Thinkers

William of Ockham Born around 1287 in the English village of Ockham, in Surrey, William entered the Franciscan order and studied at Oxford. Accused of heresy, he was summoned to the papal court at Avignon; caught up in the dispute between the Franciscans and Pope John XXII over evangelical poverty, he ended up fleeing to the court of Emperor Louis of Bavaria, under whose protection he lived until his death, around 1347. His work marks the end of classical Scholasticism and opens the way to Modernity. ...

Xavier Zubiri Xavier Zubiri Apalategui was born in San Sebastián on 4 December 1898 and died in Madrid on 21 September 1983. Trained in philosophy and theology in Madrid, Leuven and Rome, he was ordained a priest and, in 1926, won by competitive examination the chair of History of Philosophy at the Universidad Central in Madrid, where he was a disciple of Ortega y Gasset and Manuel García Morente. In 1929–1930 he studied at Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger, and then in Berlin, where he also devoted himself to physics, philology and biology. He left the clerical state in the 1930s and married Carmen Castro, daughter of the historian Américo Castro. After the Civil War, much of his work was presented in private courses and lectures, and only in the last decades of his life did it take the form of books. ...

Xenophanes of Colophon Itinerant Greek poet-philosopher, born in Colophon, in Ionia (the western coast of Asia Minor), around 570 BCE. When the Persian conquest of Ionia began in the mid-sixth century BCE, Xenophanes left his native city and spent the rest of his life wandering the Greek world, residing for periods in Zancle and Catana in Sicily and, according to tradition, in Elea in southern Italy. He lived to an exceptionally advanced age — ancient sources suggest he surpassed ninety years — and his entire output survives only in fragments preserved by later authors such as Sextus Empiricus, Simplicius, and Athenaeus. ...

Xunzi Xunzi (荀子 Xún Zǐ, “Master Xun”; personal name Kuàng 況), who lived around c. 310–c. 235 BCE, is, alongside Confucius and Mencius, one of the three great thinkers of classical Confucianism. He was active during the Warring States period and was a figure of prestige at the Jixia Academy in the state of Qi. His philosophy stands out for its argumentative rigour and its naturalism: whereas other Confucians grounded morality in a morally engaged celestial order, Xunzi grounds it in human culture, ritual, and deliberate education. ...

Zeno of Citium Founder of Stoicism. He taught at the Stoa Poikilê (Painted Porch) in Athens — hence the name of the school. After hearing the story of Socrates through the cynicism of Crates, he abandoned commerce to dedicate himself to philosophy. He taught that virtue is the only real good; everything else (wealth, health, fame) is indifferent (adiaphora). The universe is permeated by the divine Logos (rational fire) and each event occurs by rational necessity. ...

Zeno of Elea Born in Elea, in southern Italy, and active in the mid-fifth century BCE, Zeno was the most celebrated disciple of Parmenides — according to Plato, he accompanied his master to Athens, where the two are said to have conversed with the young Socrates. Tradition also attributes to him a heroic end: tortured by a tyrant whose overthrow he was plotting, he is said to have preferred death to betrayal. He is remembered above all as a master of argument. ...

Zhu Xi Note on romanisation: Chinese names are given in pinyin, with the original characters in parentheses on first occurrence. Tones are not graphically marked, in line with current editorial usage. Zhu Xi (朱熹), a Southern Song philosopher, is the great systematiser of what is conventionally called Neo-Confucianism — also known as Lixue (理學, “Learning of Principle”) or the Cheng-Zhu school, after the Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi), whose writings Zhu Xi organised into a synthesis. A government official and teacher, he spent most of his life lecturing at private academies and revising the classical texts. His historical importance is hard to overstate: the educational curriculum grounded on his commentaries to the Sishu (四書, “Four Books”) was the basis of the Chinese imperial examinations from 1313 to 1905, and through that channel it also shaped the thought of Korea, Vietnam and Japan. ...

Note on sources and authorship: The dates of Zhuangzi (莊子, “Master Zhuang”; personal name Zhōu 周) are uncertain — c. 369–286 BCE is the conventional scholarly estimate, derived from mentions in period texts. The eponymous text Zhuangzi (莊子), as transmitted to us, is a compilation in three sections: the 7 inner chapters (nèipiān 內篇), generally attributed to Zhuangzi himself by modern scholarship; the 15 outer chapters (wàipiān 外篇) and the 11 miscellaneous chapters (zápiān 雜篇), regarded as works by later disciples and commentators. The edition that reached modernity is due to the scholar Guo Xiang (c. 252–312 CE). ...