Philosophy influence map
Who influenced whom
279 philosophers and thinkers, joined by 448 documented lines of influence, from Thales to the 20th century.
Each dot is a thinker, placed by birth year inside their era and sized by how many thinkers on the map drew on them directly. Each line runs from a thinker to someone they shaped. Height only spreads crowded clusters apart. Pick any dot to open that thinker's page.
The most connected thinkers
The largest dots on the map, by direct followers. The full ranking lists the top 50.
- Georg W. F. Hegel 16 direct followers
- Aristotle 15 direct followers
- Immanuel Kant 15 direct followers
- Karl Marx 14 direct followers
- Avicenna 9 direct followers
- Edmund Husserl 9 direct followers
- Plato 8 direct followers
- Augustine of Hippo 8 direct followers
- John Locke 8 direct followers
- Martin Heidegger 8 direct followers
The map, era by era
- Ancient philosophers 54 thinkers
From the first Greek naturalists to the late Platonists, with the classical Chinese masters alongside: the thinkers who set the questions everyone after them inherited.
- Medieval philosophers 58 thinkers
Church Fathers, the Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians, the scholastics and the first Renaissance humanists: a thousand years of arguing faith and reason into one system.
- Early modern philosophers 36 thinkers
Rationalists, empiricists and the Enlightenment, from Machiavelli to Kant: philosophy rebuilt on method, experience and the new science.
- 19th-century philosophers 47 thinkers
German idealism and its critics, the utilitarians, Russian thinkers and the novelists of ideas, Darwin and the first pragmatists.
- 20th-century philosophers 84 thinkers
Analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory and structuralism, up to thinkers still writing today.
The longest line on the map
29 generations of teacher and student, from Thales of Miletus to Donald Davidson.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- T. H. Green
- F. H. Bradley
- Bertrand Russell
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Gilbert Ryle
- Donald Davidson
About the map
- What counts as a line of influence?
- A documented relation of teacher and student, or of one thinker's work shaping another's, drawn from Wikipedia articles and the Wikidata “influenced by” property. Lineage in the history of ideas is debated, so every line is one honest account.
- Who influenced the most philosophers?
- Georg W. F. Hegel, with 16 direct followers on this map, followed by Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.
- Which philosophers are on the map?
- 279 thinkers: a curated slice of the Western canon plus its roots and neighbours. The full index lists them by era, and the schools page groups them by lineage.
- Can I explore it interactively?
- Yes. The interactive atlas pans and zooms, searches by name and walks teachers and students from the keyboard.