Greek and Roman
Thales of Miletus
Miletus, Ionia · c. 624 to c. 546 BC
Aristotle called him the first philosopher, the first to explain the world by nature rather than by myth. Everything, he held, comes from water. He was said to have predicted an eclipse, and Plato tells how he fell into a well while gazing at the stars.
WorksNone survive, if he wrote any; known through Aristotle and Herodotus
In a lineAll things are full of gods.
Greek and Roman
Pythagoras
Samos and Croton · c. 570 to c. 495 BC
He founded a brotherhood at Croton with strict rules of life, and taught that souls pass from body to body; Xenophanes mocked him for hearing a dead friend’s voice in a yelping puppy. His followers found number and harmony everywhere, from the musical scale to the heavens.
WorksNone; known through later, often legendary, accounts
In a lineAll things are number.
Greek and Roman
Heraclitus
Ephesus, Ionia · fl. c. 500 BC
Called ‘the Obscure’ for his riddling sayings. Everything flows, and opposites are held together in a tense unity ordered by the logos, which most people fail to grasp. The world is an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.
WorksOne book, surviving in more than a hundred fragments
In a lineYou cannot step twice into the same river.
Greek and Roman
Parmenides
Elea, southern Italy · born c. 515 BC
In a poem revealed by a goddess, he argued that what is not cannot be thought or spoken of, so change, plurality and coming to be are illusions of the senses. Reality is one, whole and unchanging. His pupil Zeno devised the paradoxes of motion to defend him.
WorksOn Nature, a poem in hexameters, surviving in fragments
In a lineFor it is the same thing to think and to be.
Greek and Roman
Democritus
Abdera, Thrace · c. 460 to c. 370 BC
With his teacher Leucippus he held that reality is nothing but indivisible atoms moving in the void, and that colours, tastes and warmth exist only by convention. Later writers called him ‘the laughing philosopher’, and he made cheerfulness the goal of life.
WorksDozens of works, from ethics to physics, all lost but for fragments
In a lineBy convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality, atoms and void.
Greek and Roman
Socrates
Athens · c. 470 to 399 BC
He spent his life questioning his fellow Athenians about courage, justice and virtue, showing that they did not know what they thought they knew. The oracle at Delphi said no one was wiser; Athens put him to death for impiety and corrupting the young.
WorksNone; we meet him in Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes
In a lineThe unexamined life is not worth living.
Greek and Roman
Plato
Athens · c. 428 to 348 BC
Socrates’ pupil and founder of the Academy, he wrote philosophy as drama. Behind the changing world of the senses stand eternal Forms, the true objects of knowledge, crowned by the Good. The soul is immortal, and philosophy turns it from the shadows of the cave towards the sun.
WorksRepublic, Symposium, Phaedo, Timaeus and some thirty other dialogues
In a linePhilosophy begins in wonder.
Greek and Roman
Aristotle
Stagira and Athens · 384 to 322 BC
Plato’s pupil, Alexander’s tutor and founder of the Lyceum. He invented formal logic, wrote on everything from biology to drama, and explained change by four causes. The human good is eudaimonia, flourishing in a life of virtue, each virtue a mean between extremes.
WorksNicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Politics, Physics, Poetics
In a lineAll men by nature desire to know.
Greek and Roman
Diogenes of Sinope
Sinope, Athens and Corinth · c. 412 to 323 BC
The original Cynic, nicknamed ‘the dog’. He lived in a storage jar in the Athenian marketplace, owned almost nothing and mocked every convention. He carried a lamp in broad daylight, searching, he said, for a human being, and called himself a citizen of the world.
WorksNone survive; his sayings come down through Diogenes Laertius
In a lineStand a little out of my sun.
Greek and Roman
Epicurus
Samos and Athens · 341 to 270 BC
From his Garden in Athens, open to women and slaves, he taught that pleasure is the good, but that the highest pleasure is tranquillity, freedom from pain and fear. Simple living, friendship and an atomist physics free us from dread of the gods and of death.
WorksLetter to Menoeceus, Principal Doctrines; nearly all of his 300 books are lost
In a lineDeath is nothing to us.
Greek and Roman
Epictetus
Hierapolis, Rome and Nicopolis · c. AD 50 to c. 135
Born a slave, he taught Stoicism in Rome until the emperor Domitian banished the philosophers, then at his own school in Greece. Separate what is up to you, your own judgements and choices, from what is not, and you can be free in chains and calm in any storm.
WorksDiscourses and the Handbook (Enchiridion), written down by his pupil Arrian
In a lineSome things are up to us, and some are not.
Greek and Roman
Marcus Aurelius
Rome and the Danube frontier · AD 121 to 180
Roman emperor and the last great Stoic, who wrote notes to himself in Greek while on campaign against the Germanic tribes. Do your duty, accept what nature brings, and remember that everything, fame and emperors included, soon passes away.
WorksMeditations, private notebooks known in Greek as To Himself
In a lineWaste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Greek and Roman
Plotinus
Egypt and Rome · c. AD 204 to 270
The founder of Neoplatonism. All reality flows from the One, utterly simple and beyond being, through Intellect and Soul down to matter. Porphyry says he seemed ashamed to have a body, and that four times in their years together he was united with the One.
WorksThe Enneads, six sets of nine treatises arranged by his pupil Porphyry
In a lineThe flight of the alone to the Alone.
Greek and Roman
Hypatia of Alexandria
Alexandria · c. AD 355 to 415
Mathematician, astronomer and Alexandria’s leading Platonist, she taught pagans and Christians alike. Her pupil Synesius, later a bishop, wrote to her as ‘mother, sister, teacher, benefactor’. In 415 a Christian mob, caught up in the city’s power struggles, murdered her.
WorksCommentaries on Diophantus and Apollonius, now lost
In a linePlato and Aristotle, for anyone who would listen.
Middle Ages
Augustine of Hippo
Thagaste, Milan and Hippo · 354 to 430
A restless teacher of rhetoric who passed through Manichaeism and scepticism before his conversion in a Milan garden. As bishop of Hippo in North Africa he shaped all Latin Christendom: evil is the absence of good, time is a stretching of the mind, and we become what we love.
WorksConfessions, The City of God, On the Trinity, On Free Choice of the Will
In a lineOur heart is restless until it rests in you.
Middle Ages
Boethius
Rome and Pavia · c. 477 to 524
A Roman senator who planned to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, and gave the Middle Ages its logic. Condemned for treason, he wrote the Consolation in prison, where Lady Philosophy visits to explain fortune, happiness and how God’s foreknowledge leaves us free.
WorksThe Consolation of Philosophy; translations of and commentaries on Aristotle’s logic
In a lineNothing is miserable unless you think it so.
Middle Ages
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Bukhara, Isfahan and Hamadan · 980 to 1037
A prodigy who knew the Qur’an by heart at ten and was treating patients at sixteen; his Canon was taught in European medical schools for five centuries. He rebuilt Aristotle on new foundations: essence is distinct from existence, and God alone exists necessarily, of himself.
WorksThe Cure (al-Shifa), The Canon of Medicine, Remarks and Admonitions
In a lineBlindfolded in mid-air, you still know that you are.
Middle Ages
Anselm of Canterbury
Aosta, Bec and Canterbury · 1033 to 1109
Benedictine monk and Archbishop of Canterbury, who sought to understand by reason what he already believed. God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, and such a being must exist in reality, not only in the mind. The monk Gaunilo replied with a perfect island.
WorksProslogion, Monologion, Why God Became Man
In a lineFaith seeking understanding.
Middle Ages
Al-Ghazali
Tus and Baghdad · c. 1058 to 1111
Baghdad’s most celebrated professor, he abandoned his post in a crisis of doubt and took up the Sufi path. He charged the philosophers with incoherence for teaching an eternal world and a God who does not know particulars, and denied that causes have any power of their own.
WorksThe Incoherence of the Philosophers, The Deliverance from Error, The Revival of the Religious Sciences
In a lineFire does not burn the cotton; God does.
Middle Ages
Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
Córdoba and Marrakesh · 1126 to 1198
Judge, court physician and, to the Latin West, simply ‘the Commentator’ on Aristotle. He answered al-Ghazali point by point and argued that philosophy and revelation, rightly read, cannot conflict. His view that all humankind shares a single intellect scandalised Paris.
WorksThe Incoherence of the Incoherence, The Decisive Treatise, commentaries on Aristotle
In a lineTruth does not contradict truth.
Middle Ages
Maimonides
Córdoba and Cairo · 1138 to 1204
Rabbi, physician at Saladin’s court and the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. He wrote for believers perplexed by Aristotle: scripture’s bodily images of God are figures of speech, God is known only by what he is not, and perfecting the intellect is the highest human end.
WorksThe Guide for the Perplexed, the Mishneh Torah
In a lineAccept the truth from whoever speaks it.
Middle Ages
Thomas Aquinas
Roccasecca, Paris and Naples · c. 1225 to 1274
A Dominican friar his classmates called ‘the dumb ox’; his teacher Albert said his bellowing would be heard throughout the world. He wedded Aristotle to Christian faith: reason and revelation cannot conflict, God’s existence can be shown in five ways, and natural law is reason’s share in the eternal law.
WorksSumma Theologiae, Summa contra Gentiles, On Being and Essence
In a lineGrace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
Middle Ages
John Duns Scotus
Duns, Oxford, Paris and Cologne · c. 1266 to 1308
The ‘Subtle Doctor’, a Franciscan from Duns in the Scottish Borders. Being means the same when said of God and of creatures, every individual has its own ‘thisness’ (haecceitas), and the will, not the intellect, has the primacy. Renaissance critics turned his followers’ name into ‘dunce’.
WorksOrdinatio, Treatise on the First Principle
In a lineNot just what it is, but this one.
Middle Ages
William of Ockham
Ockham, Oxford, Avignon and Munich · c. 1287 to 1347
A Franciscan logician from Surrey. Only individual things exist; universals like ‘humanity’ are names or concepts, not realities in things. Summoned to the papal court at Avignon on suspicion of heresy, he fled to the emperor in Munich and spent his last years attacking the pope.
WorksSum of Logic, commentary on the Sentences, Dialogue
In a linePlurality is not to be posited without necessity.
Early Modern
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florence · 1469 to 1527
A Florentine diplomat who, tortured and pushed out of office when the Medici returned, wrote a handbook for princes. Politics has its own logic, apart from Christian morality: a ruler must learn how not to be good, use force and fraud when needed, and above all seem virtuous.
WorksThe Prince, Discourses on Livy, The Art of War
In a lineIt is much safer to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
Early Modern
Thomas Hobbes
Malmesbury, Paris and London · 1588 to 1679
His mother went into labour early at news of the Armada, and he said that fear and he were born twins. Without a power to keep us all in awe, life is a war of every man against every man, so rational people agree to hand their rights to a sovereign, the great Leviathan.
WorksLeviathan, De Cive, De Corpore
In a lineSolitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Early Modern
René Descartes
Touraine, the Netherlands and Stockholm · 1596 to 1650
He resolved to doubt everything that could be doubted, and found one thing he could not: that he was thinking. From there he rebuilt knowledge on clear and distinct ideas, dividing reality into thinking mind and extended matter. He also gave us coordinate geometry.
WorksMeditations on First Philosophy, Discourse on the Method, Principles of Philosophy
In a lineI think, therefore I am.
Early Modern
Blaise Pascal
Clermont and Paris · 1623 to 1662
A prodigy who built a calculating machine at nineteen and helped found probability theory, until a night of fire in 1654 turned him to God. Reason cannot settle whether God exists, so wager: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing.
WorksPensées, The Provincial Letters
In a lineThe heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.
Early Modern
Baruch Spinoza
Amsterdam and The Hague · 1632 to 1677
Cast out of Amsterdam’s Jewish community at 23, he lived quietly, grinding lenses. There is one substance, God or Nature, of which mind and body are two aspects, and everything follows from it by necessity. Freedom is understanding that necessity, and blessedness is the intellectual love of God.
WorksEthics, Theological-Political Treatise
In a lineGod, or Nature.
Early Modern
John Locke
Somerset, Oxford and Holland · 1632 to 1704
Physician, political exile and philosopher of the Glorious Revolution. The mind begins as a blank sheet, and all our ideas come from experience. Governments exist by consent to protect life, liberty and property, and a people may resist a ruler who betrays that trust.
WorksAn Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government, A Letter Concerning Toleration
In a lineNo man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
Early Modern
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Leipzig, Paris and Hanover · 1646 to 1716
Diplomat, librarian and universal genius, who invented the calculus independently of Newton and dreamed of settling every dispute by calculation. Nothing happens without a sufficient reason, and the world is built from simple, windowless substances he called monads, each mirroring the whole universe.
WorksMonadology, Theodicy, Discourse on Metaphysics, New Essays on Human Understanding
In a lineThis is the best of all possible worlds.
Early Modern
George Berkeley
Kilkenny, Dublin and Cloyne · 1685 to 1753
An Irish bishop who denied that matter exists. Tables and trees are collections of ideas, kept in being when no one is looking by the mind of God. Samuel Johnson kicked a large stone and declared, ‘I refute it thus.’
WorksA Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
In a lineTo be is to be perceived.
Early Modern
David Hume
Edinburgh · 1711 to 1776
Often called the greatest philosopher to write in English, and the best company in Edinburgh, he was twice refused a university chair, Glasgow’s among them. Experience gives no rational ground for causation, induction or a lasting self, and morality springs from feeling, not reason.
WorksA Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
In a lineReason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
Early Modern
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Geneva and France · 1712 to 1778
The self-taught son of a Genevan watchmaker, he argued that civilisation corrupts naturally good human beings. Legitimate government rests on the general will of free citizens, and education should follow a child’s nature rather than force it. His own five children went to a foundling hospital.
WorksThe Social Contract, Emile, Discourse on Inequality, Confessions
In a lineMan is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Early Modern
Adam Smith
Kirkcaldy, Glasgow and Edinburgh · 1723 to 1790
Glasgow’s Professor of Moral Philosophy before he was the father of economics. Morality grows from sympathy: we judge ourselves through the eyes of an impartial spectator within. Markets, as if led by an invisible hand, can turn self-interest to the common good, within the bounds of justice.
WorksThe Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
In a lineTo feel much for others and little for ourselves.
Early Modern
Immanuel Kant
Königsberg · 1724 to 1804
He never travelled far from Königsberg, and legend says his neighbours set their clocks by his daily walk. The mind does not copy the world but shapes experience through space, time and the categories. Morality rests on duty: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law.
WorksCritique of Pure Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgement
In a lineThe starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Early Modern
Mary Wollstonecraft
London and Paris · 1759 to 1797
A self-taught writer who answered Burke on the French Revolution, then turned the rights of man to the question of women. Women seem frivolous only because they are denied education and trained to please; given reason’s full training, they are men’s equals in virtue. She died days after giving birth to Mary Shelley.
WorksA Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men
In a lineI do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
Nineteenth Century
Jeremy Bentham
London · 1748 to 1832
Legal reformer and founder of utilitarianism: the right act produces the greatest happiness, with every pleasure and pain counted equally. He called natural rights ‘nonsense upon stilts’, designed a prison called the Panopticon, and left his body to be preserved and displayed. It is still at University College London.
WorksAn Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, A Fragment on Government
In a lineThe question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Nineteenth Century
G. W. F. Hegel
Stuttgart, Jena and Berlin · 1770 to 1831
He finished his first great book as Napoleon’s guns sounded at Jena, and saw history as Spirit coming to know itself. Every position breeds its own contradiction, resolved at a higher stage, until freedom is fully realised. What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.
WorksPhenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
In a lineThe owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.
Nineteenth Century
Arthur Schopenhauer
Danzig, Berlin and Frankfurt · 1788 to 1860
He timed his Berlin lectures to clash with Hegel’s, and almost no one came. Behind the world of appearance strives a blind, insatiable Will, the source of endless craving. Relief comes through art, music above all, through compassion, and through the quieting of desire.
WorksThe World as Will and Representation, On the Basis of Morality
In a lineLife swings like a pendulum, back and forth, between pain and boredom.
Nineteenth Century
John Stuart Mill
London and Avignon · 1806 to 1873
Taught Greek by his father at three, he had a breakdown at twenty and was rescued by poetry. He refined Bentham’s utilitarianism to rank higher pleasures above lower, defended liberty of thought and life against the tyranny of the majority, and argued in Parliament for votes for women.
WorksOn Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, A System of Logic
In a lineBetter to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
Nineteenth Century
Søren Kierkegaard
Copenhagen · 1813 to 1855
He broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen and wrote under a crowd of pseudonyms against Hegel’s system and the comfortable Christianity of Denmark. Truth is subjectivity: the single individual must choose, in fear and trembling, and faith is a leap no argument can make for you.
WorksEither/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
In a lineLife can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Nineteenth Century
Karl Marx
Trier, Paris and London · 1818 to 1883
A philosopher turned revolutionary, he spent years in the British Museum Reading Room dissecting capitalism. History is driven by material production and the struggle between classes; workers are alienated from what they make, and capitalism’s own contradictions will give way to a classless society.
WorksCapital, The Communist Manifesto (with Engels), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
In a linePhilosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.
Nineteenth Century
William James
New York and Harvard · 1842 to 1910
Trained as a doctor, he wrote the founding textbook of American psychology before turning to philosophy. Pragmatism judges ideas by the difference they make: a belief is true if it works out in the long run of experience. Where evidence cannot decide, we have the right to believe.
WorksThe Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism
In a lineTruth happens to an idea.
Nineteenth Century
Friedrich Nietzsche
Basel, Sils Maria and Turin · 1844 to 1900
A professor at 24, he resigned through illness and wrote his greatest books as a wandering invalid, before collapsing in Turin in 1889. God is dead, and the morality built on him will follow. Create new values, become who you are, and love your life enough to live it again forever.
WorksThus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, The Gay Science
In a lineGod is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Nineteenth Century
Gottlob Frege
Wismar and Jena · 1848 to 1925
A quiet mathematician at Jena who invented modern logic and tried to show that arithmetic is logic in disguise. Words have sense as well as reference: ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ name the same planet in different ways. A letter from Russell in 1902 exposed a paradox at the heart of his system.
WorksBegriffsschrift, The Foundations of Arithmetic, On Sense and Reference, Basic Laws of Arithmetic
In a lineNever ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence.
Twentieth Century
Bertrand Russell
Monmouthshire, Cambridge and North Wales · 1872 to 1970
Logician, pacifist and Nobel laureate in literature, jailed for protest in 1918 and again at 89. With Whitehead he set out to derive all of mathematics from logic, and his theory of descriptions showed how to talk sense about the present King of France, who does not exist.
WorksPrincipia Mathematica (with Whitehead), On Denoting, The Problems of Philosophy, A History of Western Philosophy
In a lineThe good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Twentieth Century
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Vienna and Cambridge · 1889 to 1951
Heir to a Viennese steel fortune, he gave it away and wrote his first book as a soldier in the First World War, sure it had solved philosophy. After years as a village schoolteacher he returned to Cambridge and attacked his earlier view: meaning is use, and philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.
WorksTractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty
In a lineWhereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Twentieth Century
Martin Heidegger
Messkirch and Freiburg · 1889 to 1976
Husserl’s student and successor, who asked what it means to be. We are not detached minds but beings thrown into a world, absorbed in our concerns and facing death; mostly we live inauthentically, as ‘one’ does. His membership of the Nazi party has shadowed his work ever since.
WorksBeing and Time, The Question Concerning Technology, Letter on Humanism
In a lineLanguage is the house of being.
Twentieth Century
Karl Popper
Vienna, Christchurch and London · 1902 to 1994
Vienna-born, he spent the war in New Zealand and then taught at the London School of Economics. We never prove a theory true; we make bold conjectures and try hard to refute them, and a theory is scientific only if it could be falsified. Einstein passed his test; psychoanalysis, he argued, could not even sit it.
WorksThe Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Conjectures and Refutations
In a lineScience must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.
Twentieth Century
Jean-Paul Sartre
Paris · 1905 to 1980
Novelist, playwright and café philosopher, who turned down the Nobel Prize. There is no human nature given in advance: we make ourselves by our choices and answer for them, and pretending otherwise is bad faith. He and Simone de Beauvoir were partners for half a century.
WorksBeing and Nothingness, Existentialism Is a Humanism, Nausea, No Exit
In a lineMan is condemned to be free.
Twentieth Century
Hannah Arendt
Königsberg, Paris and New York · 1906 to 1975
A German Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis to Paris and then New York. She traced how totalitarianism crushes plurality and the space for free public action, and, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, found evil done not by monsters but by thoughtless functionaries.
WorksThe Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem
In a lineThe banality of evil.
Twentieth Century
Simone de Beauvoir
Paris · 1908 to 1986
At 21 the youngest person ever to pass France’s philosophy agrégation, placed just behind Sartre. The Second Sex shows how woman has been made ‘the Other’, defined always in relation to man, and founded modern feminist philosophy. To will yourself free is to will others free.
WorksThe Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Mandarins
In a lineOne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Twentieth Century
Albert Camus
Algiers and Paris · 1913 to 1960
Goalkeeper, Resistance editor and Nobel laureate, though never, he insisted, an existentialist. We crave meaning and the universe answers with silence; that clash is the absurd. Neither suicide nor a leap of faith resolves it, so live instead in lucid revolt.
WorksThe Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Stranger, The Plague
In a lineOne must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Twentieth Century
Elizabeth Anscombe
Limerick, Oxford and Cambridge · 1919 to 2001
Wittgenstein’s student, translator and literary executor, and a Catholic convert who opposed Oxford’s honorary degree for President Truman over Hiroshima. Her ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ argued that ‘ought’ means little without a lawgiver, coined the word ‘consequentialism’ and launched the revival of virtue ethics.
WorksIntention, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, ‘Mr Truman’s Degree’
In a lineIt is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.
Twentieth Century
John Rawls
Baltimore and Harvard · 1921 to 2002
A shy Harvard professor who revived political philosophy. Choose the principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing your place in society, and you will secure equal basic liberties for all, and allow inequalities only when they benefit the worst off.
WorksA Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, The Law of Peoples
In a lineJustice is the first virtue of social institutions.
Twentieth Century
Michel Foucault
Poitiers and Paris · 1926 to 1984
A historian of madness, prisons and sexuality at the Collège de France. Knowledge and power grow together, and categories we take as natural, like sanity or normality, were shaped by institutions. Modern power works less by punishment than by watching, measuring and normalising.
WorksDiscipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, The Order of Things, History of Madness
In a lineVisibility is a trap.
Asia
Confucius
Lu, China · 551 to 479 BC
A minor official who never found a ruler to put his ideas into practice, and became China’s most influential teacher. A good society grows from cultivated persons: humaneness (ren), ritual propriety (li) and right relationships, from parent and child to ruler and subject. The exemplary person leads by virtue, not force.
WorksThe Analects, sayings collected by his disciples
In a lineDo not impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.
Asia
The Buddha
Northern India · c. 5th century BC
Siddhattha Gotama, a prince who left his palace to seek the end of suffering and, as tradition tells, found it under a tree at Bodh Gaya. Suffering is born of craving; there is no enduring self, only a stream of dependently arising processes; and the Middle Way of the Eightfold Path leads to nirvana.
WorksNone written; his teachings were memorised by his followers and later set down in the Pali Canon and other collections
In a lineAll conditioned things pass away. Strive on with diligence.
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