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Chrysippus of Soli (c. 280–c. 207 BCE) was the third scholarch (head) of the Stoic school in Athens and is considered, alongside Zeno of Citium, the second founder of Stoicism. While Zeno founded the school and established its fundamental theses, it was Chrysippus who systematically elaborated Stoic logic, physics, and ethics, producing a monumental body of work that ancient tradition estimated at over 700 titles — almost all now lost. What we know of his thought comes from secondary sources: Diogenes Laërtius, Plutarch, Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Epictetus. ...

Cicero Roman philosopher, orator, and statesman. The most important figure in transmitting Greek philosophy to the Latin world. His eclecticism synthesized Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the skepticism of the New Academy. He coined much of the Latin philosophical vocabulary — essentia, qualitas, moralis — that shaped all subsequent Western philosophy. Key Concepts Natural law: there is a universal moral law, grounded in reason, that transcends the positive laws of each people — the foundation of Western natural law theory Res publica: the republic as “the people’s affair” (res populi); the state is only legitimate when it serves the common good and respects the law Duty (officium): ethical life consists in fulfilling duties arising from reason, human social nature, and the roles each person occupies — systematized in De Officiis Academic probabilism: influenced by the skepticism of the New Academy, he argues that in the absence of certainty we should act according to what seems most probable (verisimile) Humanitas: the ideal of full human formation combining philosophy, rhetoric, and civic virtue; the Roman equivalent of the Greek paideia Highest good (summum bonum): debate among schools — for Stoics, virtue; for Epicureans, pleasure. Cicero leans toward Stoicism but presents arguments from all schools Influenced by Plato and Aristotle — politics, ethics, theory of knowledge Zeno of Citium — Stoicism (cosmopolitanism, natural law, duty) Epicurus — addressed critically Carneades — skepticism of the New Academy Influenced Augustine and all medieval philosophy — Latin vocabulary and natural law Thomas Aquinas — natural law theory Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau — republican theory Locke and Kant — natural rights and moral duty Renaissance humanism — ideal of humanitas Works On the Republic (De Re Publica, 54 BC); On the Laws (De Legibus, 52 BC); Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes, 45 BC); On Duties (De Officiis, 44 BC); On the Nature of the Gods (De Natura Deorum, 45 BC). ...

Claude Lévi-Strauss French anthropologist and philosopher; founder of structuralism in the human sciences. He applied Saussure’s model of linguistics to anthropology, transforming the study of myths, kinship, and “primitive” cultures. Born in Brussels in 1908 and died in Paris in 2009, Lévi-Strauss studied philosophy and law before becoming a professor in Brazil — he taught at the University of São Paulo from 1935 to 1939, during which time he conducted fieldwork among indigenous peoples of Mato Grosso and the Amazon. That direct encounter with Amerindian societies proved decisive: rather than confirming the dominant evolutionist framework, it led him to question radically the hierarchy between “primitive” and “scientific” thought. After returning to Europe and spending the years of the Second World War in exile in New York, he came into close contact with the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose phonological formalism gave Lévi-Strauss the central methodological instrument: the analysis of binary oppositions as the key to deciphering cultural systems. ...

Confucius (Chinese: Kǒngzǐ 孔子, “Master Kong”; Jesuit Latinisation: Confucius) was born in the state of Lu (present-day Shandong province, China) in 551 BCE and died in 479 BCE. He was a teacher, public official, and moral reformer who, after a life of frustrated political efforts, devoted himself to teaching and to the study of the ancient Chinese classics. His thought is known principally through the Lunyu (Analects 論語), a compilation of sayings and dialogues made by his disciples and the later tradition — the historicity of individual passages is a matter of debate among specialists. ...

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett was one of the most influential and provocative philosophers of mind and cognitive science of recent decades. A professor at Tufts University, where he co-directed the Center for Cognitive Studies, he defended throughout his career a thoroughgoing naturalism: mind, consciousness, and free will can be fully integrated into a scientific, Darwinian worldview, leaving no mysterious residue behind. A writer of remarkable clarity and wit, Dennett engaged closely with artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, and also became a prominent public figure known for his criticism of religion. He died in April 2024. ...

David Chalmers David John Chalmers is one of the most influential philosophers of mind of the past three decades. Born in Sydney, Australia, and trained in mathematics before turning to philosophy, Chalmers became a professor at the University of Arizona and later at New York University (NYU), where he co-directs the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. His debut book, The Conscious Mind (1996), redefined the terms of the debate on consciousness and placed what he named the “hard problem” at the centre of the philosophical and scientific agenda. ...

David Hume A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. While still very young he published his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), a work that, in his own words, “fell dead-born from the press” and would be recognized only much later. His reputation as a skeptic in matters of religion cost him the university chairs he sought; he made his living as a librarian, a diplomatic secretary, and above all as a highly successful essayist and historian. A man of serene and amiable temperament — “le bon David” — he died in 1776, facing death with the tranquility of a sage. ...

Democritus Born in Abdera, in Thrace, and active around 430 BCE, Democritus was one of the most erudite minds of antiquity — he traveled widely and wrote on almost everything, though none of his works has reached us. Tradition nicknamed him “the laughing philosopher,” in contrast to the melancholy Heraclitus. Together with his teacher Leucippus, he is the founder of atomism, the first fully materialist and mechanistic philosophy in history. His thesis is as simple as it is audacious: reality reduces to two principles — atoms and the void. Atoms (from the Greek atomon, “indivisible”) are eternal, solid, imperceptible particles that differ only in shape, size, position, and arrangement. The void is the space in which they move. Everything that exists — things, the world, and even the soul (made of finer, subtler atoms) — results from the collisions and combinations of these atoms in eternal motion. In Democritus’s cosmos there is neither purpose nor ordering intelligence: everything is explained mechanically, by necessity. ...

Denis Diderot Denis Diderot (1713–1784) is one of the most complex and prolific figures of the French Enlightenment. The son of a cutler from Langres, he studied in Paris, lived through decades of turbulent intellectual life, and was the principal architect of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1772), which he co-edited with Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The project brought together the greatest minds of the century — Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Turgot — with the aim of gathering, systematizing, and disseminating human knowledge in the service of reason and the critique of superstition. Hounded by royal censorship and the Church, the enterprise stands as the greatest monument of the encyclopedist spirit and the Enlightenment faith in the transformative power of knowledge. ...

Derek Parfit Derek Parfit (11 December 1942, Chengdu, China — January 2017, Oxford) was a British philosopher, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, regarded as one of the most important moral philosophers of the late twentieth century. He worked obsessively and almost ascetically, and published little — but each work left a deep mark on the philosophy of personal identity, rationality, and ethics. His Reasons and Persons (1984) is one of the landmark works of contemporary analytic philosophy. ...

Diogenes of Sinope “Diogenes the dog” (kynikós) — refoundaer and principal figure of Cynicism. He lived in a large ceramic jar (pithos) in Athens, reduced his needs to a minimum, and despised all social convention. He said he sought “a human being” (ἄνθρωπον) walking with a lantern lit in broad daylight. When Alexander the Great offered to grant him any desire, he asked only that he step out of his sunlight. He embodied radical anticultural philosophy: virtue requires total self-sufficiency, not abstract philosophy. ...

Dogen Note on romanisation: Japanese names are given in Hepburn romanisation, with the original characters in parentheses on first occurrence. Macrons (ō, ū) indicate long vowels. Dōgen Kigen (道元希玄), also known as Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師, “Zen Master Dōgen”), is the Japanese founder of the Sōtō (曹洞) school of Zen. He took monastic vows in his teens on Mount Hiei, the centre of Tendai Buddhism, and in 1223 sailed to Southern Song China, where he studied with Master Tiantong Rujing (天童如淨) in the Caodong lineage, the Chinese parent of the Japanese Sōtō. He returned to Japan in 1227 bringing, in his own words, “eyes horizontal, nose vertical” — that is, nothing more than the direct experience of practice. In 1244 he founded Eihei-ji (永平寺), still one of the two head temples of Sōtō. ...

Don Ihde Don Ihde was born in Hope, Kansas, on January 14, 1934, and died on January 17, 2024, just days after turning ninety. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Boston University in 1964 under Erazim Kohák, with a dissertation on Paul Ricœur’s phenomenological methodology. In 1969 he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he helped found the Department of Philosophy in the early 1970s and remained for forty-three years, retiring in 2012 as Distinguished Professor. ...

Donald Davidson Donald Davidson was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981, following positions at Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller, Davidson constructed a philosophical system remarkable for its internal coherence: his philosophy of mind, theory of action, semantics, and epistemology are closely interconnected, articulated around the themes of events, causation, truth, and interpretation. ...

Duns Scotus Born around 1266 in Duns, Scotland, John Duns Scotus entered the Franciscan order and taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died prematurely in 1308. The subtlety and rigor of his distinctions earned him the title of “Subtle Doctor.” Alongside Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, he is one of the great names of high Scholasticism — and the principal Franciscan counterpoint to Thomism. His most characteristic metaphysical thesis is the univocity of being. Against Thomas Aquinas, who held that “being” is attributed to God and creatures only by analogy, Scotus maintains that the concept of being has a univocal sense, the same for the Creator and the creature — without which, he argues, no knowledge of God from the world would be possible. It is the most universal and indeterminate concept of all. ...

Edmund Husserl Born in 1859 in Prossnitz, in Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire), Edmund Husserl trained as a mathematician before turning to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano, from whom he inherited the notion of intentionality. Dissatisfied with the psychologism that reduced logic to laws of the mind, he set out to refound philosophy as a rigorous science, capable of describing experience exactly. He was a professor at Göttingen and Freiburg, where he had Heidegger as his assistant and successor. A Jew, he was stripped of his rights by Nazism and died isolated in 1938; his thousands of manuscripts survived only because a Franciscan monk smuggled them into Belgium. ...

Édouard Glissant Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928, Sainte-Marie, Martinique — 3 February 2011, Paris) was a poet, novelist, essayist, and philosopher, one of the major figures of Caribbean thought and of French-language postcolonial theory. A pupil at the Lycée Schœlcher, where Aimé Césaire was among his teachers, he went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnography at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. He received the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde. His entire body of work — spanning poetry, fiction, and philosophy — turns on a single intuition: that identity is grounded not in a single root but in an ever-open relation with the other. Against the philosophies of purity and origin, Glissant thought the Caribbean — land of the plantation, of uprooting and forced mixture — as the laboratory of a humanity to come. ...

Edward Said Edward Wadie Said (1935–2003) was a Palestinian-American literary critic and cultural theorist. He was born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate to a Palestinian Christian family, raised between Jerusalem and Cairo, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and taught comparative literature at Columbia University from 1963 until his death. His book Orientalism (1978) is regarded as the founding text of postcolonial studies: there, drawing on Foucault (discourse/power) and Gramsci (hegemony), Said argues that “the Orient” is not a neutral region of the world but a construction of Western discourse that produces its object and legitimises colonial domination. Said was also a leading public intellectual: a member of the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991, an advocate of the Palestinian cause, and an influential model of the “exilic intellectual” and dissenter. ...

Elizabeth Anscombe Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001) was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. A student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, she became one of his literary executors and translated his Philosophical Investigations (1953) into English — a rendering that remains canonical. A devout Catholic, she fused the rigour of the analytic tradition with an Aristotelian-Thomist sensibility that shaped her entire body of work. Her monograph Intention (1957) is widely regarded as the founding text of contemporary philosophy of action, while her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) is commonly identified as the starting point of the virtue ethics revival in the Anglophone world. She taught at Oxford and, from 1970, held the chair of philosophy at Cambridge once occupied by Wittgenstein. ...

Emmanuel Lévinas Lithuanian-French philosopher, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He introduced Husserl and Heidegger to France, but later critically surpassed them. A Holocaust survivor, he developed a philosophy where ethics is first philosophy — prior to ontology. Key Concepts The Face (le visage): the manifestation of the Other that addresses me and demands a response — not a physical face, but an ethical presence that says “thou shalt not kill”; the point from which all moral responsibility emerges Ethics as first philosophy: against Heidegger, for whom ontology (being) is the foundation of everything — for Lévinas, the ethical relation with the Other precedes and grounds all ontology Radical alterity (autrui): the Other cannot be reduced to the same, cannot be fully understood or assimilated — this irreducibility is the fundamental ethical fact Totality and Infinity: Western philosophy tends toward “totalization” — engulfing the different within the same. The Infinite breaks into this totality through the face of the Other, resisting capture Infinite responsibility: I am responsible for the Other asymmetrically and without reciprocity — “I am responsible even for what I did not do”; responsibility precedes freedom Il y a (there is): the experience of anonymous, impersonal, threatening being — the murmur of being before any existent; the night in which being becomes unbearable Saying and Said (le Dire / le Dit): “Saying” is ethical exposure to the Other, the act of address; the “Said” is propositional content — ethics resides in the Saying, which the Said always betrays Influenced by Husserl — phenomenology (was his student and translator) Heidegger — fundamental ontology (later critically surpassed) Bergson — philosophy of duration and life Jewish tradition (Talmud, Rosenzweig, Buber) Influenced Derrida — deconstruction and ethics (debate on violence and metaphysics) Habermas — ethics and recognition of the other Judith Butler — vulnerability and ethical responsibility Contemporary Christian and Jewish theology Postcolonial studies and recognition theory Works Existence and Existents (1947); Totality and Infinity (1961); Otherwise than Being (1974); Ethics and Infinity (1982). ...