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Western philosophy begins in Athens with Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), a figure who never wrote a word yet shaped the entire subsequent tradition through his distinctive method of inq...
After more than a millennium of medieval scholasticism, philosophy was reborn in the seventeenth century with René Descartes (1596–1650), often called the Father of Modern Philosop...
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) responded to the standoff between rationalism and empiricism with what he called critical philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that altho...
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the most influential utilitarian of the nineteenth century, refined an ethical tradition inherited from Bentham by adding qualitative distinctions to...
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) transformed philosophy of language twice over the course of his career. In the early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he proposed the picture theory...
Confucius (551–479 BCE) shaped East Asian civilization through teachings collected in the Analects (Lunyu), a record compiled by his disciples. At the heart of his ethics stands Re...