19th-century philosophers

The most influential 19th-century philosophers

Ranked by how many thinkers on the map draw on them directly. See the full ranking.

1. Georg W. F. Hegel 16 direct followers
2. Karl Marx 14 direct followers
3. Friedrich Nietzsche 7 direct followers
4. Vladimir Solovyov 5 direct followers
5. F. W. J. Schelling 4 direct followers
6. Søren Kierkegaard 4 direct followers
7. Fyodor Dostoevsky 4 direct followers
8. Arthur Schopenhauer 3 direct followers

All 47 19th-century philosophers, by birth

• Jeremy Bentham 1748–1832

  Measured the good in pleasures and pains, founding utilitarianism on arithmetic.

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762–1814

  Radicalized Kant into a philosophy of the active self and the German nation.

• Wilhelm von Humboldt 1767–1835

  Made language the defining act of spirit and the university a place to seek truth.

• Friedrich Schleiermacher 1768–1834

  Father of modern hermeneutics and theology: religion is the feeling of absolute dependence.

• Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831

  History as the unfolding of Spirit through contradiction — dialectics before Marx made them material.

• Friedrich Schlegel 1772–1829

  Jena romantic whose fragments made irony and criticism a philosophy.

• F. W. J. Schelling 1775–1854

  Nature as visible spirit — romantic philosophy of identity and art.

• Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776–1841

  Realist psychologist who turned Kant's categories into a science of mental mechanics.

• Arthur Schopenhauer 1788–1860

  The world as blind Will and suffering — pessimism with a soundtrack (he loved opera).

• Pyotr Chaadayev 1794–1856

  His First Philosophical Letter declared Russia had no history — and started a century of debate.

• Auguste Comte 1798–1857

  Positivism's lawgiver: sociology as the queen of sciences on physics' strict terms.

• Gustav Fechner 1801–1887

  Founded psychophysics and a panpsychist daylight view: mind is everywhere.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882

  Self-reliance made a philosophy: trust yourself, read Nature, obey the Over-Soul.

• Ludwig Feuerbach 1804–1872

  Explained God as projected humanity — the bridge from Hegel's idealism to Marx's materialism.

• Aleksey Khomyakov 1804–1860

  Slavophile lay theologian who argued for sobornost — the free unity of the church.

• Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859

  Read democracy's soul in America — liberty, equality, and the soft tyranny of conformity.

• John Stuart Mill 1806–1873

  Refined utility with liberty: your freedom ends only where harm begins.

• Max Stirner 1806–1856

  The ego and its own: every spook — state, God, humanity — dissolves before the unique one.

• Ivan Kireyevsky 1806–1856

  Turned Slavophilism into a philosophy of integral knowledge against Western abstraction.

• Harriet Taylor Mill 1807–1858

  Feminist and utilitarian whose partnership shaped On Liberty and The Subjection of Women.

• Charles Darwin 1809–1882

  Natural selection as a mechanism — and a new philosophical anthropology.

• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809–1865

  First to call himself anarchist: property is theft, order lives in mutualist contracts.

• Alexander Herzen 1812–1870

  Russia's first socialist exile — married Hegel to the peasant commune and a free press.

• Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855

  The anxious father of existentialism — truth is subjectivity, leap over proof.

• Mikhail Bakunin 1814–1876

  Apostle of anarchism: destroy the state, or it will destroy you wearing revolutionary masks.

• Rudolf Hermann Lotze 1817–1881

  Mediating idealist of value and mechanism, bridge from German idealism to phenomenology.

• Karl Marx 1818–1883

  Turned Hegel on his head: ideas follow material conditions, and history has a class struggle.

• Friedrich Engels 1820–1895

  Factory owner who co-wrote communism with Marx — history read through material conditions.

• Herbert Spencer 1820–1903

  Evolution applied to society and mind: the synthetic philosophy of the age.

• Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881

  Novelist of the underground who staged freedom, faith, and the problem of evil in fiction.

• Thomas Henry Huxley 1825–1895

  Darwin's bulldog and agnostic who made science a public moral authority.

• Nikolay Chernyshevsky 1828–1889

  What Is to Be Done? — the utilitarian, materialist catechism of the Russian radicals.

• Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910

  Novelist turned moralist — nonviolence, the Sermon on the Mount, and rejection of the state.

• Nikolai Fyodorov 1829–1903

  Cosmist prophet of the common task: resurrect the dead and colonize the stars.

• Wilhelm Wundt 1832–1920

  Founded experimental psychology and a voluntarist metaphysics of will.

• Wilhelm Dilthey 1833–1911

  Separated the human sciences from the natural: life understands itself through expression.

• T. H. Green 1836–1882

  British idealist who grounded liberal rights in a common good and self-realization.

• Ernst Mach 1838–1916

  Sensations, not things — the physicist-philosopher whose skepticism helped fell Newton's absolute space.

• Franz Brentano 1838–1917

  Revived intentionality — every mind is about something — and launched phenomenology's lineage.

• Henry Sidgwick 1838–1900

  The Methods of Ethics: utilitarianism, intuitionism, and the dualism of practical reason.

• Charles Sanders Peirce 1839–1914

  Logician of doubt, belief, and inquiry — pragmatism's rigorous founder.

• Peter Kropotkin 1842–1921

  Anarchist prince who answered Darwin's struggle with mutual aid.

• William James 1842–1910

  Made truth mean what works in experience, and wrote psychology's first great book.

• Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

  Philosophizing with a hammer: genealogy of morals, death of God, love of fate.

• F. H. Bradley 1846–1924

  Absolute idealist whose Appearance and Reality reduced relations to the Whole.

• Vladimir Solovyov 1853–1900

  Philosopher of all-unity and Godmanhood — the root of the Russian religious renaissance.

• Georgi Plekhanov 1856–1918

  Father of Russian Marxism whose historical materialism broke with the populist tradition.

Other eras

• Early modern philosophers
• 20th-century philosophers
• All 279 thinkers