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Socrates Socrates is the pivot of Greek philosophy: his figure divides the tradition between the pre-Socratics, concerned with the investigation of nature (physis), and the Socratics, who shifted the focus to the human being, the soul, and ethics. An Athenian of the fifth century B.C., son of the sculptor Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, he lived through the Peloponnesian War — serving as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis — and turned the streets and gymnasia of Athens into the setting for an entirely oral philosophy. He left no writings: everything we know comes from others, above all the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Xenophon, alongside the comic caricature of Aristophanes (The Clouds). The difficulty of separating the historical Socrates from the literary character is what scholars call the “Socratic problem.” ...

Søren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher; the “father of existentialism”. Wrote frequently under pseudonyms to present opposing perspectives. His philosophy is a reaction to Hegel’s speculative system and the bourgeois comfort of institutional Christianity. Key Concepts Three stages of existence: Aesthetic: life oriented toward pleasure, novelty, aesthetics — the despair of inevitable boredom Ethical: commitment to duty, universal morality, marriage — the despair of unforgivable guilt Religious: suspension of the ethical by the singular before God — the “leap of faith” beyond reason Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844): human freedom as “vertigo of possibility”; anxiety has no determinate object (unlike fear) — it is dizziness before the abyss of the possible Despair (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849): unwilling to be oneself, or willing to be other than oneself — the universal condition of humanity without relation to God Subjectivity (“Subjectivity is truth”): existential truth is not attained through Hegel’s objective speculation, but through subjective and passionate commitment Leap of faith: Abraham who goes to sacrifice Isaac — an act that suspends the ethical and makes sense only before the singular of God; Camus criticizes it as “philosophical suicide” Pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantine Constantius — each represents a stage or perspective Influenced by Hegel — point of departure and principal adversary; rejects the speculative system Socrates — irony and indirect method; identified with him Plato — dialogues and Socratic position Luther — individual faith against institution Influenced Heidegger — anxiety, authenticity, being-toward-death Sartre — radical freedom, bad faith, existential project Camus — the absurd (but rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith) Simone de Beauvoir — concrete existential situation Existential theology (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich) Works Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); The Concept of Anxiety (1844); Stages on Life’s Way (1845); Philosophical Fragments (1844); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859, posthumous). ...

Thales of Miletus A philosopher from Miletus, in Ionia (in present-day Turkey), who lived around 624–546 BCE, Thales is considered the first philosopher of the Western tradition and was counted among the legendary Seven Sages of Greece. He left no writings; what we know comes from later reports, above all from Aristotle, who hailed him as the founder of this kind of inquiry (Metaphysics I, 3). Many stories gathered around his name: he is said to have predicted a solar eclipse, measured the height of the pyramids by their shadow, and, according to Aristotle, demonstrated the practical value of philosophy by foreseeing a good harvest and cornering the olive-press market. ...

Theodor W. Adorno Born in Frankfurt in 1903, Theodor W. Adorno was, alongside Horkheimer, the most rigorous figure of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Also trained in music — he studied composition in Vienna — he united philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics in a radical critique of modern society. A Jew and a Marxist, he went into exile in the United States during Nazism, where he observed mass culture at close range; he returned to Frankfurt after the war and died there in 1969. ...

Thomas Aquinas Born around 1225 in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in southern Italy, Thomas belonged to the high nobility, which firmly opposed his entry into the mendicant order of the Dominicans — even confining him for about a year. He studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne and became a master of theology at the University of Paris. Despite the nickname “the dumb ox,” he proved to be the greatest genius of Scholasticism. After an intense experience in 1273, he ceased writing, saying that all he had produced seemed to him like “straw”; he died the following year, on his way to the Council of Lyon. Canonized in 1323, he is “the Angelic Doctor,” and Thomism remains the official reference of Catholic philosophy. ...

Thomas Hobbes Born in England in 1588 — according to tradition prematurely, amid the panic over the threatened Spanish Armada, which led him to say that “fear and I were born twins” — Thomas Hobbes studied at Oxford and became tutor to the noble Cavendish family. In his travels through Europe, he engaged with the new science of Galileo and with the great philosophers of the continent. A witness to the bloody English Civil War, he went into exile in Paris for over a decade; it was there that he matured the political theory published in Leviathan (1651). He is the founder of modern state theory. ...

Thomas Kuhn American historian and philosopher of science. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) completely transformed the understanding of scientific progress and introduced the concept of paradigm into global intellectual vocabulary. Key Concepts Paradigm: set of theories, methods, exemplary problems and values shared by a scientific community; determines what counts as a legitimate problem and acceptable solution Normal science: period of routine “puzzle-solving” work within an established paradigm; does not question its foundations Anomaly: experimental or theoretical result that does not fit the paradigm; initially ignored or neutralized Crisis: accumulation of resistant anomalies that undermine confidence in the paradigm Scientific revolution: replacement of one paradigm by another incompatible with it — not through gradual accumulation, but through conversion of the scientific community; examples: Copernicus, Lavoisier, Einstein Incommensurability: rival paradigms are incommensurable — there is no neutral language to compare them directly; scientists live in “different worlds” Science as social practice: scientific progress is determined by sociological and historical factors, not merely logical ones — challenge to the rationalist model of Popper Influenced by Karl Popper — philosophy of science (point of debate) Alexandre Koyré — history of scientific ideas Ludwik Fleck — thought collectives and thought styles (precursor) Wittgenstein — language games and forms of life Influenced Popper — Kuhn-Popper debate on scientific rationality Paul Feyerabend — epistemological anarchism (Against Method) Imre Lakatos — scientific research programs Sociology of knowledge (Edinburgh school) Humanities in general — “paradigm” became a universal term Works The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); The Essential Tension (1977); Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978). ...

Thomas More English humanist, jurist, and statesman. Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII; refused to recognize the king as supreme head of the Church and was beheaded. Canonized by the Catholic Church (1935). Author of the concept of utopia. Key Concepts Utopia (Utopia, 1516): description of an imaginary island with a communal society, without private property, religious tolerance, work for all, equality. The name is a Greek wordplay: ou-topos (no place) / eu-topos (good place) Implicit social criticism: Utopia functions as a critical mirror of Tudor England — private property, idle nobility, and the execution of starving thieves are the true absurdity Christian humanism: friend of Erasmus (who dedicated Praise of Folly to him); reform of society should come from moral and religious education, not from revolution Martyr of conscience: refused to compromise faith for political convenience — “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first” Influenced by Plato — Republic (ideal city) and dialogues Erasmus — Christian humanism and intellectual friendship Lucian of Samosata — satirical dialogues Influenced Utopian tradition: Campanella (City of the Sun), Francis Bacon (New Atlantis) Political philosophy and 19th-century utopian socialism Marx — critique of private property (distant precursor) Christian-social political thought Works Utopia (1516); History of Richard III (c. 1513); Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1534, written in the Tower of London). ...

Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel is one of the most respected contemporary philosophers working in philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Born in 1937, he is a professor at New York University (NYU). His work returns obstinately to a single theme: the difficulty of reconciling the inner, subjective perspective of each conscious being with the external, impersonal, objective perspective that science and reason strive for. Known for his lucid prose and the intellectual honesty with which he exposes the limits of his own solutions, Nagel resists both easy reductions and mysticism, holding that certain philosophical problems are genuine and should not be dissolved prematurely. ...

Tobias Barreto Tobias Barreto de Menezes (1839–1889), born in the province of Sergipe, was a jurist, philosopher, critic and poet, recognised as one of the central figures of the so-called Recife School. In a Brazilian intellectual landscape dominated by an eclecticism of spiritualist inspiration, Tobias Barreto championed the introduction of “Germanism”—that is, German culture, science and philosophy—as a renewing alternative to the prevailing thought of the time. He drew close to monism and evolutionism, engaging critically with authors such as Haeckel, and turned against the dominant spiritualism. His most enduring contribution lies in the philosophy of law, where he defended a conception of law as a cultural and historical phenomenon rather than as the expression of a natural order. ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who would adopt the pen name Voltaire, was the most celebrated and combative figure of the French Enlightenment. Witty and provocative, he was imprisoned in the Bastille and went into exile in England (1726–1728), where he admired political liberty, the empiricism of Locke, and the science of Newton — an experience he would recount in the Philosophical Letters. He frequented the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia and finally settled at Ferney, near the Swiss border, from where he directed public campaigns against injustice. A prolific writer, he left plays, poems, historical works, philosophical tales, and a vast Philosophical Dictionary. ...

W. E. B. Du Bois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was an African-American sociologist, historian, philosopher, and activist born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895 he became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, with a historical dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade; he also studied in Berlin, where he absorbed the craft of German social science. His work inaugurated African-American urban sociology with The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and, with The Souls of Black Folk (1903), established a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about modern Black experience. He was a co-founder of the NAACP (1909) and a central figure in pan-Africanism. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party; he then moved to Ghana, where he acquired citizenship and where he died in 1963. ...

Willard Van Orman Quine was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century. A professor at Harvard for decades, his work revolutionised epistemology, philosophy of language, and ontology, while simultaneously dismantling the foundations of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Quine is the principal link between American pragmatism (Dewey, James) and contemporary analytic philosophy. Key Concepts Critique of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 1951, Philosophical Review; reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 1953): Quine attacks two dogmas of empiricism: (1) the belief in a sharp distinction between analytic propositions (true by meaning, e.g. “all bachelors are unmarried”) and synthetic ones (true by empirical fact); and (2) reductionism (each statement has an isolated empirical content). Quine argues that the notion of “analyticity” is circular — it presupposes “synonymy”, which presupposes “analyticity”. ...

Walter Benjamin Born in Berlin in 1892, Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and unclassifiable figures of twentieth-century thought — philosopher, literary critic, translator, and essayist, peripherally linked to the Frankfurt School and a friend of Adorno. His academic career failed (his habilitation thesis was rejected), and he lived by his writing, always in difficulty. In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he found himself blocked at the Franco-Spanish border, in Portbou, and took his own life — one of the most tragic fates of the European intelligentsia. ...

Wang Yangming Wang Yangming (王陽明 Wáng Yángmíng, 1472–1529; courtesy name Bó’ān, personal name Shǒurén 守仁) is the most influential Neo-Confucian thinker of the Ming dynasty and the founder of the so-called “school of mind” (xīnxué 心學). Besides being a philosopher, he was a senior state official and a successful military commander, and his doctrine arose in dialogue with that practical experience. His thought constitutes the chief alternative to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy of Zhu Xi, the “school of principle” (lǐxué 理學), which dominated the imperial examination system. ...

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most profound and original American analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, though less widely read than his influence would warrant. Trained in a tradition that combined analytic rigor with a deep knowledge of the history of philosophy, he set out to articulate what he called the ultimate aim of philosophy: “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” His work seeks to reconcile a commitment to science and naturalism with recognition of the normative dimension of thought and knowledge. He taught above all at the University of Pittsburgh, where he formed an influential line of students. ...

Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich am Rhein (present-day Wiesbaden, Germany) on 19 November 1833 and died in Seis am Schlern (present-day northern Italy) on 1 October 1911. He held professorships in Basel, Kiel, and from 1882 in Berlin — where he occupied the chair once held by Hegel — and devoted his life to a project that remained unfinished yet profoundly influential: providing the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) with their own philosophical foundation, comparable to what Kant had given the natural sciences in the Critique of Pure Reason. ...

William James American philosopher and psychologist, co-founder of pragmatism and pioneer of modern psychology. Brother of novelist Henry James. He popularized and developed Peirce’s pragmatism in a more psychological and humanistic direction, with enormous influence on 20th-century philosophy, psychology, and theology. Key Concepts Pragmatism as method: an idea is true if it works, if it produces satisfactory consequences for action — truth as an instrumental value, not a static correspondence Truth as process: “truth happens to an idea; it becomes true, is made true by events” — truth is dynamic and verifiable in experience Radical empiricism: experience includes not only things but also the relations between them — a critique of classical empiricism that fragmented experience into isolated atoms Stream of consciousness: consciousness is not discrete and static but continuous, personal, and selective — a concept that profoundly influenced modernist literature Will to believe: when evidence is insufficient and a decision is forced and momentous (such as belief in God), it is rationally legitimate to believe on practical and emotional grounds Varieties of religious experience: religion should be evaluated by its effects on people’s lives, not by its metaphysics; mysticism has genuine psychological validity Pluralism: reality is multiple and unfinished — a critique of Hegelian absolute monism Influenced by Peirce — original pragmatic maxim Darwin — evolutionism and mental functionalism Hume — skepticism and empiricism Kant — theory of knowledge (critically) Influenced John Dewey — instrumentalism and philosophy of education Bergson — mutual influence in philosophy of life and time Wittgenstein — explicit references in Philosophical Investigations American psychology (functionalism, behaviorism) Liberal theology and the religious modernist movement Works The Principles of Psychology (1890); The Will to Believe (1897); The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Pragmatism (1907); Radical Empiricism (1912). ...

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. ...