Branch
Metaphysics
181 philosophers, 9 traditions
What there is and what it is like at the most general level: being and existence, substance, causation, time, change, and whether reality is one or many.
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Themes in this branch
Philosophers
Listed where the reference works cited on their page describe significant work in metaphysics.
Western
ThalesTraditionally counted the first Greek philosopher, he held that water is the origin of all things.
AnaximanderMilesian thinker who wrote the first Greek book of prose about nature, deriving all things from "the Boundless" and picturing an earth that floats unsupported in space.
PythagorasGreek sage who taught that the soul is immortal and is reborn in other bodies, and founded a disciplined way of life; later legend made him the father of mathematics.
HeraclitusEphesian thinker who held that everything is in flux, that opposites form a unity, and that change is governed by a rational principle, the logos.
AnaxagorasThe first philosopher to live in Athens, he held that everything contains a share of everything else, and that a cosmic mind, _nous_, set the world spinning into order.
ParmenidesAuthor of a metaphysical poem arguing that what is cannot come to be or pass away, so that change and plurality are illusions of the senses.
EmpedoclesSicilian poet-philosopher who explained all change as the mixing and separating of four eternal roots, earth, water, air and fire, by two forces, Love and Strife.
Zeno of EleaParmenides' younger associate, famous for paradoxes, among them Achilles and the tortoise, that draw contradictions out of common beliefs about plurality and motion.- DemocritusCo-founder of ancient atomism, who held that the world is made of indivisible atoms moving in void, and that the good life is one of cheerfulness.
PlatoStudent of Socrates and founder of the Academy, whose dialogues range across ethics, politics, knowledge and reality, and introduce the theory of Forms.
AristotlePlato's student, who systematised logic and wrote on nearly every field of knowledge, from biology and physics to ethics, politics and metaphysics.
EpicurusTaught that the good life is one of tranquil pleasure, free from fear of the gods and of death, and explained the world as atoms moving in the void.
ChrysippusThird head of the Stoic school and its great systematiser, who developed a logic of propositions and argued that a fated world leaves room for moral responsibility.
LucretiusRoman poet whose _On the Nature of Things_ set out Epicurus' atomism in Latin verse, to free readers from fear of the gods and of death.
PlotinusFounder of Neoplatonism, who taught that all reality flows from a single, indescribable source, the One, and that the soul can return to it.- ProclusHead of the Platonic school in Athens for nearly fifty years, who built Neoplatonism into a rigorous system that reached the Middle Ages under other names.
John Scottus EriugenaIrish scholar at the Frankish court who knew Greek, translated the Greek Christian Neoplatonists and wove them into a vast system in which all of nature flows out of God and returns.
Anselm of CanterburyBenedictine abbot and Archbishop of Canterbury, famous for the ontological argument, which defines God as "that than which a greater cannot be thought".
Peter AbelardThe pre-eminent philosopher of the twelfth century, a great logician and the first great nominalist, who held that intention alone makes an act right or wrong.
BonaventureFranciscan master at Paris and head of his order, who read the whole of creation as signs leading the mind to God, and argued that a created world cannot be eternal.
Thomas AquinasDominican friar and theologian who combined Aristotle's philosophy with Christian doctrine in the most influential synthesis of medieval scholasticism.- Meister EckhartDominican master of theology and preacher whose Latin treatises and German sermons describe God as a boundless "nothing" and call the soul to let go of everything so that God may be born in it.
John Duns ScotusFranciscan philosopher-theologian, "the Subtle Doctor", known for the univocity of being, the "thisness" that makes each thing an individual, and a will free at the very moment of choice.
William of OckhamFranciscan logician and nominalist, remembered for "Ockham's Razor", the principle that we should not assume more entities than we need.
Nicholas of CusaCardinal, church reformer and self-taught philosopher whose _On Learned Ignorance_ taught that the infinite God, in whom all opposites coincide, lies beyond every measure of the mind.
Giordano BrunoRenaissance philosopher who took Copernicus as proof of an infinite, living universe full of other worlds, in which God is present in all things. He was burned as a heretic in Rome.
Lucrezia MarinellaVenetian author whose The Nobility and Excellence of Women argued that women's souls and bodies make them superior to men in reason and virtue, and demanded freedom and equality.
Thomas HobbesEnglish philosopher who argued in Leviathan that people escape a state of war only by submitting to an absolute sovereign, and defended a materialist view of the world.
René DescartesOften called the father of modern philosophy, he sought certain foundations for knowledge through methodical doubt and the insight 'I think, therefore I am'.
Ninon de LenclosParis salon host and courtesan whose Epicurean naturalism made pleasure the aim of conduct and claimed for women the same right to pursue it as men.
Margaret CavendishSeventeenth-century philosopher, scientist and writer whose naturalism held that matter itself thinks: minds are material, and perception and reason run through the whole of nature.
Madame de SévignéFrance's foremost letter-writer of the seventeenth century, whose correspondence rejected mechanistic nature and chronicled the philosophical debates of the Cartesian age.- Anne ConwayEnglish philosopher whose vitalist metaphysics, set against Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, held that all created things are living spirit, capable of endless growth in goodness.
Baruch SpinozaRationalist who identified God with Nature and set out his ethics in the form of geometrical proofs.
John LockeEnglish empiricist who argued that all ideas come from experience, and whose case for natural rights and government by consent shaped liberal political thought.
Antoinette DeshoulièresFrench poet who, following Lucretius and her friend Gassendi, used verse to defend naturalism: thought, choice and love explained by matter and instinct.
Nicolas MalebrancheFrench priest and Cartesian who joined Descartes to Augustine, holding that we perceive bodies by way of ideas that exist in God, and that nothing but God truly causes anything.
Gottfried Wilhelm LeibnizRationalist polymath who co-invented the calculus and argued that the world consists of simple substances, monads, and is the best of all possible worlds.- Mary AstellEnglish rationalist philosopher who argued that the supposed defects of women's minds come from their education, not their nature, and set out a method by which women could think for themselves.
George BerkeleyIrish philosopher and bishop who argued that there is no matter, only minds and their ideas, so that for ordinary things to be is to be perceived.
Émilie du ChâteletFrench natural philosopher who gave Newton's physics a Leibnizian metaphysical foundation, defended the use of hypotheses in science, and made the standard French translation of Newton's Principia.
David HumeScottish empiricist and sceptic who argued that our beliefs about cause and effect rest on habit rather than reason.
Immanuel KantArgued that the mind actively structures experience, reconciling rationalism and empiricism, and grounded morality in the rational will.
G. W. F. HegelThe most systematic of the German idealists, who saw reality and history as the unfolding of spirit, and whose dialectical method shaped much of later philosophy.- Mary ShepherdScottish philosopher whose essays on cause and effect answered Hume, arguing that causes necessarily produce their effects and that reason, not habit, grounds our knowledge of an external world.
Arthur SchopenhauerGerman philosopher who held that the world at its core is a blind, restless Will, and that art, compassion and ascetic renunciation offer release from suffering.
Henri BergsonFrench philosopher of time and life, famous in his day, who contrasted lived duration with measured time and explained evolution by a 'vital impulse'.
Alfred North WhiteheadMathematician who wrote Principia Mathematica with Russell, then turned to metaphysics at Harvard and founded process philosophy, which treats the world as interdependent events rather than things.
Bertrand RussellBritish philosopher and logician who argued that mathematics reduces to logic, helped found analytic philosophy, and campaigned for peace.
G. E. MooreCambridge philosopher who helped found analytic philosophy, argued that goodness cannot be defined in natural terms, and defended common sense against sceptics and idealists.
Martin HeideggerGerman philosopher whose Being and Time asked what it means to be, and shaped existentialism, phenomenology and much of later European thought.
Edith SteinPhenomenologist and Husserl's assistant, known for her account of empathy, who after converting to Catholicism joined phenomenology to Thomist metaphysics; she died at Auschwitz.
Jean-Paul SartreFrench existentialist philosopher, novelist and public intellectual, who held that human beings are condemned to be free and responsible for what they make of themselves.
W. V. O. QuineHarvard logician and philosopher who attacked logical empiricism's distinction between analytic and synthetic truths and saw philosophy as continuous with science.
Ruth Barcan MarcusAmerican logician who built the first formal systems of quantified modal logic, defended modal logic against Quine, and argued that proper names are meaningless tags.- Gilles DeleuzeFrench philosopher of difference who called himself a "pure metaphysician", replacing substance with multiplicity, and who wrote Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari.
Michael DummettEnglish philosopher who interpreted Frege as the founder of analytic philosophy and argued for "anti-realism": that what our sentences mean depends on what we can recognise as evidence for them.- Bernard WilliamsEnglish moral philosopher who argued that ethical life is too untidy for any systematic theory, and who made integrity, moral luck and truthfulness central topics of ethics.
- Ignacio EllacuríaSpanish-born Salvadoran Jesuit whose philosophy of liberation, built on Xavier Zubiri’s metaphysics, called for a preferential option for the marginalised. Soldiers murdered him in 1989.
Jacques DerridaAlgerian-born French philosopher who founded deconstruction, a way of reading texts and institutions that unsettles the oppositions on which Western thought is built.- Luce IrigarayBelgian-born philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst whose Speculum of the Other Woman exposed women's exclusion from philosophy and called for true sexual difference.
Robert NozickAmerican philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia made the classic case for a libertarian minimal state against Rawls, and who went on to new theories of knowledge and personal identity.
Jean-Luc NancyFrench philosopher of community and "being-with" who argued that the longing for a closed, unified community lies behind much modern political violence.
David LewisAmerican philosopher, one of the most important of the 20th century, known for his modal realism, his Humean metaphysics and his analysis of convention.
Slavoj ŽižekSlovenian philosopher and cultural critic who reads German idealism through Lacan’s psychoanalysis to argue that ideology still governs a supposedly post-ideological world.
Jewish
- Philo of AlexandriaJewish thinker of Roman Alexandria who read Scripture through Greek philosophy, treating philosophy as the servant of revelation; often called the founder of negative theology.
Isaac IsraeliPhysician to the first Fatimid caliph and one of the earliest Jewish Neoplatonists, whose Arabic works, drawing on al-Kindi, were widely read in Hebrew and Latin translation.
Solomon ibn GabirolAndalusian Hebrew poet and Neoplatonist whose Fountain of Life, read in Latin as the work of 'Avicebron', taught that even souls and intellects are made of matter and form.- Abraham Ibn DaudAndalusian Jewish philosopher and historian whose Exalted Faith made the first systematic attempt to bring Aristotle into Jewish thought, a generation before Maimonides.
MaimonidesRabbi, physician and the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, whose Guide of the Perplexed reconciles scripture with Aristotelian philosophy while stressing the limits of human knowledge.- Samuel Ibn TibbonTranslator of Maimonides' Guide into Hebrew and maker of Aristotle and Averroes in Hebrew for the first time, who founded Maimonideanism as a movement of philosophical Bible reading.
- Isaac AlbalagAmong the most rigorous of the Jewish Averroists, who set out to restore Aristotle, as Averroes read him, and is remembered for a 'double truth' view of religion and philosophy.
- Isaac PolqarJewish Averroist of northern Spain who read Judaism naturalistically and defended it against his former teacher, Abner of Burgos, after Abner converted to Christianity.
- Abner of BurgosJewish Aristotelian who, around sixty, became a Neoplatonic Christian, and whose polemics built an original critique of Judaism and of Aristotelian science, later felt through Crescas.
- GersonidesProvençal philosopher, astronomer and biblical commentator whose Wars of the Lord trusts reason to settle even creation and God's knowledge, sometimes against tradition.
- Hasdai CrescasRabbi and leader of Aragon's Jews whose Light of the Lord attacks Aristotle's physics, arguing for an actual infinite and an infinite void, and whose ideas reached Spinoza.
- Elijah DelmedigoCretan Jewish philosopher who taught Averroes to Pico della Mirandola and other Christian scholars in Italy, and defended philosophy within Judaism in his Examination of Religion.
Judah AbrabanelJewish philosopher of the Renaissance, known as Leone Ebreo, whose Dialogues of Love present love as both a sensual and a cosmic principle binding the universe in a circle.
Moses MendelssohnJewish philosopher at the heart of the German Enlightenment, who argued for the immortality of the soul and for religious tolerance, holding that neither church nor state may coerce belief.
Franz RosenzweigGerman-Jewish thinker whose Star of Redemption, begun on postcards from the Balkan front, joined philosophy and theology in a 'new thinking' built on speech, time and revelation.
Emmanuel LevinasLithuanian-born French philosopher who argued that ethics, the encounter with another person, is first philosophy, before metaphysics or ontology; also a reader of the Talmud.
Arabic and Islamic
al-KindiThe first thinker in the Arabic tradition to call himself a philosopher, who worked alongside translators of Greek texts and held that philosophy and revelation agree.
Abu Bakr al-RaziPhysician and controversial philosopher who held that the world arose from five eternal principles, and was reported to have argued that reason, not prophecy, guides us.
al-FarabiCalled the 'Second Teacher' after Aristotle, he established the Arabic tradition of Aristotelian logic and wrote on the ideal, virtuous city.- Abu Yaqub al-SijistaniIsmaili missionary of tenth-century Persia whose Neoplatonism held that God lies beyond both being and non-being, and that a single, undivided intellect is the first thing God made.
AvicennaPhilosopher and physician who built a comprehensive system from Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas, known for the distinction between essence and existence.- Hamid al-Din al-KirmaniLeading Ismaili theologian and philosopher of the Fatimid age, who replaced the Neoplatonic pair of Intellect and Soul with a cosmos of ten intellects, adapted from al-Farabi.
- Nasir KhusrawPersian poet, traveller and Ismaili philosopher whose Neoplatonic cosmology traces all things from God's creative word down to humanity, and back again through the intellect.
- Omar KhayyamPersian mathematician, astronomer and poet whose philosophical treatises follow Avicenna, while the quatrains attributed to him question religious certainties and dwell on doubt and transience.
al-GhazaliSunni theologian, jurist and mystic whose Incoherence of the Philosophers condemned key doctrines of the Aristotelian philosophers while adopting their logic.- al-ShahrastaniHistorian of religions and theologian whose Book of Sects and Creeds set out the doctrines of every religion and philosophy known to him, and who attacked Avicenna's account of God.
- Ayn al-Qudat HamadaniPersian philosopher, Sufi master and judge, executed at thirty-four, whose Essence of Reality was the first full philosophical defence of mysticism in Islamic thought.
AverroesAndalusian judge and philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle earned him the title 'the Commentator' in medieval Europe.- Fakhr al-Din al-RaziTheologian and philosopher who tested every argument of Avicenna's system in turn, and whose critical commentaries set the agenda for later Islamic thought.
SuhrawardiFounder of the Illuminationist school, who described reality as a hierarchy of lights and held that the deepest knowledge comes through direct presence.- Abd al-Latif al-BaghdadiPhilosopher and physician who, after years as a follower of Avicenna, called for a return to Aristotle and to the earlier Arabic Aristotelians, and attacked false physicians, philosophers and alchemy.
- Ibn ArabiAndalusian thinker, called the Greatest Master, who taught that there is no true existence but God, and gave imagination a central place in knowledge and in the cosmos.
- Nasir al-Din TusiThe most famous scholar of his century in the Islamic world, author of some 165 works from astronomy to ethics, who served Ismaili and then Mongol rulers and founded a centre of learning at Maragha.
Mulla SadraPersian philosopher whose “transcendent philosophy” joined Avicennan, Illuminationist and mystical thought, arguing that existence, not essence, is what is real.
Indian
The BuddhaFounder of Buddhism, who taught that suffering arises from craving and can be ended, and that there is no enduring self.
NāgārjunaBuddhist philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka ('middle way') school, arguing that all things are empty of intrinsic nature.
VasubandhuBuddhist philosopher whose Treasury of the Abhidharma became a standard handbook, and whose later works argue that the world we experience is “mere cognition”.- BhartṛhariGrammarian-philosopher who held that reality is Brahman, whose essence is the Word, and that the meaning of a sentence is grasped as one indivisible whole.
- GauḍapādaEarly Advaita Vedānta teacher, revered as the teacher of Śaṅkara's teacher, who held that nothing is ever truly born and that the world of plurality is like a dream.
- BuddhapālitaEarly commentator on Nāgārjuna whose method of drawing out an opponent's absurd consequences was attacked by Bhāviveka and defended by Candrakīrti, founding the 'Prāsaṅgika' line.
BhāvivekaMadhyamaka thinker who insisted on formally stated inferences in the manner of Dignāga, criticised Buddhapālita, and began the 'Svātantrika' line.
CandrakīrtiMadhyamaka commentator whose Clear Words defended Buddhapālita's reductio method against Bhāviveka, and whose 'Prāsaṅgika' reading became authoritative in Tibet.- ŚrīguptaIndian Madhyamaka philosopher whose Introduction to Reality gave the first complete Madhyamaka form of the 'neither one nor many' case for emptiness.
ŚāntidevaBuddhist monk and poet whose Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life argues from the absence of a self to boundless care for others, and against the rationality of anger.
ŚaṅkaraThe pre-eminent teacher of Advaita Vedānta, who taught that the self (ātman) is identical with brahman, the one reality, and that plurality is not ultimately real.
ŚāntarakṣitaBuddhist philosopher who joined Madhyamaka, Yogācāra and the logic of Dharmakīrti into one system, then took it to Tibet as the first abbot of Samye.- BhāskaraThe first thinker the tradition recognises as a Bhedābheda Vedāntin, whose commentary on the Brahma Sūtra defended the reality of the world against Śaṅkara's Advaita.
- SomānandaKashmiri Śaiva thinker whose Cognition of Śiva was the first full work of scholastic philosophy in the monistic Śaiva tradition, explaining how Śiva emanates a real world identical with himself.
- RatnakīrtiBuddhist philosopher at Vikramaśīla whose crisp restatements of his teacher's work capture the final stage of Dignāga's tradition in India, and defend idealism and even solipsism.
RāmānujaChief proponent of Viśiṣṭādvaita, “qualified non-dualism”, which affirms both the unity of all in God and the reality of individual persons and things.- ŚrīharṣaIndian philosopher and poet whose Sweets of Refutation argued that every attempt to define knowledge, truth or the categories of reality collapses under its own standards.
MadhvaFounder of the Dvaita, or dualist, school of Vedānta, which holds that God, individual selves and the world are really and eternally distinct.- VeṅkaṭanāthaSouth Indian polymath, known as Vedānta Deśika, whose more than 100 works in Sanskrit and Tamil reshaped Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and Śrī Vaiṣṇava thought.
- VallabhaFounder of the Puṣṭimārga devotional sect, whose 'pure non-dualism' held that Brahman and the world are equally real, against Advaita's unreal world.
CaitanyaVaiṣṇava teacher whose 'inconceivable difference and non-difference' founded the Gauḍīya tradition, from which the Hare Krishna movement descends.- VijñānabhikṣuLast major Bhedābheda thinker of pre-modern India, who argued that Vedānta, Sāṅkhya, Yoga and Nyāya are at bottom one, and is best known for his commentaries on Sāṅkhya and Yoga.
Tibetan
DolpopaTibetan master of Jonang whose 'Great Middle Way' taught a single absolute, a pure transcendental knowledge, and was the burning question that Tsongkhapa answered.
TsongkhapaTibetan philosopher whose reading of Madhyamaka joined a robust realism about the conventional world to emptiness, and whose school became the Gelug.
GorampaSakya Madhyamaka philosopher and fierce critic of Tsongkhapa, whose banned works were rediscovered in the twentieth century and are now widely studied.
Chinese
LaoziSemi-legendary sage traditionally credited with the Daodejing, the founding text of Daoism, which counsels living in harmony with the dao through simplicity and non-action.- LieziSemi-legendary Daoist master named in the Zhuangzi, to whom the Liezi is attributed, the third classic of philosophical Daoism after the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.
- Yang XiongHan court poet and Confucian scholar, best known for holding that human nature is neither good, as Mencius said, nor bad, as Xunzi said, but a mixture of both.
- Huan TanHan thinker who argued that the spirit depends on the body and dies with it, attacking belief in ghosts and quests for immortality, and set the critical tone of Eastern Han philosophy.
- Wang ChongEastern Han critic who tested received teachings, sages included, against the evidence, and explained nature as the spontaneous workings of qi rather than the will of Heaven.
Zhong HuiThird-century interpreter of the Laozi and Yijing and an early figure of xuanxue, who held that natural capacity and nature coincide, and died after a failed rebellion.
Wang BiNeo-Daoist commentator, dead in his early twenties, who read the Dao as nothingness, the ground of all beings, and whose edition of the Laozi became the standard text.- Guo XiangAuthor of the leading commentary on the Zhuangzi, who taught that all things transform themselves without any creator, and that the Daoist sage belongs in public life, not in retreat.
- SengzhaoBuddhist monk and disciple of Kumārajīva whose Treatises of Zhao are the main source for early Chinese Madhyamaka, teaching emptiness through paradox.
ZhiyiFounding figure of Tiantai Buddhism, whose meditation teaching held that a single moment of experience contains, and is identical with, 'three thousand worlds'.
DushunMeditation master honoured as the first patriarch of Huayan Buddhism, who distilled the Avatamsaka Sutra into meditations and described ultimate reality as li, a patterned activity.
XuanzangBuddhist monk who spent sixteen years travelling to and studying in India, brought hundreds of texts back to China, and with his disciple Kuiji founded the Consciousness-only (Faxiang) school.- ZhiyanSecond patriarch of Huayan Buddhism, teacher of Fazang and the Korean monk Uisang, who ranked the Buddhist teachings in five tiers with the Huayan vision at the top.
Li TongxuanReclusive lay commentator on the Avatamsaka Sutra whose teaching of the one true dharma-realm, read through the Book of Changes, shaped Chinul in Korea and later Chan masters.
FazangSystematiser of Flower Garland (Huayan) Buddhism, who taught that all things contain and reflect one another, and served the empress Wu Zhao as lecturer, translator and ideologue.
ChengguanFourth patriarch of Huayan Buddhism, whose commentary on the Avatamsaka Sutra displaced Fazang's, and who described reality as a fourfold dharma-realm.- ZongmiFifth patriarch of Huayan and a patriarch of Chan, whose Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity ranked Confucianism and Daoism alongside Buddhist teachings, and found them wanting.
Shao YongNorthern Song thinker, sometimes counted a fifth founder of Neo-Confucianism, known for mathematical and numerological laws and for warning that subjectivity blocks knowledge of things.
Zhou DunyiNorthern Song thinker, honoured as the first Neo-Confucian master, whose Diagram of the Supreme Polarity traced the cosmos from its source to human beings and the sage.
Zhang ZaiNorthern Song pioneer of Neo-Confucianism who held that everything is qi, condensing and dispersing, and taught that we form one body with all things.
Cheng HaoCo-founder, with his brother Cheng Yi, of the Neo-Confucian "learning of principle", who saw ultimate reality as life-giving activity and the humane person as one body with all things.
Cheng YiNorthern Song Neo-Confucian who made principle (li) the ground of all existence and morality, and taught cultivation through composure and investigating things.
Zhu XiThe leading Neo-Confucian philosopher, whose synthesis and commentaries on the Four Books became the basis of Chinese state examinations for centuries.
Lu XiangshanSouthern Song Confucian, friend and critic of Zhu Xi, who held that principle is complete within the heart-mind, and with Wang Yangming gave his name to the 'learning of the heart-mind'.- Wang TingxiangMaverick Ming Confucian who held that qi alone accounts for everything, rejected the oneness of all things, and denied that human nature is necessarily good.
Huang ZongxiMing-Qing polymath and historian of Ming thought who turned the learning of the mind outward, to effort, history and the practical ordering of the world.
Wang FuzhiLate Ming-early Qing thinker who gave the most systematic form to a qi-based, vitalist metaphysics, and read principle through changing historical conditions.- Dai ZhenQing scholar who argued, against Zhu Xi, that pattern lies in everyday things and that ethics begins from fulfilling people's wants and feelings, not suppressing them.
Xiong ShiliFounder of modern Confucian philosophy, whose New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness recast Yogācāra Buddhism in Confucian terms and taught the goodness of human nature.
Zhang JunmaiModern Confucian thinker and politician who, in the 1923 debate with China's scientists, defended the limits of science and the value of Confucian truth.
Liang ShumingConfucian defender who, in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, saw world cultures as three stages and predicted a renewed Chinese culture for the world.
Feng YoulanHistorian of Chinese philosophy who rebuilt Zhu Xi's learning of principle with the tools of Western logic, and later reworked his thought under Mao in Marxist terms.
Mou ZongsanNew Confucian who argued, against Kant, that human beings have intellectual intuition, a direct moral knowing that makes sagehood possible and gives the world its moral meaning.- Tang JunyiNew Confucian philosopher and co-founder of New Asia College in Hong Kong, who analysed Chinese and Western cultures as expressions of the mind's pursuit of ideals.
- Lao Sze-kwangChinese philosopher in Taiwan and Hong Kong whose New History of Chinese Philosophy defined Chinese thought by what it does, orienting values, and who later built a philosophy of culture.
Japanese
KūkaiFounder of Shingon esoteric Buddhism, often called Japan's greatest premodern systematic thinker, who taught that the cosmos is the Buddha's body and that one can become a Buddha in this very body.
DōgenFounder of Japanese Sōtō Zen, who taught 'just sitting' as practice that is already realisation, and wrote of 'being-time', the inseparability of being and time.
Hayashi RazanEarly Tokugawa Neo-Confucian, among the first in Japan to restate Zhu Xi's philosophy of principle and generative force, who prized words as the key to the sages' minds.
Itō JinsaiKyoto Confucian scholar who rejected Zhu Xi's priority of principle for a monism of generative force, and read the Analects and Mencius word by word to purge Buddhist terms.
Nishida KitarōThe most influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, founder of the Kyoto School, who grounded self and world in 'pure experience' and in the place of absolute nothingness.- Tanabe HajimeNishida's colleague and critic in the Kyoto School, who rethought absolute nothingness as 'absolute mediation' and, after the war, wrote a philosophy of repentance, Philosophy as Metanoetics.
Kuki ShūzōJapanese philosopher whose Structure of Iki, a phenomenological study of a refined, erotic style of the Edo pleasure quarters, is perhaps the century's key work of Japanese aesthetics.- Hisamatsu Shin'ichiKyoto School philosopher who brought Zen practice as well as Zen thought into philosophy, and spoke of absolute nothingness as 'oriental nothingness'.
Nishitani KeijiKyoto School philosopher of religion, inspired by Nishida, who held that nihilism can be overcome only by passing through it to the 'field of emptiness'.
Tosaka JunMarxist student of Nishida and Tanabe who named the Kyoto School in 1932 and attacked it as bourgeois idealism; he died in prison in 1945.
Ueda ShizuteruKyoto School philosopher, Zen master and Eckhart scholar, who described human beings as living in a twofold world: the everyday world of language, set within an empty expanse of absolute nothingness.
Korean
WonhyoSilla monk, often called the most prominent philosopher of Korean Buddhism, who taught that all beings arise from and return to the One Mind, and sought to reconcile rival Buddhist doctrines.
UisangSilla monk who founded the Korean school of Flower Garland (Hwaeom) Buddhism, teaching that all things arise interdependently, each containing the whole universe.
UicheonGoryeo monk, traditionally the founder of Korea's Cheontae (Tiantai) school, who sought to harmonise all Buddhist teachings and hailed Wonhyo as the master of reconciliation.- Jeong DojeonConfucian scholar and statesman of the new Joseon dynasty whose critiques of Buddhism, for abandoning family and society, shaped the Neo-Confucian thought of early Joseon.
- Yi HwangJoseon Neo-Confucian, known as Toegye, whose Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning distilled Zhu Xi's thought, and whose Four-Seven Debate on principle and feeling defined Korean philosophy.
- Gi DaeseungJoseon Neo-Confucian, known as Gobong, whose letters to Yi Hwang began the Four-Seven Debate, arguing that principle and material force cannot be separated in the feelings.
- Yi IJoseon Neo-Confucian, known as Yulgok, who argued against Yi Hwang that principle and material force always act together: material force issues, and principle rides on it.
- Im YunjidangJoseon Neo-Confucian, among the few women of her time to write philosophy, who held that each thing has its own embodied nature and that women have the same moral potential as men.
- Jeong YakyongJoseon scholar, known as Dasan, among Korea's most celebrated philosophers, who took apart Zhu Xi's metaphysics of principle and rebuilt Confucian ethics around a personal Lord on High.
- Bak JungbinFounder of Won Buddhism, known as Sotaesan, who reworked Buddhist teaching for lay people around the image of the One Circle, a symbol of the Buddha-nature of all beings.
