History of western literature and philosophy By Rolf van Breugel 800 BCE Homer 800 BCE Hesiod 630 BCE Sappho 585 BCE Thales 570 BCE Anaximander 540 BCE Xenophanes 532 BCE Pythagoras 525 BCE Aeschylus 495 BCE Sophocles 484 BCE Herodotus 480 BCE Euripides 470 BCE Anaxagoras 465 BCE Parmenides 460 BCE Thucydides 450 BCE Empedocles 450 BCE Zeno of Elea 445 BCE Aristophanes 440 BCE Leucippus 428 BCE Plato 415 BCE Democritus 400 BCE Hippocrates 384 BCE Aristotle 372 BCE Mencius 300 BCE Euclid 287 BCE Archimedes 262 BCE Apollonius 98 BCE Lucretius 70 BCE Vergil 46 Plutarch 55 Tacitus 60 Nicomachus 60 Epictetus 100 Ptolemy 121 Marcus Aurelius 130 Galen 205 Plotinus 354 Saint Augustine 477 Boethius 495 Heraclitus 546 Anaximenes 1079 Abelard 1214 Roger Bacon 1225 St. Thomas Aquinas 1265 Dante 1266 Duns Scotus 1285 William of Ockham 1340 Geoffrey Chaucer 1369 Nicolo Machiavelli 1473 Nicolaus Copernicus 1495 Francois Rabelais 1533 Michel de Montaigne 1540 William Gilbert 1546 Miguel de Cervantes 1561 Francis Bacon 1564 William Shakespeare 1564 Galileo 1571 Johannes Kepler 1578 William Harvey 1588 Thomas Hobbes 1596 Rene Descartes 1608 John Milton 1623 Blaise Pascal 1629 Christiaan Huygens 1632 Benedict de Spinoza 1632 John Locke 1642 Isaac Newton 1646 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1667 Jonathan Swift 1685 George Berkeley 1689 Baron de Montesquieu 1707 Henry Fielding 1711 David Hume 1712 Jean Jacques Rousseau 1713 Laurence Sterne 1723 Adam Smith 1724 Immanuel Kant 1737 Edward Gibbon 1740 James Boswell 1743 Antoine Lavoisier 1745 John Jay 1748 Jeremy Bentham 1749 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1751 James Madison 1757 Alexander Hamilton 1768 Joseph Fourier 1770 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1788 Arthur Schopenhauer 1791 Michael Faraday 1806 John Stuart Mill 1809 Charles Darwin 1818 Karl Marx 1819 Herman Melville 1821 Fyodor Dostoevsky 1828 Leo Tolstoy 1842 William James 1844 Friedrich Nietzsche 1848 Gottlob Frege 1856 Sigmund Freud 1859 Edmund Husserl 1872 Bertrand Russell 1873 Thomas Moore 1889 Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 Martin Heidegger 1891 Rudolf Carnap 1900 Gilbert Ryle 1902 Karl Popper 1905 Jean-paul Sartre 1908 Robert Louis Stevenson 1908 Willard Van Orman Quine 1908 Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1911 John Langshaw Austin 1913 Paul Ricœur 1917 Donald Davidson 1917 John Leslie Mackie 1919 Richard Mervyn Hare 1919 Peter Frederick Strawson 1921 John Rawls 1925 Gilles Deleuze 1925 Michael Dummett 1930 Jacques Derrida 1938 Robert Nozick 1940 Saul Kripke