Schools of philosophy
Members and lineages
12 schools and lineages the map follows, each with its members in order of birth.
Stoics 4
Virtue as the only good and a life in agreement with nature, from Zeno's painted porch to a Roman emperor's notebook.
- Zeno of Citium c. 334–262 BC
Founder of Stoicism: virtue alone is good, and wisdom means living according to nature.
- Seneca c. 4 BC – AD 65
Stoic playwright and reluctant courtier whose letters made philosophy a daily practice.
- Epictetus AD 50–135
Born enslaved, taught that some things are up to us and most things are not.
- Marcus Aurelius AD 121–180
Emperor and Stoic whose private notebooks became the Meditations.
German idealists 5
From Kant's critical turn to Hegel's system, and the materialist inversion Marx made of it.
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
Made the mind co-author of reality and duty the core of morality — the pivot of modern philosophy.
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762–1814
Radicalized Kant into a philosophy of the active self and the German nation.
- F. W. J. Schelling 1775–1854
Nature as visible spirit — romantic philosophy of identity and art.
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
History as the unfolding of Spirit through contradiction — dialectics before Marx made them material.
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
Turned Hegel on his head: ideas follow material conditions, and history has a class struggle.
Existentialists 6
Existence before essence: anxiety, freedom and the absurd, from Kierkegaard's leap to Camus's Sisyphus.
- Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855
The anxious father of existentialism — truth is subjectivity, leap over proof.
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
Philosophizing with a hammer: genealogy of morals, death of God, love of fate.
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
Asked why there is anything at all — Being, anxiety, and thrownness in one dense project.
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
Existence precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, in a café or a war.
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
One is not born, but becomes, a woman — existentialism turned into feminism.
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
The absurd: the world keeps silent, and we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Empiricists 3
All knowledge from experience: Locke's blank slate, Berkeley's ideas, Hume's skepticism.
- John Locke 1632–1704
Mind as blank paper, government by consent — the philosophical source of liberalism.
- George Berkeley 1685–1753
Pushed empiricism to its idealist edge: to be is to be perceived.
- David Hume 1711–1776
Reduced causation to habit and woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber.
Russian religious renaissance 7
Russia's Silver Age philosophers, who answered positivism and Marxism with metaphysics, freedom and faith.
- Vladimir Solovyov 1853–1900
Philosopher of all-unity and Godmanhood — the root of the Russian religious renaissance.
- Nikolai Berdyaev 1874–1948
Freedom before being: personalist Christianity, creativity, and the meaning of history.
- Sergei Bulgakov 1871–1944
From Marxist economics to Orthodox theology — priest and sophiologist after Solovyov.
- Pavel Florensky 1882–1937
Priest-scientist of the Silver Age: icon theology, paradox, and the pillar of truth.
- Semyon Frank 1877–1950
Philosopher of the unknowable: the absolute as the living whole beyond being.
- Nikolay Lossky 1870–1965
Intuitivist of the given — knowledge as a direct grasp of reality in its all-unity.
- Lev Shestov 1866–1938
Philosophy of tragedy against reason — Dostoevsky and Nietzsche over Athens.
Scholastics 9
The medieval schools' method of question, objection and reply, from Anselm's proofs to Ockham's razor.
- Anselm of Canterbury 1033–1109
Faith seeking understanding — and author of the famous ontological argument for God.
- Peter Abelard 1079–1142
The dialectician whose love letters and logic scandalized twelfth-century Paris.
- Albertus Magnus c. 1200–1280
Universal Doctor — Aquinas' teacher and the first to read Aristotle through fresh observation.
- Thomas Aquinas 1225–1274
The great synthesis of Aristotle and Christian theology — natural law and the Five Ways.
- Bonaventure 1221–1274
Franciscan Seraphic Doctor who read creation as a book of traces leading to God.
- Duns Scotus c. 1266–1308
The Subtle Doctor who sharpened scholastic logic until it could cut itself free.
- William of Ockham c. 1287–1347
Nominalist razor in hand, he pared universals away and split faith from reason.
- Meister Eckhart c. 1260–1328
German mystic of the ground of the soul: the eye with which I see God is God's eye.
- Jean Buridan c. 1300–1361
Nominalist rector of Paris whose impetus theory broke with Aristotle's physics.
Church Fathers 9
The theologians of the first Christian centuries, who stated doctrine in the language of Greek philosophy.
- Origen c. 185–254
Allegorist of the Bible and father of systematic theology — brilliant, condemned, endless.
- Tertullian c. 155–220
Latin apologist: Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens — yet gave theology its vocabulary.
- Clement of Alexandria c. 150–215
First Christian thinker to treat Greek philosophy as a schoolmaster toward Christ.
- Irenaeus c. 130–202
Bishop who answered Gnostic dualism with one creation and one recapitulating Christ.
- Augustine of Hippo AD 354–430
Fused Platonism with Christianity; memory, time, and will were never the same.
- Gregory of Nyssa c. 335–395
Cappadocian mystic of the soul's endless ascent into God's infinity.
- Pseudo-Dionysius c. 5th–6th c.
Anonymous mystic of apophatic theology whose celestial hierarchy ruled medieval thought.
- Maximus the Confessor c. 580–662
Byzantine theologian of the will and deification, mutilated for opposing monotheletism.
- John of Damascus c. 675–749
Last Church Father: summed orthodoxy and defended icons against the iconoclasts.
Structuralists 9
Language as a system of differences, carried from Saussure's linguistics into anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
- Ferdinand de Saussure 1857–1913
Signifier meets signified: founded modern linguistics and handed philosophy its structural turn.
- Roman Jakobson 1896–1982
Structural linguist of the Prague Circle who carried form across poetics and semiotics.
- Louis Hjelmslev 1899–1965
Glossematics: language as pure form, the engine of high structuralism.
- Émile Benveniste 1902–1976
Linguist who made subjectivity and the speech act a matter of language.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
Read myth kinship and taboo as structures — anthropology's structuralist revolution.
- Roland Barthes 1915–1980
Mythologies and the death of the author made semiology a cultural critique.
- Algirdas Julien Greimas 1917–1992
Semiotics of the actantial model: narratives as deep structures.
- Jacques Lacan 1901–1981
The unconscious structured like a language — Freud reread through Hegel and Saussure.
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
Semiotics of the open work and the limits of interpretation.
German classical 7
The classical age of German philosophy, from Wolff's school system through Kant to the idealists and their Romantic contemporaries.
- Christian Wolff 1679–1754
Systematized Leibniz into the schoolroom philosophy Kant woke up from.
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
Made the mind co-author of reality and duty the core of morality — the pivot of modern philosophy.
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762–1814
Radicalized Kant into a philosophy of the active self and the German nation.
- F. W. J. Schelling 1775–1854
Nature as visible spirit — romantic philosophy of identity and art.
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
History as the unfolding of Spirit through contradiction — dialectics before Marx made them material.
- Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–1803
Made cultures organic languages of spirit — Volksgeist — and history a chorus, not a ladder.
- Friedrich Schleiermacher 1768–1834
Father of modern hermeneutics and theology: religion is the feeling of absolute dependence.
Frankfurt School 8
Critical theory and the Western Marxism around it, turned on culture, reason and mass society.
- György Lukács 1885–1971
History and Class Consciousness turned Marxism toward reification and culture.
- Antonio Gramsci 1891–1937
Prison notebooks on hegemony, intellectuals, and the war of position.
- Max Horkheimer 1895–1973
Founder of critical theory: reason becomes instrumental and turns on its makers.
- Theodor W. Adorno 1903–1969
Critical theory's negative dialectician: the culture industry administers even our leisure.
- Walter Benjamin 1892–1940
Read modernity in arcades, reproducible art, and the angel of history.
- Herbert Marcuse 1898–1979
One-Dimensional Man: taught the New Left that freedom can be repressive in comfort.
- Erich Fromm 1900–1980
Humanist psychoanalysis of escape, love, and the sane society.
- Jürgen Habermas 1929–2026
Reason lives in conversation: communicative action against colonized lifeworlds.
Analytic philosophers 11
Logic and the analysis of language as the method of philosophy, from Frege to Kripke.
- Gottlob Frege 1848–1925
Invented modern logic and the sense/reference split — analytic philosophy's quiet origin.
- G. E. Moore 1873–1958
Defended common sense and the indefinability of good, opening analytic ethics.
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
Logic, language, and public dissent — the analytic tradition's loudest voice.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
Two philosophies: meaning as logical form, then as ordinary use — both revolutionary.
- Rudolf Carnap 1891–1970
Rebuilt philosophy as the logical analysis of science and language.
- A. J. Ayer 1910–1989
Language, Truth and Logic carried logical positivism to the English public.
- W. V. O. Quine 1908–2000
Attacked the analytic/synthetic wall and made ontology a question of variables.
- Gilbert Ryle 1900–1976
The Concept of Mind dissolved the ghost in the machine.
- P. F. Strawson 1919–2006
Descriptive metaphysics of persons and the bounds of sense.
- Donald Davidson 1917–2003
Actions, events, and truth: meaning is public and charity is the rule.
- Saul Kripke 1940–2022
Naming and Necessity: rigid designators and the metaphysics of possible worlds.
Non-Western 11
Classical Chinese, Indian, Japanese and modern Islamic thought: traditions this map follows alongside the Western canon.
- Confucius 551–479 BC
China's master of ritual and character: order begins with the rectification of names.
- Laozi c. 6th c. BC
The Old Master of the Daodejing — wu wei, the soft overcoming the hard.
- Zhuangzi c. 369–286 BC
Daoist trickster-philosopher of the butterfly dream and the usefulness of the useless.
- Mencius c. 372–289 BC
Argued human nature is good and that a ruler who loses the people loses the mandate.
- Xunzi c. 310–235 BC
Confucian who held nature bad and ritual the tool that civilizes it.
- Nagarjuna c. 150–250
Founder of Madhyamaka: emptiness is not nothing, it is dependent arising.
- Adi Shankara 788–820
Systematizer of Advaita Vedanta: the self is Brahman and the world is maya.
- Ramanuja 1017–1137
Qualified non-dualist for whom devotion, not bare knowledge, reaches the personal God.
- Dōgen 1200–1253
Zen master of just sitting: practice and enlightenment are one, time is being.
- Kitarō Nishida 1870–1945
Founded the Kyoto School: pure experience before the subject/object split.
- Muhammad Iqbal 1877–1938
Poet-philosopher of the self and the reconstruction of Islamic thought.