Most Famous Transcendentalism Philosophers

Transcendentalism was a 19th-century American philosophical and literary movement centred in New England, drawing on European Romanticism, German Idealism, Indian and Chinese religious thought, and Unitarian Christianity. Its central convictions include the inherent goodness of nature and humanity, the priority of individual intuition over external authority, and the spiritual significance of self-reliance and direct experience of nature. Its leading figures include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. The movement gathered around the Transcendental Club, founded in 1836, and its journal The Dial. Its influence on American literature, environmental thought, and philosophy of self-reliance has been lasting.

Philosophers in this tradition

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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 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...
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...