Philosophers
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.
XenophanesWandering poet who mocked the idea that gods look and behave like humans, described one greatest god unlike mortals, and doubted that anyone can know the plain truth.
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.
ProtagorasThe first to call himself a sophist, he taught argument for a fee, held that "man is the measure of all things", and said he could not know whether the gods exist.
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.
SocratesAthenian who wrote nothing but, through relentless questioning about how to live, became the founding figure of Western moral philosophy.
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.
Diogenes of SinopeThe model Cynic, who lived in a storage jar in Athens, flouted convention to show that a life according to nature and reason needs almost nothing, and called himself a citizen of the world.
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.- HipparchiaCynic philosopher, wife of Crates, one of the few known women philosophers of ancient Greece, famous for her shamelessness and her sharp wit at men's symposia.
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.
CiceroRoman statesman and orator whose dialogues brought Greek philosophy into Latin, setting rival schools' views side by side in the spirit of Academic scepticism.
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.
SenecaRoman Stoic, statesman and adviser to Nero, whose letters and essays made Stoic ethics a practical guide to living and shaped how later readers saw Stoicism.
EpictetusFormer slave turned Stoic teacher, who taught that our freedom lies entirely in our own choices and judgements, and that everything else is outside our control.- Sextus EmpiricusPyrrhonian sceptic and doctor whose Outlines of Pyrrhonism is our fullest account of ancient scepticism, which sets argument against argument to reach tranquillity.
Marcus AureliusRoman emperor and Stoic whose private notebook, the Meditations, shows him trying to live by the Stoic view that virtue is the only good.
PlotinusFounder of Neoplatonism, who taught that all reality flows from a single, indescribable source, the One, and that the soul can return to it.
AugustineBishop of Hippo whose writings on sin, grace, free will and time made him the most influential Christian thinker of late antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages.- 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.
BoethiusRoman statesman who handed Aristotle's logic to the Latin Middle Ages, and wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison while awaiting execution.
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.
Desiderius ErasmusHumanist scholar who edited the Greek New Testament, satirised scholastic theology in _The Praise of Folly_, and defended free will against Luther with a sceptic's reluctance to assert.
Niccolò MachiavelliFlorentine diplomat and political thinker whose Prince analysed power without moralising, and whose Discourses on Livy championed republican liberty.
Michel de MontaigneFrench essayist who revived ancient scepticism, took "What do I know?" as his motto, and made the free exercise of one's own judgement the aim of philosophy.
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.
Francis BaconEnglish statesman and philosopher who planned a great renewal of all knowledge, based on experiment, a new method of induction and the conviction that knowledge is power.
Marie de GournayFriend and editor of Montaigne, whose essays defended the equality of the sexes and women's right to education and public office.
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.
Jeanne de ChantalFounder of the Visitation order, whose lectures and letters mapped the soul's journey to perfection: an early modern moral psychology written for women.
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.
Angélique ArnauldReforming abbess of Port-Royal whose Jansenist Augustinianism defended women's rights to education, self-government and conscience.
Agnès ArnauldAbbess of Port-Royal whose writings defended women's spiritual freedom and set out an ethics of resistance to illegitimate commands of church and state.
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'.
Madame de SabléParis salon host and patron of La Rochefoucauld whose maxims unmasked virtue as disguised pride and self-interest, with friendship as the one exception.
Madeleine de ScudéryFrench novelist and salon host whose philosophical dialogues analysed the virtues of aristocratic society and defended women's right to a public and political voice.- Margaret FellQuaker writer hailed as a feminist pioneer for Womens Speaking Justified, which argued from Scripture and the inner light that women may preach.
Elisabeth of BohemiaExiled princess whose letters to Descartes asked how an immaterial mind could move a body, and pressed him on the passions, virtue, happiness and how to rule.
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.
Blaise PascalFrench mathematician and scientist whose unfinished Pensées, a defence of Christianity, reflect on human wretchedness and greatness, the thinking reed.
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.- Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d'AndillyAbbess of Port-Royal and leader of the uncompromising wing of Jansenism, who set out an ethics of resistance by which a persecuted minority can refuse coercion.
Jacqueline PascalCistercian nun of Port-Royal, sister of Blaise Pascal, whose writings on education and conscience defended women's right to a vocation, to theology and to dissent.
Kristina WasaQueen of Sweden who brought Descartes to Stockholm, abdicated in 1654, and wrote on virtue, the equality of the sexes and the toleration of religious minorities.
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.
Madame de MaintenonSecond wife of Louis XIV and founder of the school for girls at Saint-Cyr, whose educational philosophy put moral formation before intellectual cultivation.
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.
Marguerite de La SablièreParis salon host, patron of La Fontaine and early woman astronomer, whose moral writings held natural virtues to be disguised vices and only the theological virtues genuine.
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.
Anne DacierFrench classicist whose translations of Homer made her famous, and who, defending the ancients against the moderns, developed a philosophy of taste, imitation and metaphor.
Marquise de LambertParis salon host whose essays defended the dignity of women, criticised the inequalities of her society, and were praised by Fontenelle, Montesquieu and Voltaire.- Damaris MashamOne of the earliest English women philosophers, friend of Locke and correspondent of Leibniz, who defended a reasonable Christianity and argued for the education of women.
- 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.
Catharine Trotter CockburnPlaywright and philosopher who defended Locke's Essay and Samuel Clarke's moral theory, grounding morality in reflection on human and divine nature.
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.
MontesquieuEnlightenment political philosopher who explained forms of government by their causes, from climate to commerce, and argued that liberty needs separate legislative, executive and judicial powers.
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.
Jean-Jacques RousseauGenevan thinker who argued that society corrupts naturally good human beings, and that legitimate law must express the general will of free and equal citizens.
Adam SmithScottish moral philosopher who grounded ethics in sympathy and an imagined impartial spectator, and whose _Wealth of Nations_ defended the natural liberty of ordinary people to run their affairs.
Immanuel KantArgued that the mind actively structures experience, reconciling rationalism and empiricism, and grounded morality in the rational will.
Catharine MacaulayRepublican historian and philosopher, whose History of England defended the people's liberties against the Stuarts, and whose Letters on Education argued for educating the sexes alike.
Jeremy BenthamEnglish jurist and reformer who gave utilitarianism its first systematic form, holding that pleasure and pain are our sovereign masters and that law should promote the greatest happiness.
Olympe de GougesPlaywright and pamphleteer of the French Revolution whose Rights of Woman exposed how the Declaration of the Rights of Man left women out, and who was guillotined for her writings.
Mary WollstonecraftEnglish moral and political philosopher whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women, as rational beings, need the same education and rights as men.
Sophie de GrouchyFrench philosopher of the Revolution whose Letters on Sympathy traced morality to the sympathy we learn in infancy, and argued from it for equality, republican liberty and reform of marriage law.
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.
Sarah GrimkéAbolitionist and women's rights theorist born into a slave-owning South Carolina family, whose Letters on the Equality of the Sexes argued from Scripture that women and men were made equal.
John Stuart MillThe nineteenth century's most influential philosopher writing in English: an empiricist, a utilitarian and a liberal, author of On Liberty.
Harriet Taylor MillEnglish philosopher who worked so closely with John Stuart Mill that their contributions are hard to separate, and whose Enfranchisement of Women demanded full equality for women.
Margaret FullerAmerican transcendentalist, critic and journalist whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century argued that every person combines masculine and feminine qualities.
Søren KierkegaardDanish writer who opposed philosophical system-building, and explored faith, anxiety and what it means to exist as a single individual.
Elizabeth Cady StantonAmerican feminist theorist and the philosopher of the women's suffrage movement, author of the Declaration of Sentiments and, late in life, the critical Woman's Bible.
Karl MarxPhilosopher and revolutionary who analysed history in terms of material production and class struggle, and capitalism as a system that alienates workers.
Charles Sanders PeirceLogician, scientist and founder of American pragmatism, who held that a concept's meaning lies in its conceivable practical effects, and who developed a general theory of signs.
William JamesPsychologist and philosopher whose Principles of Psychology described the 'stream of thought', and who made pragmatism famous with a theory of truth as what works.
Friedrich NietzscheGerman philosopher and cultural critic who attacked traditional morality and religion, announced that “God is dead”, and asked how life can be affirmed without them.
E. E. Constance JonesCambridge logician and ethicist, Mistress of Girton, whose 'new law of thought' anticipated Frege's distinction between sense and reference.
Gottlob FregeGerman logician who invented modern predicate logic, tried to derive arithmetic from logic, and distinguished the sense of an expression from what it refers to.
Edmund HusserlFounder of phenomenology, who studied consciousness as it is experienced, bracketing our taken-for-granted belief in the world to reveal how things show up for us.
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'.
John DeweyPragmatist and perhaps the most prominent American intellectual of his time, who treated thinking as a way of solving problems and saw democracy and education as bound together.
Jane AddamsAmerican pragmatist and social philosopher who founded Chicago's Hull House, built an ethics on 'sympathetic knowledge', and won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against war.
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.
Maria MontessoriItalian physician, psychologist and philosopher whose educational method, based on children's freedom in a prepared environment, now guides schools around the world.
Rosa LuxemburgPolish-born Marxist theorist of capitalism, imperialism and revolutionary democracy, who defended freedom as collective self-rule and was murdered in Berlin in 1919.
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.- Edith Landmann-KalischerGerman philosopher of art and value who argued that aesthetic judgements are cognitive, as objective as sense perception, and that art can be true by mirroring the mind.
- Susan StebbingBritish philosopher of the interwar years, a leading figure in the Cambridge School of Analysis and the first woman in the UK to hold a full professorship in philosophy.
Ludwig WittgensteinAustrian-born philosopher of logic and language whose Tractatus and later Philosophical Investigations transformed analytic philosophy twice over.
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.- Rudolf CarnapLeading figure of logical empiricism and a founder of the philosophy of science, who saw philosophy as the engineering of clearer languages and rejected metaphysics as empty.
Susanne LangerAmerican philosopher of symbolic form whose Philosophy in a New Key sold over 600,000 copies, and whose theory of art and feeling made her a leading philosopher of art.- Karl PopperPhilosopher of science who made falsifiability the mark of a scientific theory, and a political philosopher who defended the 'open society' against totalitarianism.
Theodor W. AdornoFrankfurt School philosopher, sociologist and music critic whose Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Horkheimer, argued that modern reason had turned into a new form of domination.
Ayn RandRussian-born American novelist-philosopher whose Objectivism defended rational egoism, individual rights and capitalism, through novels such as Atlas Shrugged.
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.
Hannah ArendtGerman-American political thinker who analysed totalitarianism, defended political action and plurality, and coined the phrase "the banality of evil".- Maurice Merleau-PontyThe leading phenomenologist of post-war France, who made the lived, perceiving body the starting point for understanding mind, world, language and art.
Simone de BeauvoirFrench existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex argued that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.
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.
Simone WeilFrench philosopher, activist and mystic who worked in factories to understand oppression, and whose late thought centred on attention, affliction and the soul's need for roots.
Albert CamusFrench novelist, journalist and philosopher of the absurd, who asked whether life is worth living in a silent universe and answered with revolt.
Elizabeth AnscombeWittgenstein's student and translator, whose Intention founded modern action theory and whose 'Modern Moral Philosophy' urged philosophers to abandon the moral 'ought'.- Iris MurdochBritish philosopher and novelist whose Sovereignty of Good defended a Platonic moral realism, in which moral life is chiefly a matter of attentive, loving vision of others.
- Philippa FootBritish moral philosopher who defended the objectivity of morality, devised the trolley problem, and helped revive Aristotelian virtue ethics with her ethical naturalism.
John RawlsAmerican political philosopher in the social contract tradition, whose A Theory of Justice asks what principles free and equal citizens would choose behind a veil of ignorance.
Paulo FreireBrazilian educator and philosopher whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed attacked "banking" education and taught literacy as a path to critical awareness and freedom.
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.
Thomas KuhnPhysicist turned historian and philosopher of science whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that science advances through paradigm shifts, not steady accumulation.
Jean-François LyotardFrench philosopher whose The Postmodern Condition defined the postmodern as "incredulity towards metanarratives", and then asked what justice could mean without such grand stories.- 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.- Michel FoucaultFrench historian and philosopher who wrote histories of madness, the prison and sexuality to show how knowledge and power shape what seems natural and necessary.
Alasdair MacIntyreScottish-born moral philosopher whose After Virtue diagnosed modern moral talk as a "culture of emotivism" and called for a renewal of Aristotle’s ethics of the virtues within communities.- 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.
Jürgen HabermasGerman social theorist and public intellectual who grounded morality and democracy in communication aimed at agreement, and defended the public sphere against its erosion.- 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.
Richard RortyAmerican pragmatist whose Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature attacked the idea of knowledge as a mental mirror of reality, and who defended a liberalism resting on solidarity rather than foundations.
Jerry FodorAmerican philosopher of mind who argued that thinking is computation over sentence-like mental representations, a "language of thought", and that parts of the mind are modular.
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.
Giorgio AgambenItalian philosopher whose Homo Sacer argues that sovereign power rests on excluded "bare life", and that the camp, where the exception is the rule, is the hidden pattern of modern politics.
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.- Saadia GaonRabbi and head of the Sura academy whose Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, written in Arabic, argues that reason and revelation confirm each other.
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.
Judah HaleviHebrew poet of the 'Golden Age of Spanish Jewry' whose Kuzari defends Judaism against the philosophers, holding that God is known through history and prophecy rather than proof.- 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.- Abraham Ibn EzraPoet, biblical commentator and astrologer from Tudela whose brief, cryptic remarks on God, the stars and the soul carried great authority in later Jewish thought.
- 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.
- Shem Tov Ibn FalaqueraPoet and philosopher who tried to win his fellow Jews over to philosophy and the sciences, making the Greek and Islamic philosophers available in Hebrew, often reshaping them as he went.
- 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.
- Joseph Ibn KaspiProvençal exegete who wrote some thirty works explaining the Bible through philosophy, using logic and the study of Hebrew as tools for reading Scripture.
- 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.
- Joseph AlboJewish philosopher of Christian Spain whose Book of Principles reduced the necessary beliefs of a divine law to three: God's existence, revelation, and reward and punishment.
- 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.
Salomon MaimonLithuanian-born Jewish philosopher whose "sceptical rationalism" made him the critic Kant said understood him best, and whose objections shaped German Idealism.
Hermann CohenFounder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism and the leading German-Jewish philosopher of his generation, whose Religion of Reason found reason's religion in the sources of Judaism.- Margarete SusmanGerman-Jewish philosopher, poet and essayist of the Simmel circle, writing on Jewish thought and on women in modern society, whose book on Job was an early response to the Shoah.
Martin BuberAustrian-born Jewish philosopher of dialogue, best known for I and Thou, who retold Hasidic tales, translated the Bible and argued for a shared Jewish-Arab state in Palestine.
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.
Yeshayahu LeibowitzIsraeli scientist and public intellectual whose radical theocentrism joined strict Orthodox practice to a stripped-down faith, and led him to oppose the occupation after 1967.
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.- AvempaceAndalusian philosopher who taught how the lone philosopher should live in an imperfect city, and rise towards union with the Active Intellect.
- 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.
- Afdal al-Din al-KhunajiJudge and logician, among the greatest in the Islamic world after Avicenna, whose objections to Avicenna's logic set the course of later logic and philosophy in Arabic.
- 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.
RumiPersian Sufi poet of the Mathnawi who mocked philosophers' 'wooden legs', yet shaped post-Avicennian philosophical Sufism with his critique of reason's reach.- Ibn TaymiyyaDamascene scholar and reformer who attacked Aristotelian logic and the theology of the philosophers, and argued that true revelation and sound reason never conflict.
Mulla SadraPersian philosopher whose “transcendent philosophy” joined Avicennan, Illuminationist and mystical thought, arguing that existence, not essence, is what is real.
Sayyid QutbEgyptian writer turned Islamist ideologue, executed in 1966, who described all contemporary societies, Muslim ones included, as living in jahiliyya and called for God's sovereignty alone.
Indian
The BuddhaFounder of Buddhism, who taught that suffering arises from craving and can be ended, and that there is no enduring self.- PatañjaliAuthor of the Yoga Sūtras, the founding text of classical Yoga, which defines yoga as the stilling of the mind's activities and sets out the eight limbs of practice that lead to liberation.
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.
DharmakīrtiBuddhist philosopher of logic and knowledge whose account of perception, inference and “exclusion” dominated Indian and Tibetan debate for centuries.- Kumārila BhaṭṭaMīmāṃsā philosopher who argued that every cognition is to be trusted until overturned, and defended the authority of the Vedas against Buddhist critics.
- 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.- KamalaśīlaStudent of Śāntarakṣita who helped bring Indian Buddhist scholasticism to Tibet, and is remembered for defending gradual awakening against a Chan master.
- 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.
- JayarāśiSceptic of the materialist Cārvāka tradition whose "Lion of the Dissolution of All Categories" argued that no school had ever validly defined the sources of knowledge it relied on.
- 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.
- GaṅgeśaLogician of the Nyāya school whose Jewel founded “New Nyāya” (Navya-Nyāya), the standard technical language of Indian philosophical argument for centuries.
- 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.
Sarvepalli RadhakrishnanPhilosopher and statesman who presented Advaita Vedanta to the West as religion founded on intuitive experience, and later served as India's vice-president and president.
Tibetan
Ngok Loden SherabThe 'Great Translator' and pioneer interpreter of Indian epistemology, whose Sangphu tradition set the main line of Tibetan logic until Sakya Paṇḍita.- Chapa Chökyi SengéTibetan epistemologist of the Ngok tradition who rejected both idealism and representationalism, and whose account of the objects of cognition shaped later Gelug thought.
Sakya PaṇḍitaSakya scholar, one of Tibet's greatest philosophers, whose Treasure of Reasoning turned Tibetan epistemology to Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika and criticised his Tibetan predecessors.
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.
ConfuciusTeacher and would-be adviser to rulers, whose sayings about virtue, ritual and good government became the foundation of Confucianism.- MoziFounder of Mohism, who argued for impartial care for everyone and against offensive war, and was the first Chinese thinker to argue systematically for his views.
- 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.
MenciusKnown as the 'Second Sage' of Confucianism, he argued that human nature is good and that virtue grows from innate moral sprouts.
ZhuangziDaoist thinker whose playful, paradoxical stories question fixed points of view and celebrate a spontaneous, free-flowing way of life.
XunziConfucian who argued, against Mencius, that human nature is bad and must be reformed through ritual, learning and the teachings of the sages.
Han FeiLeading thinker of the Legalist, or fa, tradition, who argued that order depends not on virtue but on clear laws, reliable rewards and punishments, and the power of the ruler’s position.- Lu JiaMinister to the founding Han emperor whose New Discussions is the earliest surviving Han treatise on political philosophy, grounding the Way of government in the patterns of Heaven.
Jia YiHan official and tutor to vassal kings whose New Writings criticised the fallen Qin dynasty and held that rule depends on the people's consent: 'taking the people as root'.- 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.
Ban ZhaoHan scholar and historian who completed the History of the Former Han and wrote Instructions for Women, a Confucian guide to the virtues of a wife.- Wang FuEastern Han critic whose Discourses of a Hermit revived the Confucian idea of withdrawing from a corrupt society, for virtue's sake, as the dynasty declined.
- Xu GanLast major philosopher of the Han, one of the Seven Masters of Jian An, whose Discourses Hitting the Mark explored how names relate to actualities and to moral conduct.
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.
Ge HongEclectic thinker of China's Period of Disunity who sought physical immortality through alchemy, and tried to reconcile Daoism with Confucianism, and Confucianism with Legalism.- 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.
HuinengSemi-legendary Sixth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, whose Platform Sutra teaches that Buddha-nature is our own nature and that awakening needs no study of texts.
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.
Mazu DaoyiFounder of the Hongzhou line of Chan, famous for shock tactics and for teaching that 'ordinary, everyday mind is Buddha'.
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'.- Chen LiangSouthern Song Confucian of the Yongjia school, who judged policies and practices by their contribution to public welfare, and argued against treating the Way as a timeless abstraction.
- Ye ShiSong Confucian of the Yongjia school who, like Chen Liang, judged policies and practices by their public benefit and rejected a timeless, abstract Way.
Wang YangmingMing statesman, general and Neo-Confucian thinker who taught that moral understanding is innate in every mind, and that knowing and acting are one.- 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.
- Wang GenMing Confucian and founder of the Taizhou school, who held that sagehood lies in the everyday practices of ordinary people and set out to bring Confucian learning to all.
Luo RufangMing Confucian of the Taizhou school who found goodness in the 'infant heart-mind', defended women's education, and held women more reliably virtuous than men.
Li ZhiUnorthodox Ming Confucian of the Taizhou school, who found our truest moral capacity in the 'child heartmind' and defended the education of women.
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.
Gu YanwuEarly Qing scholar who rejected Ming Confucianism's 'empty learning', avoided metaphysics, and insisted that the study of principle is the study of the classics.
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.
Hu ShiStudent of John Dewey and leader of China's New Culture Movement, who championed pragmatism, the scientific method and the vernacular against Confucian tradition.
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.
Xu FuguanArmy general turned scholar, a New Confucian who wrote on the history of Chinese thought and art and held that Chinese learning aims at moral practice rather than knowledge.
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.
- Tu WeimingThird-generation New Confucian, long at Harvard, who stressed the religious dimension of Confucianism and promoted dialogue between civilisations towards a global ethic.
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.
HōnenTendai monk who founded the Pure Land school, teaching that simply saying Amida Buddha's name in trust, open to everyone, is the one path to liberation left in a degenerate age.
ShinranDisciple of Hōnen whose radical Pure Land thought held that the nembutsu is the Buddha's call, and true entrusting Amida's own mind given to beings.
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.
Sen no RikyūThe pre-eminent Japanese tea master, whose wabi tea ceremony of austere, rustic simplicity resolved the tensions in sixteenth-century tea and opened new visions of equality.
Takuan SōhōRinzai Zen master who linked Zen with the martial experience of his samurai students, describing an 'immovable wisdom' that stays still in the midst of action.
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.
Kaibara EkkenJapanese Neo-Confucian, physician and naturalist whose Record of Great Doubts set out one of the most systematic philosophies of doubt in early modern Japan.
Ogyū SoraiEdo Confucian whose Distinguishing Names tied correct definitions to good government, and who held that rites and institutions, not the mind's self-control, order people and states.
Kamo no MabuchiEdo-period scholar of Japan's oldest poetry, who held that the ancient Way followed the rhythms of nature and was corrupted by the artificial morals imported from China.
Motoori NorinagaLeading scholar of Kokugaku (Native Studies), who read The Tale of Genji through mono no aware and drew from the Kojiki a Way of the kami he held to be Japan's original Way.
Hirata AtsutaneKokugaku thinker who recast Shinto as a universal 'True Shinto', taught that the dead become kami in a hidden world, and insisted, in increasingly xenophobic terms, on Japan's superiority.
Matsuo TasekoPeasant woman, poet and disciple of the Hirata school of Native Studies, whose waka voiced loyalty to the emperor and who took part in the politics of the Meiji Restoration.
Kiyozawa ManshiShin Buddhist priest trained in Western philosophy who sought a 'spiritual living' grounded in personal encounter with the absolute, and worked to modernise his tradition.
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.
Suzuki DaisetsuJapanese Buddhist scholar, famous for introducing Zen to the West, whose 'logic of soku-hi', affirmation through negation, shaped Nishida's late philosophy.- 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'.
Watsuji TetsurōPhilosopher of ethics and culture who answered Heidegger's stress on time with space and climate, and defined the human being by the 'betweenness' of people.
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.
JinulGoryeo monk, counted as founder of the Jogye Order, who shaped Korean Seon (Zen) with sudden awakening followed by gradual cultivation, and with keyword meditation.- 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.
- GihwaBuddhist monk of early Joseon whose Exposition of Orthodoxy answered Jeong Dojeon's Neo-Confucian attack on Buddhism with a Buddhist account of self-cultivation.
- 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.
- Baek YongseongKorean Seon monk and independence activist who compared Buddhism favourably with Christianity and founded the Order of Great Awakening to bring enlightenment to lay people.
- 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.
- Kim IryeopWriter of Korea's "New Woman" movement who became a Seon Buddhist nun, and drew on Seon teaching to ask what the authentic self is and how a woman can be free.
African
- Ottobah CugoanoFante-born abolitionist, enslaved in the West Indies and freed in England, whose book on the evil of slavery argued that every Briton who tolerates slavery shares its guilt.
Frederick DouglassAbolitionist and political thinker who escaped slavery and argued, from natural law, that enslaved people's humanity entitled them to every right the American republic promised.
Alexander CrummellBlack American priest and philosopher, the leading rationalist of the nineteenth-century Black enlightenment, who put reason at the centre of moral agency.
Anna Julia CooperEducator and philosopher whose A Voice from the South, one of the first book-length works of Black feminist thought, analysed how race, sex and class oppression intersect in Black women's lives.
W. E. B. Du BoisSociologist, historian and activist who, by making race and "the Negro problem" objects of philosophical reflection, all but founded the philosophy of race.
Alain LockePhilosopher of value, culture and race, called the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance", who developed a pluralist theory of values and an account of race as culture, not biology.
Léopold Sédar SenghorSenegalese poet, statesman and philosopher, a founder of Négritude, who read in African religions an ontology of vital forces and gave the movement its philosophy.
Aimé CésaireMartinican poet and politician, a founder of Négritude, for whom it was not a metaphysics but a way of living history and reclaiming a heritage.
Julius NyerereTanzanian statesman and political thinker who based his African socialism on Ujamaa, "familyhood", drawn from the communal values he saw in pre-colonial African life.- Frantz FanonMartinican psychiatrist and revolutionary whose two books on anti-Black racism and colonialism became founding texts of anti-colonial thought.
- Kwasi WireduGhanaian philosopher whose programme of "conceptual decolonisation" helped establish modern African philosophy as a discipline, critical of both colonial habits of thought and unexamined tradition.
- Paulin HountondjiBeninese philosopher whose critique of "ethnophilosophy" argued that African philosophy must be critical, argued work by individual thinkers, not a reconstruction of a people’s collective worldview.
- Henry Odera OrukaKenyan philosopher whose Sage Philosophy project interviewed wise men and women in rural Kenya to show that critical, individual philosophical reflection has always existed in Africa.