Philosophy Map

Used public dialogue to press for definitions of virtue; executed by Athens for allegedly corrupting the young.

Founder of the Academy whose dialogues set out the theory of Forms, tripartite soul, and the ideal polis.

Built the basic frameworks of logic, biology, ethics, and metaphysics with an emphasis on empirical inquiry and teleology.

Argued that reality is constant flux held together by logos, the rational order of opposites.

In verse, argued that only 'what is' can be thought or spoken, founding the ontological tradition.

Combined atomism with hedonism, identifying pleasure with the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance.

Founded Stoicism, teaching that virtue alone suffices for happiness and that one must live according to nature.

Founder of Neoplatonism, organizing reality as emanations from the One through Intellect and Soul.

Plato's claim that genuine reality consists of abstract, unchanging Forms that sensible particulars only imperfectly instantiate.

Aristotle's material, formal, efficient, and final causes — a complete explanation of why something is the way it is.

Ethics centered on character and practical wisdom rather than rules or outcomes; systematized by Aristotle and revived today.

Method of cross-examining an interlocutor's beliefs to expose contradictions, with acknowledged ignorance as the starting point for inquiry.

The cosmos is governed by divine reason; human freedom consists in aligning one's judgments with nature and virtue.

Reality is atoms and void; the good life is a rational, moderate pleasure defined negatively as absence of pain.

For every claim an equally strong counter-claim can be made, so one suspends judgment (epoche) and attains tranquility.

Plotinus holds that all reality flows from an ineffable One, giving later Christian theology a philosophical model of creation.

Uses the question of justice to weave together psychology, education, and political theory; foundational for Western political philosophy.

A series of speeches on eros that climb from bodily attraction to the vision of Beauty itself.

Systematic account of eudaimonia, virtue, friendship, and practical wisdom; the source text of virtue ethics.

Investigates 'being qua being' and introduces substance, potency and act, and the unmoved mover.

Defines the human as a political animal and analyzes regimes and citizen virtue; a touchstone of republican thought.

Plato's account of Socrates' defense before the Athenian court, a classic statement of philosophy's right to exist.

A handbook of Stoic maxims distinguishing what is 'up to us' from what is not; influential in Rome and beyond.

Fifty-four treatises edited by Porphyry that systematize Neoplatonic metaphysics and the ascent of the soul.

The trial became the archetypal clash between philosophical inquiry and political authority, cited ever since.

These schools prefigured the European university; the Academy endured for roughly nine centuries.

Stoics, Epicureans, Academics, and Peripatetics offered rival philosophical ways of life across the Mediterranean.

Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius translated Stoic doctrine into a practical ethic for Roman elites and administrators.

Aristotle's classificatory method shaped Euclidean geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Galenic medicine for over a millennium.

Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus were absorbed by Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, shaping early Christian metaphysics.

Bishop of Hippo who fused Neoplatonism with Christianity and set the Western vocabulary of sin, grace, time, and inwardness.

Translated Aristotle's logic and, in the Consolation, bridged ancient philosophy to the Latin Middle Ages.

Archbishop who formulated the ontological argument under the motto 'faith seeking understanding'.

Persian philosopher and physician who systematized the essence-existence distinction at the heart of Islamic Aristotelianism.

Andalusi jurist and commentator on Aristotle who argued that philosophy and revelation do not conflict.

Jewish philosopher and legal scholar whose Guide of the Perplexed reconciles Aristotelian philosophy with Torah.

Dominican theologian whose Summa Theologiae offers the classical synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian doctrine.

Scottish Franciscan who argued for the univocity of being and introduced haecceitas as the principle of individuation.

English Franciscan and leading nominalist; his principle of parsimony reshaped late medieval metaphysics.

Anselm's program: first believe, then use reason to understand what is believed, which shaped the temperament of scholastic theology.

From the concept of 'that than which no greater can be thought' Anselm infers God's existence — among the most disputed arguments in philosophy.

Avicenna argued that in creatures essence does not entail existence; only in God do essence and existence coincide, a move crucial for Aquinas.

Aquinas' arguments from motion, causation, contingency, degrees, and teleology to the existence of a first cause.

Are universals real, mental concepts, or mere names? The dispute among realism, conceptualism, and nominalism dominates late medieval thought.

Aquinas holds that moral law can be derived by reason from human nature — a rational creature's participation in the eternal law.

Duns Scotus argues that the word 'being' means the same thing when said of God and creatures, challenging Aquinas' analogy.

Do not multiply entities beyond necessity; universals are merely names the mind uses to group similar particulars.

Autobiographical reflection on memory, time, desire, and grace — the first major work of Western introspection.

Written after the sack of Rome, it opposes the earthly and heavenly cities and founds Christian political theology.

A prison dialogue with Lady Philosophy about fortune, happiness, foreknowledge, and freedom — one of the most copied books of the Middle Ages.

The original home of the ontological argument, a compact synthesis of faith and reason.

A vast philosophical-scientific encyclopedia whose metaphysics reshaped Latin ontological vocabulary.

Replies to al-Ghazali and defends the compatibility of Aristotelian philosophy with revelation.

Philosophical reading of scriptural difficulties, divine attributes, creation, prophecy, and reasons for the commandments.

Organized as question-objection-response, it systematically covers God, creation, ethics, and Christology.

Benedictine and other monasteries preserved classical texts and carried philosophical learning through the early medieval rupture.

Paris, Oxford, and Bologna institutionalized scholastic philosophy with lectures, disputations, and degrees.

Baghdad's House of Wisdom rendered Greek texts into Arabic; Toledo then translated them into Latin, reigniting Western philosophy.

Aquinas' system became the official idiom of Catholic theology after Trent and remains a living tradition.

Developed through Aquinas and the Salamanca school, it stands among the roots of international law and human rights discourse.

The Bishop of Paris banned many Aristotelian-Averroist theses, indirectly pushing Scotus and Ockham toward more flexible metaphysical options.

Florentine political thinker who separated politics from moral theology and analyzed power as it actually operates.

Proposed a new scientific method centered on experiment and induction, attacking the four idols of the mind.

Used materialism and contract theory to argue for absolute sovereignty, founding modern political philosophy.

Used methodical doubt to find an indubitable starting point and set up mind-body dualism and modern rationalism.

Mathematician and religious thinker concerned with the limits of reason and the stakes of faith.

Developed a geometric monist metaphysics identifying God with Nature.

Founder of empiricist epistemology and liberal political theory based on consent, property, and limited government.

Systematic rationalist who proposed monads, the principle of sufficient reason, and pre-established harmony.

Universal doubt is used to locate an Archimedean point in the thinking self.

Extended matter and thinking mind are distinct substances, generating the modern mind-body problem.

Bacon argues that natural laws are to be built up from systematic observation and controlled experiment.

Political authority is grounded in consent among individuals rather than in divine right.

A running dispute over whether knowledge originates in sense experience or in pure reason.

Leibniz treats unextended monads as the fundamental beings, coordinated by pre-established harmony.

Spinoza claims there is only one substance (God or Nature) and all events follow necessarily from its nature.

Locke grounds private property in labor and occupation, shaping later liberal and colonial debates.

Handbook on acquiring and keeping power, detaching political action from Christian virtue.

Replaces Aristotelian syllogism with a new inductive logic as a charter for experimental science.

Six meditations laying out methodical doubt, the cogito, and mind-body dualism.

Foundational work of modern political philosophy, arguing from the state of nature to absolute sovereignty.

A geometrically structured derivation of monism, a theory of the emotions, and a conception of freedom.

Systematic empiricist epistemology that attacks innate ideas.

Natural rights, consent, and limited government; deeply influenced the American and French revolutions.

Posthumous fragments including the famous wager and reflections on the human condition.

The paradigm shift from Copernicus through Newton, for which philosophy supplied method and metaphysics.

From Leviathan to the Peace of Westphalia, sovereignty becomes the basic unit of international order.

Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration helped move belief outside the reach of state coercion.

Natural rights, consent, and limited government become the backbone of later constitutional and human-rights discourse.

The Republic of Letters and print culture carried philosophical debate across borders and prepared the Enlightenment public.

Jurist and political philosopher who compared regimes and proposed a constitutional doctrine of separated powers.

One of the Enlightenment's most influential public intellectuals, campaigning for toleration and civil liberty.

Central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment who pushed empiricism into deep skepticism about causation, induction, and the self.

Reworked political philosophy around the general will and offered a sweeping critique of modern civilization and education.

Idealist who argued that to be is to be perceived and rejected the notion of material substance.

Moral philosopher and political economist whose system runs from sympathy to the division of labor and markets.

Critical philosopher who integrated empiricism and rationalism and developed an ethics of autonomy and a project of perpetual peace.

Argued from reason and virtue for women's equal education and civic standing; key forerunner of modern feminism.

Hume argues that our belief in causal necessity has no rational ground beyond habit and custom.

Berkeley holds that only minds and ideas exist and that matter beyond experience cannot be defended.

Kant inverts the epistemic relation so that objects conform to the structure of cognition, underwriting synthetic a priori judgments.

Moral law comes from reason itself; universalizability and treating persons as ends are its canonical formulations.

Rousseau locates sovereignty in the people as a body, with the general will aimed at the common good rather than aggregate interest.

Montesquieu argues for mutual checks among legislative, executive, and judicial powers and ties regimes to social conditions.

Smith argues that self-interested action, under suitable institutions, can produce unintended public benefits.

Wollstonecraft extends Enlightenment principles of rational equality to the education and civic status of women.

Comparative study of regimes that proposes separation of powers and strongly influenced the U.S. Constitution.

A proposed science of human nature covering epistemology, the passions, and morals.

An accessible restatement of the skepticism about causation, miracles, and induction.

Develops the general will, sovereignty, and the grounds of legitimate political authority.

Uses England as a foil to criticize the French old regime and promote toleration and empirical science.

Foundational work of modern economics, analyzing the division of labor, markets, and free trade.

Maps the limits of pure reason and establishes the framework of transcendental philosophy.

Demands equal education and civil rights for women and is a classic of modern feminism.

Ideas from Locke, Montesquieu, and Hume fed directly into the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen wrote Enlightenment universal rights into law.

Checks and balances, limited government, and bills of rights became the basic template for modern states.

Universal rights talk was mobilized against the slave trade, driving abolition movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

Coffeehouses, salons, and the periodical press made rational debate a new source of political legitimacy.

Wollstonecraft and others pushed universal rationality toward gender equality as a political claim.

The great systematiser of German idealism, integrating history, logic, and ethical life through dialectic and absolute spirit.

Reinterprets Kant's thing-in-itself as blind Will, founding a pessimistic metaphysics that shaped later irrationalism.

Attacks the Hegelian system with categories of the individual, anxiety, and faith, and is read as the first existentialist.

Refines utilitarianism and defends individual liberty in On Liberty, grounding modern liberal political thought.

Develops historical materialism and a critique of capitalism built on alienation, surplus value, and class struggle.

Revalues values through will to power, eternal recurrence, and the death of God, targeting Christian and Platonic morality.

Founder of pragmatism; ties meaning to observable consequences and lays the groundwork of modern semiotics.

Bentham (1748–1832) formulates the greatest happiness principle; Comte (1798–1857) founds positivism and sociology.

Concepts and history advance through contradiction, sublation, and synthesis; a shared methodological core for Hegel and Marx.

The estrangement of persons from their labour, products, and essence, moving from Hegel's spiritual alienation to Marx's critique of capitalist work.

Evaluates actions and institutions by the greatest happiness of the greatest number, driving reforms in law, suffrage, and welfare.

Nietzsche's explanatory principle for life, knowledge, and morality, challenging inherited notions of truth and the good.

Kierkegaard places individual choice and faith before any universal system, supplying the core motifs of twentieth-century existentialism.

Peirce and James hold that an idea's meaning lies in its practical effects and that truth is verifiable and revisable.

Traces consciousness dialectically from sense-certainty to absolute knowing, the paradigm of nineteenth-century systematic philosophy.

Reads the world as the appearance of a blind Will; a major influence on Nietzsche, Freud, and modern aesthetics.

Introduces the harm principle and is the canonical defence of free speech and individual liberty in modern liberalism.

Analyses commodity, value, surplus value, and accumulation, founding the methodology of political-economic critique.

A poetic parable introducing the overman, eternal recurrence, and the death of God, reshaping literature and psychology.

Uses Abraham's sacrifice to explore the leap of faith and to launch Christian existentialism.

Systematises the pragmatist theory of truth and turns philosophical debate toward concrete consequences and experience.

Marx and Engels supply the theoretical backbone for workers' parties and socialist movements that reshape twentieth-century politics.

Utilitarian and socialist arguments together drive legislation on working hours, factory safety, and collective bargaining.

Mill's The Subjection of Women brings utilitarian and liberal principles to gender equality and inspires first-wave feminism.

Comte's positivism provides the template by which sociology and psychology separate from philosophy as independent research programmes.

Bentham's utility calculus pushes modern reforms in prisons, criminal codes, and public-health legislation.

Founder of modern predicate logic and philosophy of language, introducing the sense-reference distinction.

Develops the theory of descriptions and logical atomism and co-writes Principia Mathematica with Whitehead.

Shapes meta-ethics and epistemology through common-sense philosophy and the naturalistic fallacy argument.

Early Tractatus advances a picture theory of language; later Investigations introduces language-games and meaning as use.

Carnap (1891–1970) is the leading logical empiricist; Quine (1908–2000) challenges the analytic/synthetic divide and reductionism.

Reshapes modal logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics with rigid designators and the causal theory of reference.

Rawls (1921–2002) revives normative political philosophy with A Theory of Justice; Nozick (1938–2002) defends the minimal state through entitlement theory.

Parfit (1942–2017) transforms views of personal identity and ethics; Dennett (1942–2024) explains consciousness through functionalism and evolution.

Runs from Frege-Russell referential semantics to the later Wittgenstein's language-games, framing analytic philosophy's central tension about language.

Quine's Two Dogmas argues the distinction cannot be sustained, driving holism and naturalised epistemology.

Kripke and Putnam argue that proper names and natural-kind terms refer via baptism and causal chains, challenging descriptivism.

Rawls uses the veil of ignorance to defend two principles of justice, setting the agenda of contemporary liberal political philosophy.

Debates over consciousness, intentionality, and the mind-body problem run from behaviourism through functionalism, physicalism, and panpsychism.

Possible-worlds semantics treats necessity and possibility as truth distributions across worlds, and has become a standard tool of analytic philosophy.

Founds modern predicate logic and marks the starting point of analytic philosophy.

Attempts to reduce mathematics to logic, the high point of logicism and a direct provocation to Goedel's incompleteness theorems.

Analyses the relation between language and world through the picture theory and inspires the Vienna Circle.

Introduces language-games, family resemblance, and the private-language argument, shaping later analytic philosophy as a whole.

Attacks the analytic/synthetic divide and reductionism, opening the way to naturalism and holism.

Uses the original position and veil of ignorance to defend justice as fairness and revive normative political philosophy.

Proposes rigid designators and a causal theory of reference, redrawing the borders of necessity, a priori, and analyticity.

Reshapes personal identity, practical reason, and future-generations ethics, a landmark of late-twentieth-century moral philosophy.

Logicism and formalisation pave the way for Goedel, Turing, and modern computer science's theory of computability.

Frege-Russell semantics and functionalist philosophy of mind supply the philosophical background for generative linguistics and cognitive science.

The exchanges between Rawls, Nozick, Sandel, and MacIntyre set the agenda of normative political philosophy since the 1970s.

Analytic argumentation is now standard in bioethics, machine ethics, and institutional debates over algorithmic fairness.

Cost-benefit analysis, utility theory, and welfare economics absorb the analytic tools of utilitarianism and decision theory.

Recent work on revising concepts such as gender, race, and knowledge brings analytic methods into wider public debate.

Founder of phenomenology; introduced intentionality and the phenomenological reduction as a rigorous description of what appears to consciousness.

Reopened the question of Being through the analytic of Dasein; decisive for existentialism, hermeneutics and deconstruction.

Reworked phenomenology around freedom, responsibility and bad faith; leading figure of postwar existentialism.

Rewrote perception around the lived body, laying groundwork for embodied cognition and the philosophy of art.

Worked the absurd and revolt between essay and fiction to articulate a humanism that refuses nihilism.

From the experience of totalitarianism, rebuilt the concepts of public space and political action.

The Second Sex grounded modern feminism philosophically by treating gender as situation and history, not nature.

Traced the knowledge-power structures behind madness, medicine, prisons and sexuality, reshaping historical and social critique.

Deconstructed the metaphysics of presence; reassessed writing, difference and the trace.

Developed an ontology of difference, becoming and the rhizome; with Guattari rewrote the link between desire and capitalism.

Grounded democracy and the rule of law in communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Bracket the natural attitude and turn to the structures of consciousness: every consciousness is consciousness of something.

Human existence is thrown, caring, being-toward-death, not a neutral subject facing objects.

There is no fixed human nature; choice and action carry full responsibility, which anchors existentialist ethics.

Camus names the gap between the world's silence and our demand for meaning the absurd, and answers it with revolt.

Knowledge is not opposed to power; regimes of truth are produced and sustained by power relations.

Meaning arises through differing and deferring traces; there is no pure self-present origin.

Deleuze replaces representational thought with an ontology in which difference precedes identity and becoming precedes being.

Mutual understanding reached under ideal speech conditions grounds the legitimacy of modern democracy.

Establish phenomenological method and give a systematic account of meaning, intentional object and eidetic intuition.

Reopens the question of Being via the analytic of Dasein; among the most influential works of twentieth-century philosophy.

Lays out being-in-itself vs. being-for-itself, the gaze of the other and bad faith, framing postwar existentialism.

Reworks the subject-world relation around the body; a classic starting point for embodied cognition.

The former ends with 'one must imagine Sisyphus happy'; the latter probes the ethics of revolt and revolution.

Diagnoses twentieth-century political catastrophe and reconstructs a political anthropology of labour, work and action.

'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' becomes the theoretical starting point of second-wave feminism.

Analyse the micro-mechanics of modern power and the production of the subject through punishment and sexuality.

Set out the deconstructive programme and challenge the phonocentric bias of Western metaphysics.

Map the history and norms of the modern public sphere and ground communicative rationality in speech acts.

Sartre's and Camus's writing reshaped French literature, theatre and cinema and pushed philosophy into popular culture.

The student and worker upheaval drew on existentialism, Marxism and early structuralist debates for its intellectual idiom.

Beauvoir's Second Sex gave philosophical grounding to the view of gender as situation and fuelled reform in law and family life.

Foucault's discourse analysis and Derrida's deconstruction were reworked by Said and others to study colonial knowledge and identity.

Continental philosophy supplies core concepts for cultural studies, film theory and queer theory.

Habermas's public sphere and deliberative model remain a key reference in European and American institutional debate.

Founder of the Ru tradition; answered the collapse of Zhou ritual order with ren, li and the junzi ideal that shaped two millennia of East Asian ethics and politics.

Traditional author of the Daodejing; with dao, wuwei and a praise of the soft and yielding he opens a second main current of Chinese thought.

Founder of Mohism; impartial care, anti-aggression and frugality challenged aristocratic ritual order and seeded an early consequentialist strand.

Defended innate goodness and the four sprouts, lifting Confucian moral psychology and humane government to a systematic level.

Leading Daoist; used fable and irony to unsettle knowledge, language and the self, deeply shaping later Chan and Chinese art.

Combined a thesis of bad human nature with a strong theory of ritual and law, the most systematic Confucian of the pre-Qin era.

Synthesized Legalism; fused law, technique and positional power into the blueprint behind Qin imperial rule.

Founded Buddhism through the Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path and dependent origination, the root of all later Mahāyāna and East Asian schools.

Founder of Mahāyāna Madhyamaka; used emptiness and the middle way to dismantle any metaphysics of intrinsic nature.

Synthesizer of Song neo-Confucianism; his li-qi metaphysics and Collected Commentaries on the Four Books defined state orthodoxy for six centuries.

Leader of the xin-xue school; extending innate moral knowing and the unity of knowledge and action reshaped late-imperial and modern East Asian thought.

Inner humaneness and outer ritual together articulate the Confucian picture of the person and social order.

Daoism urges alignment with nature and the dropping of contrivance, applied alike to self-cultivation and rulership.

Mencius argues innate goodness from the four sprouts; Xunzi argues for bad nature from unchecked desire, setting the enduring Confucian tension.

Mohism defends undifferentiated care and opposition to offensive war, an early universalist ethic and peace theory in China.

Legalism engineers rule out of written statutes, bureaucratic technique and positional power, without relying on sages.

Phenomena arise only in dependence and have no intrinsic nature; this is the shared metaphysical base of Madhyamaka and later Chan.

Zhu Xi rebuilds Confucian cosmology and moral psychology around a metaphysical li and a concrete qi.

Wang Yangming treats knowing and acting as two sides of one nature and rejects any split between moral knowledge and practice.

Sayings of Confucius and his disciples; the basic textbook of East Asian education and political ethics for two thousand years.

Systematic defence of innate goodness, humane government and the contrast between kingly and hegemonic rule.

Links heaven, ritual and human nature in the most systematic theoretical project of pre-Qin Confucianism.

About five thousand characters of aphoristic chapters on dao, de and wuwei; a core text of Daoism and East Asian culture.

Inner, outer and miscellaneous chapters use parable to probe language, knowledge and death; decisive for Chinese arts and Chan temperament.

Contains impartial care, anti-aggression, frugality, heaven's will and ghosts, plus some of the earliest Chinese logic and engineering thought.

The definitive Legalist text; takes a cold, systematic realist stance on power, institutions and human nature.

Uses Madhyamaka dialectic to refute all claims to intrinsic nature and grounds Mahāyāna philosophy.

Compilation of commentary on the Analects, Mencius, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean; the canonical text of the imperial examinations for over six centuries.

Records dialogues with disciples that set out extending innate moral knowing and the unity of knowledge and action, the central text of xin-xue.

Examinations based on Confucian classics shaped the values and knowledge of East Asian political elites for centuries.

Filial piety, fraternal respect and loyalty embedded Confucian virtues in family, lineage and state, with effects still visible today.

Chan deeply shaped Japanese tea, bushido, gardens and aesthetics, forming a key strand of East Asian spiritual life.

China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam share Confucian, Buddhist and classical Chinese texts in a distinctive intellectual commons.

Early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals reopened the tradition under modernizing pressure, driving major intellectual and institutional change.

Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi and others reread the learning of the heart-mind to engage science, democracy and globalization in contemporary terms.