558 B.C.E. - 2006 A.C.E.

2006
Library
Counterbalance Interactive Library
Welcome to the Counterbalance Interactive Library, offering new views on complex issues from science, ethics, philosophy, and religion. Here you'll find extensive resources on the evolution/creation controversy, biomedical ethical challenges, and muc...

2005
Reference
Philosophy Professor
PhilosophyProfessor.com is a provider information on philosophies and philosophers. It is an open-content web site - which means that users can provide PhilosophyProfessor.com with further information on the subjects for publication. The informati...

2004
Reference
Philosophy Timelines
Thomson Learning: Graphical depiction of historical timelines featuring key philosophy biographies and theorems: Greek Timeline, Roman Timeline, Middle Ages Timeline, Renaissance Timeline, Enlightenment Timline, Industrial Revolution Timline, Moder...

2002
Gottlieb
The Dream of Reason, Gottlieb
A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. Gottlieb's elegant survey brings a breath of fresh air. Executive editor of The Economist, Gottlieb mines primary sources with a remarkably even hand. He demonstrates that, while cosmologica...

1997
Reference
EpistemeLinks, Philosophy Resources
EpistemeLinks includes over 19,000 categorized links to philosophy resources on the Internet and has several additional features. The database includes links to over a thousand resources on over 450 philosophers throughout history. You can search by...

1995
Reference
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which was designed from its inception (September 1995) as a dynamic reference work. In a dynamic reference work, each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the...

1995
Reference
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy was founded in 1995 for the purpose of providing detailed, scholarly information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of philosophy. The IEP is free of charge and available to all internet users world wi...

1995
Reference
The Window - Philosophy on the WWW
The Window is an experimental interface attempting to stretch the limits of HTML and the WWW. Conceived as "the philosophical clearing house on the Internet," it has grown from simple beginnings as a simple list of sites to a comprehensive tool for t...

1994
Science
The Journal of the History of Ideas
The Journal of the History of Ideas examines the evolution of ideas and their influence on historical developments. An interdisciplinary publication, JHI covers several fields of historical study, including the history of philosophy, literature, the...

1947
Philosophers
Peter Sloterdijk, Philosopher
Peter Sloterdijk studied philosophy, Germanistics and history at the University of Munich. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. Since 1980 he has published many philosophical works, including the Critique of Cynical Reason. I...

1929
Philosophers
Jürgen Habermas, Philosopher
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism, best known for his concept of the public sphere based in his theory and pragmatics of communicative action. His work focuses on the f...

1928
Philosophers
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky is one of the most well-known figures of the American left. His traditional definition of himself is a anarchist, a political philosophy he summarizes as seeking out all forms of hierarchy and attempting to eliminate them if they are unjustif...

1908 - 1986
Philosophers
Simone de Beauvoir
Born and educated in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir was among the first women permitted to complete a program of study at the École Normale Supérieure. Through her lifelong friendship with Sartre, she contributed significantly to the development and expre...

1905 - 1980
Philosophers
Jean-Paul Sartre, French Philosopher
Recognizing a connection between the principles of existentialism and the more practical concerns of social and political struggle, Sartre wrote not only philosophical treatises but also novels, stories, plays, and political pamphlets. Sartre's perso...

1902 - 1994
Philosophers
Karl Popper, Philosophy of Science
The most important philosopher of science since Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Sir Karl Popper finally solved the puzzle of scientific method, which in practice had never seemed to conform to the principles or logic described by Bacon -- see The Great De...

1889 - 1951
Mathematicians
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and regarded by some as the most important since Immanuel Kant. His early work was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer and, especially, by his teacher Be...

1889 - 1976
Philosophers
Heidegger, German Philosopher
A student of Husserl, whom Heidegger succeeded as professor of philosophy at Freiburg, he was also influenced by Kierkegaard, Dilthey, and Nietzsche. Heidegger's major work, Being and Time (1927), analyzes the concepts of "care," "mood," and the indi...

1883 - 1969
Athletes
Morihei Ueshiba, Founder of Aikido
Morihei Ueshiba was a famous martial artist and founder of the Japanese martial art of aikido. He is often referred to as Kaiso, meaning "founder", or Osensei, "Great Teacher". Ueshiba is remembered by his pupils as a master of the martial arts, w...

1870 - 1919
Communists
Rosa Luxemburg, Political Theorist
Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a theorist of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, later becoming involved in the German SPD, followed by the Indep...

1861 - 1925
Architects
Rudolf Steiner, Founder Anthroposophy
Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker. He is the founder of anthroposophy, "a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure thought but...

1844 - 1900
Philosophers
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche sharply criticized the Greek tradition's over-emphasis on reason in his Die Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) (1889). Reliance on abstract concepts in a quest for absolute truth, he supposed, is merely a symptom of the degenerate pers...

1828 - 1910
Anarchists
Leo Tolstoy, Russian Writer
Count Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist and philosopher, considered one of the world's greatest writers. About 1876 the doubts that had beset Tolstoy since youth, fed by his puritan temperament in conflict with his sensuality, gathered force. The resu...

1820 - 1895
Communists
Friedrich Engels, Founder Communism
Friedrich Engels, with Karl Marx, founder of modern Communism and Socialism, he was the son of a textile manufacturer, and after managing a factory in Manchester, England, he wrote his first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England i...

1820 - 1903
Philosophers
Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, prominent classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical worl...

1818 - 1883
Communists
Karl Marx, Founder Communism
Karl Marx, with Friedrich Engels, a founder of modern socialism and communism. The son of a lawyer, he studied law and philosophy; he rejected the idealism of Hegel but was influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess. His editorship (1842-43) of th...

1813 - 1855
Philosophers
Søren Kierkegaard, Father of Existentialism
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish "golden age" of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction. K...

1788 - 1860
Philosophers
Arthur Schopenhauer
German philosopher. Rejecting the idealism of Hegel, Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung employed Kant's notion of the noumenal self as the foundation for a comprehensive account of human nature, in contrast to the phenomenal realm of o...

1770 - 1831
Philosophers
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel devoted his life wholly to academic pursuits. His Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) (1812-1816) attributes the unfolding of concepts of reality in terms of the pattern of dialectical reasoning (thesis — antithesis — synthesis) that Hege...

1756 - 1836
Anarchists
William Godwin
Anarchistic/Utopian political and social philosopher - husband of early feminist author Mary Wollestonecraft and father of Mary Shelley (writer of "Frankenstein" and wife of romantic poet Percy Byssche Shelley). A profound optimist concerning human n...

1724 - 1804
Philosophers
Immanuel Kant, German Philosopher
One of the greatest figures in the history of Metaphysics. After 1755 he taught at the Univ. of Kšnigsberg and achieved wide renown through his teachings and writings. According to Kant, his reading of Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber and led...


1712 - 1778
Philosophers
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Rousseau first attracted wide-spread attention with his prize-winn...

1711 - 1776
Philosophers
David Hume
"Hume is our Politics, Hume is our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our Religion." This statement by 19th century British idealist philosopher James Hutchison Stirling reflects a unique position that David Hume holds in intellectual thought. Hu...

1694 - 1778
Humanists
Voltaire, Author and Philosopher
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Francois Marie Arouet (pen name Voltaire) was born on November 21, 1694 in Paris. Voltaire's intelligence, wit and style made him one of France's greatest writers and phil...

1685 - 1753
Mathematicians
George Berkeley, Philosopher
George Berkeley was one of the three most famous (Locke and Hume) eighteenth century British Empiricists. He is best known for his motto, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. He was an idealist: everything that exists is either a mind or depend...

1647 - 1706
Christians
Pierre Bayle, Philosopher
Pierre Bayle was a Huguenot, i.e., a French Protestant, who spent almost the whole of his productive life as a refugee in Holland. His life was devoted entirely to scholarship, and his erudition was second to none in his, or perhaps any, period. Much...

1646 - 1716
Mathematicians
Gottfried W. Leibniz, Discovery of Calculus
German philosopher, physicist, and mathematician whose mechanical studies included forces and weights. He believed in a deterministic universe which followed a "pre-established harmony." He extended the work of his mentor Huygens from kinematics to...

1632 - 1677
Philosophers
Baruch Spinoza, Dutch Philosopher
A member of the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, Spinoza received a thorough education in the tradition of medieval philosophical texts as well as in the works of Descartes, Hobbes, and other writers of the period. After charges of heretical...

1632 - 1704
Philosophers
John Locke
John Locke was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher, whose association with Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury) led him to become successively a government official charged with collecting information...

1596 - 1650
Mathematicians
René Descartes, French Philosopher
Unsatisfied with scholastic philosophy and troubled by skepticism of the sort expounded by Montaigne, Descartes soon conceived a comprehensive plan for applying mathematical methods in order to achieve perfect certainty in human knowledge. During a t...

1561 - 1626
Philosophers
Sir Francis Bacon
Sir Francis Bacon achieved fame as an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist. He was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and finally created Viscount St Albans in 1621; the peerage titles became extinct upon his death. He began his...

1548 - 1600
Philosophers
Giordano Bruno
Italian philosopher of the Renaissance and follower of Nicolas of Cusa. An aposotate Dominican, Bruno tried to incorporate both Copernican astronomy and hermetic mysticism into an atomistic physics. His evident inclination toward pantheism and explic...

1533 - 1592
Philosophers
Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation wit...

1509
Erasmus
In Praise of Folly, Erasmus
In Praise of Folly (Encomiun Moriae in Latin) was written in 1509 by the Dutchman Erasmus of Rotterdam when he was guest to his English famous friend Thomas More,or Morus if you prefer, the author of the celebrated book Utopia. Given internal religio...

1469 - 1527
Writers
Niccolò Machiavelli
In 1498, Niccolò Machiavelli began his career as an active politician in the independent city-state of Florence, engaging in diplomatic missions through France and Germany as well as Italy. After more than a decade of public service, he was driven fr...

1466 - 1536
Humanists
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was a Dutch humanist and theologian. Erasmus was a classical scholar who wrote in a "pure" Latin style. Although Erasmus remained a Roman Catholic throughout his lifetime, he harshly criticised what he considered exces

1463 - 1494
Humanists
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Philosopher
Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for whic...

1401 - 1464
Astronomers
Nicholas of Cusa, Polymath
Nicholas of Kues, also referred to as Nicolaus Cusanus and Nicholas of Cusa, was a cardinal of the Catholic Church from Germany (Holy Roman Empire), a philosopher, jurist, mathematician, and an astronomer. He is widely considered one of the great gen...

1225 - 1274
Christians
St. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, born of a noble family in Rocca Secca, near Aquino in 1225, was to complete the magnificent synthesis of Scholasticism. Thomas Aquinas was the first to recognize the fact that Aristotelian intellectualism would be of great help fo...

1128 - 1198
Muslims
Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Muslim Scientist
Abu'l Waleed Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes in the West, was born in 1128 C.E. in Cordova. He studied philosophy and law from Abu J'afar Haroon and from Ibn Baja; he also studied medicine. Al-Hakam, the famous Umayyad...

480 - 525
Philosophers
Boethius, Roman Scholar
In two ways, Boethius was unique. He was far and away the best educated Roman of his age: indeed, there had been no one like him for a century, and there would never be another (the senate, long since ceremoniously inane, disappeared forever by the e...

354 - 430
Christians
Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
He was named the Christian bishop of Hippo (Annaba, Algeria) in 396, and devoted the remaining decades of his life to the formation of an ascetic religious community. Augustine argued against the skeptics that genuine human knowledge can be establish...

205 - 270
Philosophers
Plotinus, Father of Neoplatonism
Plotinus was a major philosopher in the ancient world and is widely considered the father of Neoplatonism. Much of our biographical information about him comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads. His metaphysical writings hav...

121 - 180
Philosophers
Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor
Marcus Antoninus the Philosopher, Roman Emperor from 161 to his death in 180. It is this quality of Marcus' character which has made him a unique figure in Roman history, since he was the only emperor whose life was molded by, and devoted to, philoso...

4 BC - 65
Dramatists
Seneca, Philosopher
Seneca, Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, who was one of the most eminent writers of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was born Lucius Annaeus Seneca in Córdoba, Spain, the son of the Roman rhetorician Marcus (Lucius) Annaeus Seneca k...

20 BC - 50
Philosophers
Philo of Alexandria, Jewish Philosopher
Philo, known also as Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia and Philo the Jew, was an Hellenistic Jewish philosopher born in Alexandria. Philo used allegory to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. His met...

106 BC - 43 BC
Philosophers
Cicero, Roman Philosopher
Cicero was born in 106 BC, six years before the birth of Julius Caesar, into a wealthy family, though none of his family served as senators. He received the Roman equivalent of an Ivy League education, studying rhetoric and philosophy in Rome, Athens...

341 BC - 270 BC
Philosophers
Epicurus, Pleasure is the Highest Good
Epicurus was born in the Greek colony on Samos, but spent most of his active life in Athens, where he founded yet another school of philosophy. At "the Garden," Epicurus and his friends lived out their ideals for human life, talking about philosophic...

384 BC - 322 BC
Philosophers
Aristotle, Greek Philosopher
He studied (367-347 B.C.) under Plato and later (342-339 B.C.) tutored Alexander the Great at the Macedonian court. In 335 B.C. he opened a school in the Athenian Lyceum. During the anti-Macedonian agitation after Alexander's death Aristotle fled (32...

404 BC - 323 BC
Philosophers
Diogenes of Sinope, The Cynic
Diogenes was chief among the school known as the cynics. It was said of Diognes that throughout his life he "searched with a lantern in the daylight for an honest man." And though Diogenes apparently did not find an honest man, he had, in the process...

427 BC - 347 BC
Philosophers
Plato, Greek Philosopher
In 407 B.C. he became a pupil and friend of Socrates. After living for a time at the Syracuse court, Plato founded near Athens the most influential school of the ancient world, the Academy, where he taught until his death. His most famous pupil there...

469 BC - 399 BC
Philosophers
Socrates, Greek Philosopher
A philosopher of Athens, generally regarded as one of the wisest people of all time. It is not known who his teachers were, but he seems to have been acquainted with the doctrines of PARMENIDES, HERACLITUS, and ANAXAGORAS. Socrates himself left no wr...

488 BC
Philosophers
Zeno of Elea, All is One
Very little is known of the life of Zeno of Elea. We certainly know that he was a philosopher, and he is said to have been the son of Teleutagoras. The main source of our knowledge of Zeno comes from the dialogue Parmenides written by Plato. Zeno was...

490 BC - 420 BC
Philosophers
Protagoras, Man is Measure of all Things
Protagoras of Abdera was one of several fifth century Greek thinkers (including also Gorgias, Hippias, and Prodicus) collectively known as the Older Sophists, a group of traveling teachers or intellectuals who were experts in rhetoric (the science of...

510 BC
Philosophers
Parmenides, Philosopher
Parmenides of Elea was a Greek philosopher and poet, born of an illustrious family about BCE. 510, at Elea in Lower Italy, and is is the chief representative of the Eleatic philosophy. He was held in high esteem by his fellow-citizens for his excelle...

551 BC - 479 BC
Philosophers
Confucius, Chinese Philosopher
Confucius was a famous sage and social philosopher of China whose teachings deeply influenced East Asia during twenty centuries. Living in times of trouble, he was convinced of his ability to restore the world's order but he failed.

569 BC - 475 BC
Mathematicians
Pythagoras of Samos
Pythagoras of Samos is often described as the first pure mathematician. He is an extremely important figure in the development of mathematics yet we know relatively little about his mathematical achievements. Unlike many later Greek mathematicians.

600 BC
Anarchists
Lao Tzu, Founder of Taoism
Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher, reputedly the founder of Taoism. It is uncertain that Lao Tzu (old person or old philosopher) is historical. His biography in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Records of the Historian (1st cent. B.C.) says he was a contemporary of Confuc...

600 BC
Philosophers
Epimenides of Knossos
Epimenides of Knossos was a semi-mythical 6th century BC Greek seer and philosopher-poet, who is said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years in a Cretan cave sacred to Zeus, after which he reportedly awoke with the gift of prophecy. It is not...

624 BC - 547 BC
Engineers
Thales, 1st Greek Philosopher
Thales of Miletus seems to be the first known Greek philosopher, scientist and mathematician although his occupation was that of an engineer. He is believed to have been the teacher of Anaximander (611 BC - 545 BC) and he was the first natural philos...

638 BC - 558 BC
Solon, Father of Democracy
Solon was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and elegiac poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in archaic Athens. His reforms failed in the short term yet he is often credited wit...