Nagarjuna c. 150 – c. 250

Nagarjuna was a 2nd or 3rd-century AD Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosopher and the founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school, regarded as one of the most important philosophers in the Indian Buddhist tradition. His central work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika or Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, develops the doctrine of emptiness, arguing that all phenomena lack inherent existence and exist only in relations of dependent origination. His method of reductio ad absurdum, applied systematically to philosophical positions of his Buddhist and Hindu interlocutors, demonstrated the limits of conceptual thought. His thought reshaped subsequent Buddhist philosophy across India, Tibet, China, and Japan, and provided the philosophical foundations of nearly every later Mahayana school. He has been compared with thinkers including Wittgenstein and Sextus Empiricus for his anti-dogmatic philosophical method.