Most Famous Enlightenment Philosophers
The Enlightenment was an intellectual and cultural movement that dominated Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emphasized reason, individual liberty, scientific inquiry, religious toleration, and skepticism toward traditional authority. Major figures include Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. Its ideas underwrote modern constitutional government, human rights doctrine, and the institutional separation of church and state. The American and French revolutions are often cited as practical expressions of Enlightenment political thought.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Voltaire
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...
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Edmund Burke
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...
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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...
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Mary Wollstonecraft
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...
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Johann Gottfried Herder
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...
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Montesquieu
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...
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Bernard Mandeville
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...
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Baron d'Holbach
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 ...
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
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...
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Joseph Priestley
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...
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Immanuel Kant
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...
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Adam Ferguson
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...
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an 18th-century Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer whose work profoundly influenced political theory, education, literature, and the French Revo...
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John Locke
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...
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Adam Smith
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 ...
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Friedrich Schiller
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...
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Joseph de Maistre
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...
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Madame de Stael
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...
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Claude Adrien Helvetius
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...
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Denis Diderot
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...
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Francis Hutcheson
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...
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Hannah More
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...
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Julien Offray de La Mettrie
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...
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Etienne Bonnot de Condillac
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...
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Thomas Reid
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...
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Pierre Bayle
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...
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Wilhelm von Humboldt
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...
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Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff was a German philosopher, mathematician, and the most influential continental rationalist between Leibniz and Kant. He developed a vast, systematic philosophy in...
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Marquis de Condorcet
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...
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Olympe de Gouges
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...
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Joseph Butler
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...
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Moses Mendelssohn
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...
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Cesare Beccaria
Cesare Beccaria was an Italian philosopher, jurist, and economist and the foundational figure of modern criminology. His treatise On Crimes and Punishments, published anonymousl...
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert
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...
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Anton Wilhelm Amo
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...
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Antonio Genovesi
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...
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Catharine Macaulay
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...
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Christian Garve
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...
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Christian Thomasius
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...
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Emilie du Chatelet
Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, was a French Enlightenment philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. The translator and commentator on Newton's...
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Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
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...
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Johann Nicolaus Tetens
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...
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Lord Shaftesbury
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...
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Madame de Lambert
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...
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Sophie de Grouchy
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...