Early modern philosophers

The most influential early modern philosophers

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

1. Immanuel Kant 15 direct followers
2. John Locke 8 direct followers
3. René Descartes 7 direct followers
4. Baruch Spinoza 7 direct followers
5. Michel de Montaigne 4 direct followers
6. David Hume 4 direct followers
7. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 4 direct followers
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 4 direct followers

All 36 early modern philosophers, by birth

• Niccolò Machiavelli 1469–1527

  Separated politics from moral philosophy and looked at power as it is, not as it should be.

• Michel de Montaigne 1533–1592

  Invented the essay: skeptical, personal, humane — Que sais-je?

• Giordano Bruno 1548–1600

  Infinity of worlds, no center, no edge — the Church burned him for it.

• Francis Bacon 1561–1626

  Knowledge is power: replaced authority with observation and invented the research program.

• Hugo Grotius 1583–1645

  Founded international law on natural right — even God cannot make the unjust just.

• Thomas Hobbes 1588–1679

  Imagined society as a contract escaping a war of all against all — the first modern political science.

• René Descartes 1596–1650

  Doubted everything down to the thinking self and rebuilt knowledge from there.

• Blaise Pascal 1623–1662

  The heart has its reasons: geometer, probabilist, and Christianity's sharpest pessimist.

• Margaret Cavendish 1623–1673

  Duchess and natural philosopher whose materialist monism cut against Hobbes and Descartes.

• Anne Conway 1631–1679

  Attacked Cartesian dualism with a monism of spirit and matter that Leibniz read closely.

• John Locke 1632–1704

  Mind as blank paper, government by consent — the philosophical source of liberalism.

• Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677

  God-or-Nature, one substance, freedom as understanding necessity — excommunicated for it.

• Nicolas Malebranche 1638–1715

  Occasionalist who saw all things in God and made Descartes' system speak theology.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716

  Monads, best of all possible worlds, and binary arithmetic — optimism as a system.

• Pierre Bayle 1647–1706

  His Dictionnaire's relentless footnotes made doubt a scholarly virtue.

• Giambattista Vico 1668–1744

  Held that we truly know only what we make — history as the New Science of nations.

• Christian Wolff 1679–1754

  Systematized Leibniz into the schoolroom philosophy Kant woke up from.

• George Berkeley 1685–1753

  Pushed empiricism to its idealist edge: to be is to be perceived.

• Montesquieu 1689–1755

  Read laws as climates and customs, and gave constitutionalism its separation of powers.

• Voltaire 1694–1778

  The Enlightenment's sharp pen — toleration, ridicule of dogma, écrasez l'infâme.

• Émilie du Châtelet 1706–1749

  Mathematician-philosopher who translated Newton and fought for women's education.

• Thomas Reid 1710–1796

  Founded common-sense realism against Hume: perception really puts us in touch with things.

• David Hume 1711–1776

  Reduced causation to habit and woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778

  Civilization corrupts; legitimacy lives in the general will — the French Revolution read him aloud.

• Denis Diderot 1713–1784

  Editor of the Encyclopédie and a vitalist materialist of endless curiosity.

• Étienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714–1780

  Reduced the mind to transformed sensation and taught Europe to analyze ideas.

• Hryhorii Skovoroda 1722–1794

  Ukraine's wandering Socrates — read scripture and nature as one book and sought the inner man.

• Adam Smith 1723–1790

  Moral sentimentalist who described the invisible hand of markets — and their dangers.

• Immanuel Kant 1724–1804

  Made the mind co-author of reality and duty the core of morality — the pivot of modern philosophy.

• Moses Mendelssohn 1729–1786

  The German Socrates of the Jewish Enlightenment: reason and tradition in one life.

• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729–1781

  Dramatist-critic whose Spinoza dispute opened the German pantheism controversy.

• Johann Georg Hamann 1730–1788

  The Magus of the North: language, not reason, is the organ of truth.

• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi 1743–1819

  Nihilism's first reporter: every rational system ends in fatalism or atheism.

• Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–1803

  Made cultures organic languages of spirit — Volksgeist — and history a chorus, not a ladder.

• Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–1797

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: reason has no sex.

• Bernard Bolzano 1781–1848

  Priest-logician who anticipated set theory and sharpened the concept of a limit.

Other eras

• Medieval philosophers
• 19th-century philosophers
• All 279 thinkers