Famous Philosophers a to z

Maria Gaetana Agnesi is best known for writing the first book discussing integral and differential calculus.

Samuel Alexander was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college.

Philosopher, novelist and scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah is known for his contributions to political philosophy, moral psychology and the philosophy of culture.

Italian Dominican theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas was the foremost medieval Scholasticist and father of the Thomistic school of theology.

Hannah Arendt gained much attention for her writings on totalitarianism and Jewish affairs after World War II.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, together with Socrates and Plato, laid much of the groundwork for western philosophy.

Roland Barthes was a French literary philosopher whose work influenced structuralism, semiotics and anthropology.

Cesare Beccaria was one of the greatest minds of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. His writings on criminology and economics were well ahead of their time.

Henri Becquerel was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, an achievement for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

Isaiah Berlin was a trailblazing 20th century scholar, philosopher and author, who championed pluralistic thinking and openness to ideas.

André Breton was a French writer, editor and critic who was a key figure in the Dada and Surrealist art movements.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet of the Romantic Movement, best known for his allegorical sea-faring poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) greatly advanced the field of social science, giving it the name "sociology" and influenced many 19th-century social intellectuals.

Confucius was an influential Chinese philosopher, teacher and political figure known for his popular aphorisms and for his models of social interaction.

Poet, writer, political thinker. Dante was a Medieval Italian poet and philosopher whose poetic trilogy, The Divine Comedy, made an indelible impression on both literature and theology.

French writer Simone de Beauvoir laid the foundation for the modern feminist movement. Also an existentialist philosopher, she had a romance with Sartre.

Michel de Montaigne was a 16th century French author best known for his series of philosophical essays, which were published in 1575.

Maximilien de Robespierre was an official during the French Revolution and one of the principal architects of the Reign of Terror.

Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat and philosopher who became notorious for acts of sexual cruelty in his writings as well as in his own life.

Jacques Derrida was an influential postmodern French philosopher who developed the analytic method known as Deconstruction.

Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes is regarded as the father of modern philosophy for defining a starting point for existence, “I think; therefore I am.”

Educator John Dewey originated the experimentalism philosophy. A proponent of social change and education reform, he founded The New School for Social Research.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher and essayist during the 19th century. One of his best-known essays is "Self-Reliance.”

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist Party leader. He was arrested for speaking out against fascism and wrote his Prison Notebooks before dying in jail.

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was one of the creators of German Idealism. He explored how contradictions ultimately integrated.

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher in the 17th century, was best known for his book Leviathan (1651) and his political views on society.

Robert Hooke was an English philosopher, mathematician and architect who discovered the law of elasticity, now known as Hooke's law.

The writings of psychologist and philosopher William James had a major impact on the way we look at the mind, the body, and the world.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th century. His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason.

Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher who wrote about Christian belief systems and helped birth existentialism.

English philosopher John Locke's works lie at the foundation of modern philosophical empiricism and political liberalism.

A leading twentieth century philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard was noted for his analysis of postmodernity and its impact on humankind.

Herbert Marcuse was an American political philosopher whose Marxists theories of 20th-century Western society influenced liberal student groups in the 1960s.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher and man of letters, the leading exponent of phenomenology in France.

James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, and philosopher. He supported the radical philosophical belief called Utilitarianism.

John Stuart Mill, who has been called the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the 19th century, was a British philosopher, economist, and moral and political theorist. His works include books and essays covering logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, and religion, among them A System of Logic, On Liberty, and Utilitarianism.

Mohammed was the founder of the religion of Islam, accepted by Muslims throughout the world as the last of the prophets of God.

Thomas More is known for his 1516 book Utopia and for his untimely death in 1535, after refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. He was canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint in 1935.

Prolific novelist Iris Murdoch won a Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea. In 2001, she was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judy Dench in the biographical film Iris.

English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, most famous for his law of gravitation, was instrumental in the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche radically questioned widely held cultural beliefs and is best known for his "God is dead" concept.

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher, who laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities.

American author Robert Pirsig is best known for his philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974).

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato founded the Academy and is the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence in Western thought.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is best known as an influential 18th-century philosopher who wrote the acclaimed work A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th century intellectual, writer and activist who put forth pioneering ideas on existentialism.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher best known for his book The World as Will and Representation, and for his pessimistic views of human nature.

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher whose work in applied ethics has led to controversial views on abortion, animal liberation and infanticide.

Scottish social philosopher and political economist Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and achieved the first comprehensive system of political economy.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher and the main source of Western thought. Little is known of his life except what was recorded by his students, including Plato.

Rudolf Steiner was a lecturer and founder of anthroposophy. His works attempted to find a synthesis between science and mysticism.

American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was a New England Transcendentalist and author of the book Walden.

Author Voltaire wrote the satirical novella Candide and, despite controversy during his lifetime, is widely considered one of France's greatest Enlightenment writers.

Max Weber was a 19th century German sociologist and one of the founders of modern sociology. He wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1905.

Simone Weil was a French intellectual, activist and Christian Mystic.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer who advocated for women's equality. Her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman pressed for educational reforms.