Most Famous Christian Philosophers

Christian philosophy is the tradition of philosophical inquiry conducted in dialogue with Christian doctrine, beginning in late antiquity and continuing to the present. Its central concerns include the existence and attributes of God, the nature of the soul, free will, the problem of evil, and the relation of reason to revelation. Major early figures include the Church Fathers, especially Augustine, who synthesized Neoplatonism with Christian thought. The medieval scholastics, above all Thomas Aquinas, developed comprehensive philosophical systems integrating Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. The tradition continues today through analytic philosophy of religion, neo-Thomism, and theological ethics.

Philosophers in this tradition

Augustine of Hippo 354 – 430 · Roman
Augustine of Hippo was a Roman-African theologian and philosopher whose work shaped Western Christianity and Latin philosophy for the next millennium. His Confessions, addressed...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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,...
Boethius c. 480 – 524 · Roman
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a 5th and 6th-century Roman senator, consul, and philosopher, one of the last representatives of classical learning in the Latin West and ...
Jacques Maritain 1882 – 1973 · French
Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the architects of the twentieth-century revival of Thomism. After studies at the Sorbonne and a conversion to Catho...
Nicholas of Cusa 1401 – 1464 · German
Nicholas of Cusa was a German cardinal, philosopher, and mathematician at the threshold between the medieval and Renaissance worlds. His treatise On Learned Ignorance argued tha...
Gregory of Nyssa 335 AD – 395 AD · Greek
Gregory of Nyssa was a fourth-century Cappadocian bishop and theologian and one of the architects of orthodox Trinitarian theology. The younger brother of Basil the Great and fr...
Bernard of Clairvaux 1090 – 1153 · French
Bernard of Clairvaux was a French Cistercian abbot, mystical theologian, and one of the most influential figures of the twelfth century. As founder of the abbey of Clairvaux and...
Joseph Pieper 1904 – 1997 · German
Joseph Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and one of the most widely read twentieth-century interpreters of Thomas Aquinas. Long-time professor at Munster, he combined car...
Reinhold Niebuhr 1892 – 1971 · American
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Reformed theologian and the principal exponent of Christian realism in twentieth-century social thought. After thirteen years as a par...
Basil the Great 330 AD – 379 AD · Greek
Basil of Caesarea, called the Great, was a fourth-century Cappadocian theologian, bishop, and the chief organizer of Eastern Christian monasticism. The elder brother of Gregory ...
Clement of Alexandria 150 AD – 215 AD · Greek
Titus Flavius Clemens, known as Clement of Alexandria, was a Christian theologian and the first major teacher of the catechetical school at Alexandria, where he helped to shape ...
Etienne Gilson 1884 – 1978 · French
Etienne Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, the leading figure of twentieth-century neo-Thomism. He devoted his career to recovering medieval philosophy...
Paul Tillich 1886 – 1965 · German-American
Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Lutheran theologian and philosopher of religion and one of the most widely read religious thinkers of the twentieth century. After se...
Meister Eckhart 1260 – 1328 · German
Meister Eckhart was a German Dominican theologian, philosopher, and mystic. Trained in scholastic theology and twice the regent master at Paris, he is best known for his vernacu...
Origen 185 AD – 253 AD · Greek-Egyptian
Origen of Alexandria was an early Christian theologian and biblical scholar, the most important and most controversial of the Greek Fathers of the Church. He produced the Hexapl...
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...
Edith Stein 1891 – 1942 · German
Edith Stein was a German philosopher, phenomenologist, and Carmelite nun. She studied under Edmund Husserl at Gottingen, served as his assistant, and wrote her doctoral disserta...
Isidore of Seville c. 560 – 636 · Spanish
Isidore of Seville was a Spanish bishop, encyclopedist, and the last of the Latin Fathers of the Church. Presiding over Visigothic Spain during the long transition from late ant...
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...
Gabriel Marcel 1889 – 1973 · French
Gabriel Marcel was a French Catholic existentialist philosopher, dramatist, and music critic. Often called the first French existentialist, he distinguished his thought sharply ...
Nikolai Berdyaev 1874 – 1948 · Russian
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher. After early involvement with Marxism and a brief imprisonment under the Tsar, he turned to Ch...
Peter Abelard 1079 – 1142 · French
Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, logician, and theologian and one of the most original thinkers of the twelfth century. He made decisive contributions to the problem of u...
John Chrysostom 347 AD – 407 AD · Greek
John Chrysostom, the Golden-Mouthed, was an early Christian preacher, archbishop of Constantinople, and one of the most important Fathers of the Greek-speaking Church. After asc...
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...
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 Aquinas 1225 – 1274 · Italian
Thomas Aquinas was a 13th-century Italian Dominican friar and philosopher, the most influential figure of medieval scholasticism. His Summa Theologica, left unfinished at his de...
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...
Gregory of Nazianzus 329 AD – 389 AD · Greek
Gregory of Nazianzus, called the Theologian, was a fourth-century Cappadocian Father, archbishop of Constantinople, and one of the principal architects of Trinitarian orthodoxy....
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...
Bonaventure 1221 – 1274 · Italian
Bonaventure was a 13th-century Italian Franciscan friar, theologian, philosopher, and Cardinal, regarded as one of the most important medieval Christian thinkers alongside his c...
Cassiodorus c. 485 – c. 585 · Roman
Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was a Roman senator, scholar, and statesman who served the Ostrogothic kings of Italy under Theodoric and his successors before retir...
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...
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 ...
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 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...
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...
Gabriel Biel c. 1420 – 1495 · German
Gabriel Biel was a German scholastic philosopher and theologian, sometimes called the last of the great medieval nominalists. After studies at Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Cologne an...
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...
Hans Urs von Balthasar 1905 – 1988 · Swiss
Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher and one of the most wide-ranging Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. After early studies of Germa...
Henry of Ghent c. 1217 – 1293 · Flemish
Henry of Ghent was a Flemish secular master of theology at Paris in the late thirteenth century and one of the most influential scholastics of the generation between Aquinas and...
Hugh of Saint Victor c. 1096 – 1141 · German-French
Hugh of Saint Victor was a German-born theologian and philosopher who taught at the abbey of Saint Victor in Paris and shaped the intellectual and contemplative life of the Vict...
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 Climacus c. 579 – c. 649 · Byzantine
John Climacus, also known as John of the Ladder, was a Byzantine Christian monk and philosopher of the late sixth and early seventh centuries, abbot of the monastery of Saint Ca...
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 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...
Peter Damian 1007 – 1072 · Italian
Peter Damian was an Italian Benedictine reformer, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and one of the most vigorous voices of the eleventh-century reform of the Latin Church. After early s...
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...
Simone Weil 1909 – 1943 · French
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Trained in philosophy alongside Simone de Beauvoir, she taught at provincial lycees while spending vacation...
Tertullian 155 AD – 220 AD · Roman
Tertullian of Carthage was a prolific early Christian author and the first major Christian writer to compose his works in Latin, for which he is sometimes called the father of W...
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...
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...
Alvin Plantinga b. 1932 · American
Alvin Plantinga is an American philosopher of religion, long associated with Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame, and the most influential analytic Christian philoso...
Anselm of Canterbury 1033 – 1109 · Italian
Anselm of Canterbury was an 11th and early 12th-century Italian-Norman Benedictine monk, philosopher, and theologian, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. H...
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...
Catherine of Genoa 1447 – 1510 · Italian
Catherine of Genoa was an Italian mystic and philanthropist of the late fifteenth century. Married young to a difficult husband, she experienced a transformative conversion at t...
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 ...
Hildegard of Bingen 1098 – 1179 · German
Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess, polymath, and one of the most important religious figures of the twelfth century. From the age of three she experienced visi...
Johannes Tauler c. 1300 – 1361 · German
Johannes Tauler was a German Dominican preacher and mystic and one of the principal figures of the Rhineland mystical tradition along with Meister Eckhart and Henry Suso. After ...
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 Scotus Eriugena 815 – 877 · Irish
John Scotus Eriugena was an Irish theologian and Neoplatonist philosopher active at the court of the Carolingian king Charles the Bald. He produced the first Latin translation o...
Justin Martyr 100 AD – 165 AD · Roman
Justin Martyr was an early Christian apologist, the first Christian author known to have engaged Greek philosophy as a Christian. Born in Samaria, he sought wisdom among the Sto...
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...
Athanasius 297 AD – 373 AD · Greek-Egyptian
Athanasius of Alexandria was a fourth-century Egyptian Christian theologian and bishop and the central defender of Nicene orthodoxy against the Arian doctrine in the decades fol...
Henry Suso c. 1295 – 1366 · German
Heinrich Seuse, known in English as Henry Suso, was a German Dominican mystic, preacher, and spiritual director and one of the principal figures of the Rhineland mystical tradit...
Jean-Luc Marion b. 1946 · French
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and theologian, a major figure in contemporary phenomenology, and a leading interpreter of Descartes. His God Without Being challenged th...
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...
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...
Photios I c. 810 – 893 · Byzantine
Photios I, called the Great, was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and twice Patriarch of Constantinople, the most learned man of ninth-century Byzantium and one of the princ...
Rene Girard 1923 – 2015 · French
Rene Girard was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science best known for his theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. From his early li...
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...
Lactantius c. 250 AD – c. 325 AD · Roman
Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius was an early Christian Latin author and rhetorician who served as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine. Trained in classical rhetori...
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...
Alexis Kagame 1912 – 1981 · Rwandan
Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan Catholic priest, philosopher, historian, and linguist and one of the principal pioneers of academic African philosophy. After studies at Astrida and ...
Catherine of Siena 1347 – 1380 · Italian
Catherine of Siena was an Italian Dominican tertiary, mystic, and political activist whose influence on the fourteenth-century Church was extraordinary for a woman of her time. ...
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...
John of Damascus c. 675 – 749 · Syrian-Greek
John of Damascus was an Arab Christian monk, theologian, and hymnographer, often counted as the last of the Greek Fathers. After serving for a time as a high official at the ear...
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...
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...
Hadewijch of Antwerp c. 1200 – c. 1260 · Flemish
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a thirteenth-century Flemish Beguine mystic and philosopher, leader of a small community of beguines in the Low Countries, and the author of one of the ...
Duns Scotus c. 1266 – 1308 · Scottish
John Duns Scotus was a 13th and early 14th-century Scottish Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian, regarded as one of the most important medieval scholastic philosophers...
Eusebius of Caesarea c. 260 AD – c. 340 AD · Greek-Roman
Eusebius of Caesarea was a Greek Christian bishop, scholar, and historian and the principal author of the first surviving general history of the Christian Church. After the pers...
John B. Cobb Jr. b. 1925 · American
John B. Cobb Jr. is an American Process philosopher and theologian, professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, and one of the leading living interpreters of Alfred ...
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...
Karl Rahner 1904 – 1984 · German
Karl Rahner was a German Jesuit theologian and philosopher and one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Trained in scholastic theology and in Heid...
Ramon Llull 1232 – 1316 · Catalan
Ramon Llull was a Catalan philosopher, theologian, mystic, and missionary, the first major author to write philosophical and literary works in the vernacular Catalan. After a wo...
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...
Bernard of Chartres c. 1080 – c. 1130 · French
Bernard of Chartres was a French Latin Platonist of the early twelfth century, master and chancellor of the cathedral school of Chartres, and one of the most influential teacher...
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 Lombard c. 1096 – 1160 · Italian
Peter Lombard, known as the Master of the Sentences, was an Italian theologian and bishop of Paris, and the author of the most influential textbook of medieval scholastic theolo...
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite c. 475 AD – c. 525 AD · Syrian
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the conventional name given to an anonymous late-fifth or early-sixth-century Christian theologian who wrote in Greek under the persona of the...
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...
Raimon Panikkar 1918 – 2010 · Spanish-Indian
Raimon Panikkar was a Spanish-Indian philosopher and Catholic priest, born in Barcelona to a Catalan mother and an Indian father, and one of the most influential figures in twen...
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...
Louis Lavelle 1883 – 1951 · French
Louis Lavelle was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the principal exponents of the philosophy of being and of participation in twentieth-century French thought. Long-time...
Pope Gregory the Great 540 AD – 604 AD · Roman
Gregory the Great was a Roman pope, theologian, and one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church. After service as prefect of Rome and as papal envoy to Constantinople, he was el...
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...
Ivan Ilyin 1883 – 1954 · Russian
Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, legal theorist, and political thinker and one of the most consequential conservative voices of the Russia...
Jean Gerson 1363 – 1429 · French
Jean Charlier de Gerson was a French theologian, mystic, and chancellor of the University of Paris and one of the leading figures of the late medieval conciliar movement. He pla...
Joachim of Fiore c. 1135 – 1202 · Italian
Joachim of Fiore was an Italian Cistercian abbot, biblical exegete, and one of the most influential apocalyptic thinkers of the Middle Ages. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land ...
John Finnis b. 1940 · Australian-British
John Finnis is an Australian-British legal and moral philosopher, emeritus professor of law at Oxford and a long-time professor at the University of Notre Dame. Natural Law and ...
Maximus the Confessor 580 AD – 662 AD · Greek
Maximus the Confessor was a seventh-century Greek Christian monk and theologian and one of the great architects of Eastern patristic thought. After service in the imperial court...
Mechthild of Magdeburg c. 1207 – c. 1282 · German
Mechthild of Magdeburg was a German beguine and Christian mystic and the author of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, the first major work of mystical theology written in Middle ...
Richard Swinburne b. 1934 · British
Richard Swinburne is a British philosopher of religion, long associated with the University of Oxford, and the most prolific defender of natural theology in late-twentieth-centu...
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, ...
Alan of Lille c. 1128 – 1202 · French
Alan of Lille was a French Cistercian theologian, preacher, and Latin poet of the twelfth-century renaissance, known to medieval readers as Doctor Universalis for the breadth of...
Aleksei Losev 1893 – 1988 · Russian
Aleksei Losev was a Russian philosopher, classicist, and historian of philosophy, the last great Russian neoplatonist of the Silver Age, who survived imprisonment in the Stalini...
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...
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...
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,...
Beatrijs of Nazareth 1200 – 1268 · Flemish
Beatrijs of Nazareth was a thirteenth-century Cistercian nun, mystic, and philosopher of the Low Countries, prioress of the abbey of Our Lady of Nazareth near Lier in the southe...
Berengar of Tours c. 999 – 1088 · French
Berengar of Tours was a French theologian, philosopher, and grammarian of the eleventh century, master of the cathedral school of Tours, and the principal early-medieval defende...
Bernard Lonergan 1904 – 1984 · Canadian
Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian and one of the leading representatives of transcendental Thomism. After studies at Heythrop, Lon...
Bernard Silvestris c. 1085 – c. 1178 · French
Bernard Silvestris was a Latin Platonist philosopher and poet of the twelfth-century Renaissance, master at the cathedral school of Tours, and one of the central figures of the ...
Boethius of Dacia c. 1240 – c. 1284 · Danish
Boethius of Dacia was a Latin philosopher and master of arts at the University of Paris, one of the leading exponents of the Latin Averroist school of the Faculty of Arts in the...
Chalcidius c. 320 – c. 400 · Roman
Chalcidius was a Latin philosopher and Christian thinker of late antiquity, whose Latin translation of the first part of Plato's Timaeus and his accompanying Commentary on the T...
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...
Emmanuel Mounier 1905 – 1950 · French
Emmanuel Mounier was a French Catholic philosopher and the founder of the personalist movement and its journal Esprit, founded in 1932. Drawing on Bergson, Maritain, and the Chr...
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 1888 – 1973 · German-American
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a German-American Christian philosopher of speech, history, and the social sciences. After a youthful conversion from Judaism to Christianity that is...
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga 1934 – 2018 · Cameroonian
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga was a Cameroonian philosopher and former Jesuit and one of the sharpest critics of ethnophilosophy in the African philosophical tradition. His Christianit...
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...
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...
Frederick Copleston 1907 – 1994 · British
Frederick Charles Copleston was an English Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy and the author of the standard English-language survey of Western philosophy, ...
Gilbert of Poitiers c. 1085 – 1154 · French
Gilbert of Poitiers, also known as Gilbert de la Porree, was a French scholastic theologian and bishop of Poitiers and one of the most acute minds of the twelfth-century renaiss...
Hedwig Conrad-Martius 1888 – 1966 · German
Hedwig Conrad-Martius was a German Catholic phenomenologist and one of the leading figures of the Munich-Gottingen circle around Husserl and Reinach. A friend of Edith Stein, wi...
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim c. 935 – c. 1002 · Saxon
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim was a tenth-century Saxon canoness, poet, and philosopher in the imperial abbey of Gandersheim, the first known dramatist of the post-classical Latin W...
Ignacio Ellacuria 1930 – 1989 · Spanish-Salvadoran
Ignacio Ellacuria Beascoechea was a Spanish-Salvadoran Jesuit philosopher, theologian, and the long-time rector of the Central American University in San Salvador. A pupil of Xa...
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...
Jean Buridan c. 1300 – c. 1361 · French
Jean Buridan was a French priest and one of the most important philosophers of the late Middle Ages, who spent his entire career in the secular arts faculty at Paris rather than...
John D. Caputo b. 1940 · American
John D. Caputo is an American philosopher, professor emeritus at Villanova University and Syracuse University, and one of the most influential figures in the contemporary tradit...
John Italos c. 1023 – c. 1090 · Byzantine
John Italos was a Byzantine philosopher of the eleventh century, born in southern Italy of Norman parents, who studied in Constantinople under Michael Psellos and succeeded him ...
John Philoponus c. 490 AD – c. 570 AD · Greek
John Philoponus was a Greek Alexandrian Christian philosopher, theologian, and Aristotelian commentator of late antiquity. A pupil of the Neoplatonist Ammonius Hermiae, he produ...
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...
Lev Karsavin 1882 – 1952 · Russian
Lev Platonovich Karsavin was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, medieval historian, and one of the most original metaphysicians of the Russian religious renaissance. Afte...
Linda Zagzebski b. 1946 · American
Linda Zagzebski is an American philosopher, George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma, and one of the leading contemporary theorists of virtue epistemol...
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...
Macrina the Younger c. 327 – 379 · Cappadocian
Macrina the Younger was a Cappadocian Christian philosopher and theologian, the elder sister of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, who shaped the early monastic communities o...
Marguerite Porete c. 1250 – 1310 · French
Marguerite Porete was a French Christian mystic, beguine, and the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls, one of the most daring works of medieval mystical theology. The book, wri...
Marius Victorinus c. 290 AD – c. 364 AD · Roman
Gaius Marius Victorinus was a Roman rhetorician, grammarian, Neoplatonist philosopher, and Latin Christian theologian whose late conversion in Rome around 355 became a pattern t...
Mark Eugenikos 1392 – 1444 · Byzantine
Mark Eugenikos was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and Metropolitan of Ephesus, who attended the Council of Florence of 1438-39 as the principal philosophical and theologic...
Maurice Blondel 1861 – 1949 · French
Maurice Blondel was a French Catholic philosopher and the principal architect of the philosophy of action. Long-time professor at Aix-en-Provence, he produced his foundational d...
Michael Psellos 1018 – 1078 · Byzantine
Michael Psellos was a Byzantine philosopher, statesman, and historian, the leading intellectual of eleventh-century Constantinople, and the principal figure in the Platonist rev...
Nemesius of Emesa c. 350 – c. 420 · Syrian
Nemesius of Emesa was a late-fourth-century Christian philosopher and bishop in Syria, whose On the Nature of Man fused the inheritance of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and the Stoic...
Nikolai Lossky 1870 – 1965 · Russian
Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher and the principal architect of the metaphysical position he called intuitivism. A professor at St. Peters...
Pavel Florensky 1882 – 1937 · Russian
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox theologian, mathematician, electrical engineer, art historian, and philosopher of religion, often called the Russian Leonar...
Petrus Olivi 1248 – 1298 · French
Petrus Iohannis Olivi was a French Franciscan philosopher and theologian of the late thirteenth century, the most original and controversial Spiritual Franciscan of his generati...
Pierre d'Ailly 1351 – 1420 · French
Pierre d'Ailly was a French scholastic theologian, cardinal, and statesman of the Church and one of the leading figures of the conciliarist movement that resolved the Western Sc...
Placide Tempels 1906 – 1977 · Belgian
Placide Frans Tempels was a Belgian Franciscan missionary in the Belgian Congo and the author of Bantu Philosophy, published in 1945, the first book to argue at length that the ...
Richard of Saint Victor c. 1110 – 1173 · Scottish-French
Richard of Saint Victor was a Scottish-born Latin theologian and philosopher of the twelfth century, prior of the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris and one of the most influential ...
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...
Robert Spaemann 1927 – 2018 · German
Robert Spaemann was a German Catholic philosopher, professor at the University of Munich, and one of the most influential conservative voices in late-twentieth-century German ph...
Romano Guardini 1885 – 1968 · Italian-German
Romano Guardini was an Italian-born German Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian and one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He held chair...
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...
Semyon Frank 1877 – 1950 · Russian
Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher and one of the foremost metaphysicians of the Russian religious renaissance of the early twentieth century...
Sergei Bulgakov 1871 – 1944 · Russian
Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, economist, and religious philosopher. After early career as a Marxist economist, he turned to religious philosophy...
Siger of Brabant c. 1240 – c. 1284 · Brabantian
Siger of Brabant was a master of arts at the University of Paris and the leading exponent of Latin Averroism in the thirteenth century. Drawing on the commentaries of Averroes, ...
Synesius of Cyrene c. 370 AD – c. 414 AD · Greek-Roman
Synesius of Cyrene was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and Christian bishop of Ptolemais in Roman Libya. A pupil of Hypatia at Alexandria, to whom he addressed several of his f...
Theodore Metochites 1270 – 1332 · Byzantine
Theodore Metochites was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, statesman, and poet of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, the prime minister of the emperor Androniko...
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 of Auvergne c. 1180 – 1249 · French
William of Auvergne was a French scholastic theologian and bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249, and one of the first major Latin Christian thinkers to engage serio...
William of Conches c. 1090 – c. 1154 · French
William of Conches was a French scholastic philosopher and grammarian and one of the leading lights of the School of Chartres in the twelfth-century renaissance. He taught gramm...
Xavier Zubiri 1898 – 1983 · Spanish
Xavier Zubiri was a Spanish Catholic philosopher and one of the most original Spanish-language metaphysicians of the twentieth century. After studies under Husserl, Heidegger, a...
Albert the Great c. 1200 – 1280 · German
Albertus Magnus, known in English as Albert the Great, was a 13th-century German Dominican friar, theologian, philosopher, and natural scientist, regarded as one of the greatest...