Philosophers
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German Augustinian friar, theologian, and reformer whose challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's authority ignited the Protestant Reformation and permanently transformed …
Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was a French Renaissance nobleman and writer who invented the essay as a literary and philosophical form. His three-volume Essais — …
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, cosmologist, and poet whose visionary ideas about the infinity of the universe, the plurality of worlds, and …
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, was an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist who is widely regarded as the father of empiricism and the modern …
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher whose mechanistic materialism, geometrical method, and theory of the social contract made him one of the founders of modern …
René Descartes
René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy. His method of radical doubt, his discovery of …
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and religious philosopher whose brief, intense life produced groundbreaking contributions to mathematics and physics as well as …
Margaret Cavendish
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623–1673), was an English natural philosopher, poet, playwright, and early science fiction author who developed a systematic materialist philosophy of …
Anne Conway
Anne Conway (1631–1679) was an English philosopher who developed one of the most original metaphysical systems of the seventeenth century — a vitalist monadology that …
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin whose radical metaphysics, uncompromising rationalism, and scandalous identification of God with Nature made him …
John Locke
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician whose work on epistemology, political theory, and the philosophy of mind made him the most influential thinker …
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath — philosopher, mathematician, logician, diplomat, and universal scholar — whose staggering range of achievement makes him one of …
Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was an Italian philosopher of history, jurisprudence, and culture whose *New Science* (*Scienza Nuova*, 1725, revised 1730, 1744) constituted one of the …
George Berkeley
George Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and bishop whose radical idealism — the thesis that material objects exist only as perceptions in the mind — …
Voltaire
Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, the French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, and polemicist whose wit, prolific output, and relentless campaigning against religious intolerance, …
Émilie du Châtelet
Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) was a French natural philosopher, mathematician, and physicist who produced the standard French translation and commentary on Newton's *Principia Mathematica*, synthesized …
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist whose radical empiricism, devastating critique of causation, and naturalistic approach to human nature made him arguably …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer whose radical ideas about nature, society, education, and political legitimacy made him one of the most …
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher and political economist whose two masterworks — The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations — …
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher whose critical philosophy represents the most ambitious and systematic attempt in the history of Western thought to determine the …
Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment whose work pioneered the reconciliation of Jewish tradition with Enlightenment rationalism, earning him the title …
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer who founded modern utilitarianism — the ethical theory that the right action is the one …
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate for women's rights whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is one of the earliest …
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher whose radicalization of Kant's transcendental idealism into a system of absolute idealism made him the pivotal figure between …