trained in bo...

  • Isaac Abarbanel 1437 – 1508 · Spanish-Portuguese

    Isaac Abarbanel was a Spanish-Portuguese Jewish philosopher, statesman, and biblical commentator of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who served as treasurer to ...

  • Israel Salanter 1810 – 1883 · Lithuanian

    Rabbi Israel Salanter, born Israel Lipkin in Lithuania, was the founder of the Mussar movement, a nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jewish ethical-philosophical movement that sought...

  • Ivan Kireevsky 1806 – 1856 · Russian

    Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky was a Russian philosopher and literary critic and, with Alexei Khomyakov, one of the founding figures of the Slavophile movement. After early work as ...

  • Jacobus Arminius 1560 – 1609 · Dutch

    Jacobus Arminius was a Dutch Reformed theologian and the eponym of the Arminian school of Protestant theology. Educated at Leiden, Geneva, and Basel, he served as a pastor in Am...

  • Johann Nicolaus Tetens 1736 – 1807 · German

    Johann Nicolaus Tetens was a German philosopher, psychologist, and economist of the late Enlightenment and one of the most important predecessors of Kant in the German philosoph...

  • Justus Lipsius 1547 – 1606 · Flemish

    Justus Lipsius was a Flemish humanist and philosopher and the central figure in the late Renaissance revival of Stoicism. After holding chairs at Jena, Leiden, and Louvain and c...

  • Kang Youwei 1858 – 1927 · Chinese

    Kang Youwei was a late-Qing Chinese scholar, reformer, and political philosopher who reimagined Confucianism as a modern civil religion and engine of political transformation. H...

  • Konstantin Leontiev 1831 – 1891 · Russian

    Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev was a Russian philosopher of culture, novelist, and former diplomat in the Ottoman Empire and one of the most uncompromising conservative voices...

  • Leonardo Bruni 1370 – 1444 · Italian

    Leonardo Bruni was an Italian Renaissance humanist, historian, and statesman, chancellor of the Florentine Republic for two long terms in the early fifteenth century and one of ...

  • Liang Qichao 1873 – 1929 · Chinese

    Liang Qichao was a Chinese reformer, journalist, and philosopher and one of the leading intellectuals of the late Qing and early Republican period. A student of Kang Youwei and ...

  • Liu Zongzhou 1578 – 1645 · Chinese

    Liu Zongzhou, known as Liu Jishan, was a Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher and political figure of the late Ming dynasty, the leader of the Donglin movement of moral-political r...

  • 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...

  • Luis de Molina 1535 – 1600 · Spanish

    Luis de Molina was a Spanish Jesuit philosopher and theologian of the School of Salamanca and one of the most influential figures of late scholasticism. After many years of teac...

  • Madame de Lambert 1647 – 1733 · French

    Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, the Marquise de Lambert, was a French moralist, salonniere, and philosopher of the early Enlightenment, whose Paris salon, held weekly f...

  • Madhusudana Sarasvati c. 1540 – c. 1640 · Indian

    Madhusudana Sarasvati was a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Indian Advaita Vedantin philosopher, traditionally regarded as one of the greatest Advaita systematists between Sa...

  • Maine de Biran 1766 – 1824 · French

    Marie-Francois-Pierre Gontier de Biran, known as Maine de Biran, was a French philosopher and statesman, sometimes called the founder of French spiritualism. After service in th...

  • Marie de Gournay 1565 – 1645 · French

    Marie le Jars de Gournay was a French writer, editor, and philosopher, the adopted daughter and literary executor of Michel de Montaigne. After Montaigne's death she edited his ...

  • Marin Mersenne 1588 – 1648 · French

    Marin Mersenne was a French Minim friar, mathematician, and philosopher and the central node of the European scientific correspondence of the first half of the seventeenth centu...

  • Mary Shepherd 1777 – 1847 · Scottish

    Lady Mary Shepherd was a Scottish philosopher and one of the most acute British metaphysicians of the early nineteenth century. The daughter of an Earl, she received an extensiv...

  • Mulla Sadra 1572 – 1640 · Persian

    Mulla Sadra was a Persian Shia Islamic philosopher and the most important figure of the Iranian School of Isfahan. Synthesizing Avicennan philosophy, Suhrawardi's illuminationis...

  • Nakae Chomin 1847 – 1901 · Japanese

    Nakae Chomin was a Japanese journalist, translator, and political philosopher and one of the principal voices of the Meiji-period Freedom and People's Rights movement. After stu...

  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky 1828 – 1889 · Russian

    Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, and novelist and the most influential radical Russian thinker of the 1850s and 1...

  • Olympia Morata 1526 – 1555 · Italian

    Olympia Morata was an Italian Renaissance humanist philosopher, classical scholar, and Protestant convert, prodigy of the court of Ferrara who, after marriage to a German Luther...

  • Pico della Mirandola 1463 – 1494 · Italian

    Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance humanist and philosopher, a member of the Florentine circle around Marsilio Ficino. At twenty-three he proposed to defen...

  • Pietro Pomponazzi 1462 – 1525 · Italian

    Pietro Pomponazzi was an Italian Renaissance Aristotelian and one of the most controversial philosophers of his age. Trained in the Aristotelian tradition at Padua, he argued in...

  • 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...

  • Salomon Maimon 1753 – 1800 · Polish-German

    Salomon Maimon was a Polish-born Jewish philosopher of the German Enlightenment, born in Lithuania to a poor Hasidic family, who escaped his early circumstances to become one of...

  • Samuel Pufendorf 1632 – 1694 · German

    Samuel Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, and historian, the principal continental developer of the natural-law tradition that ran from Grotius to Locke. The ...

  • Sebastian Castellio 1515 – 1563 · French

    Sebastian Castellio was a French Reformed theologian and one of the earliest sustained defenders of religious toleration. After collaboration with Calvin in Geneva and Strasbour...

  • Sophie de Grouchy 1764 – 1822 · French

    Sophie de Grouchy, the Marquise de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, translator, and salonniere of the late Enlightenment, the wife of the philosopher and mathematician the M...

  • Tan Sitong 1865 – 1898 · Chinese

    Tan Sitong was a late-Qing Chinese reformer and philosopher, one of the Six Gentlemen executed after the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. In his major work A Study o...

  • Wang Tingxiang 1474 – 1544 · Chinese

    Wang Tingxiang, known as Wang Junchuan, was a Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher of the mid-Ming dynasty, a senior official of the imperial court, and the most original Confucian...

  • Wilhelm Dilthey 1833 – 1911 · German

    Wilhelm Dilthey was a German philosopher and historian who devoted his career to the foundations of the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften, against the encroachment of na...

  • Wilhelm Windelband 1848 – 1915 · German

    Wilhelm Windelband was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy and the founder, with Heinrich Rickert, of the Southwest German School of neo-Kantianism. Holding chairs ...

  • 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...

  • Yi Hwang (Toegye) 1501 – 1570 · Korean

    Yi Hwang, known by his pen name Toegye, was a Korean Joseon dynasty Confucian scholar and the most influential Korean philosopher in the Neo-Confucian tradition of Zhu Xi. He se...

  • Yi I (Yulgok) 1536 – 1584 · Korean

    Yi I, known by the pen name Yulgok, was a Korean Joseon-dynasty Confucian philosopher, statesman, and reformer, often counted with Yi Hwang as one of the two great Korean Neo-Co...