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Thales of Miletus is celebrated as one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. He was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, scientist, astronomer and mathematician from Miletus in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Considered by Aristotle to be the first Greek philosopher, he is best known for his proposition that everything in nature occurs because of a material substance which we now call water. -
Confucius the Chinese philosopher, author, and political theorist, was arguably one of the greatest minds to have ever roamed our planet. His teachings have inspired generations of philosophers and students alike. The first thing that a student of the writing craft should do is imitate his example. -
Socrates was a well-known philosopher in ancient Greece. His main goal in life was to find the objective truth about everything and he tried to teach other people how to think for themselves, how to ask questions about what they believed, and how to understand what it means for something to be true. -
Plato was a philosopher of the Classical period in Greece, founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. -
Aristotle was an Ancient Greek philosopher, scientist, and logician. He combined many older scientific traditions to create a remarkably detailed system of thought. Later Greek and Roman thinkers imitated his techniques and his subjects of interest. Aristotle is considered a giant of western philosophy. -
St. Thomas Aquinas is considered by many to be the most influential Western theologian of the Catholic Church. His writings have had a profound impact on Christianity, influencing medieval economic thought and modern economic theory. -
Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian political philosopher and one of the main founders of modern political science. His books The Prince, written in 1513, and The Discourses, written in 1517 and published in 1531, are the most important early works of modern political thought. -
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, and perhaps the most influential thinker in the Western philosophical tradition. He is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, which established the social contract theory that has served as the foundation for most later Western political philosophy. -
René Descartes was a 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician. He is often considered the father of modern philosophy. He developed the famous Cartesian coordinate system, which allowed algebraic equations to be graphed and geometry to be analyzed analytically. -
John Locke was an English philosopher who wrote extensively on politics, religion, and education. His writings are still widely read and deeply influential today. He was one of the first to develop a philosophy of personal freedom and individual rights that has profoundly shaped the modern world. -
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist and revolutionary socialist born in Trier and later based in London. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. -
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, composer, and Latin and Greek scholar. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science throughout his career. Nietzsche's key ideas include the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, aesthetic affirmation of life, the will to power, eternal recurrence and the death of God. -
Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He is known for his revolutionary early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and for his later thought in relation to language games, private and public language, and for his work in aesthetics. -
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He is best known for his analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as most notably for his application of this theory to mental illness and criminal deviance.