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624 BCE
Thales of Miletus
He was the founder of the Milesian School of natural philosophy, and the teacher of Anaximander. He was perhaps the first subscriber to Materialist and Naturalism in trying to define the substance or substances of which all material objects were composed, which he identified as water. -
610 BCE
Anaximander
He was an early proponent of science, and is sometimes considered to be the first true scientist, and to have conducted the earliest recorded scientific experiment. He is often considered the founder of astronomy, and he tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe and its origins, and to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. He made important contributions to cosmology, physics, geometry, meteorology and geography as well as to Metaphysics. -
585 BCE
Anaximenes
In the physical sciences, Anaximenes was the first Greek to distinguish clearly between planets and stars, and he used his principles to account for various natural phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, rainbows, earthquakes, etc. -
570 BCE
Pythagoras
He was the founder of the influential philosophical and religious movement or cult called Pythagoreanism, and he was probably the first man to actually call himself a philosopher (or lover of wisdom). Pythagoras (or in a broader sense the Pythagoreans), allegedly exercised an important influence on the work of Plato. -
428 BCE
Plato
He was a hugely important Greek philosopher and mathematician from the Socratic (or Classical) period. He is perhaps the best known, most widely studied and most influential philosopher of all time. In many middle period dialogues, Republic and Phaedrus Plato advocates a belief in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. -
384 BCE
Aristotle
He is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. Aristotle's philosophy stresses biology, instead of mathematics like Plato. He also defined the supreme good as an activity of the rational soul in accordance with virtue. -
354 BCE
Augustine
He was an early North African Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy. St. Augustine is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism. He is famous for being an inimitable Catholic theologian and for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. -
344 BCE
Zeno de Citium
He was born around 490 B.C. in the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy. The date is an estimate based on Plato's report of a visit to Athens by Zeno and his teacher Parmenides when Socrates was "a very young man", and Zeno being about 25 years younger than Parmenides. Little is known for certain about Zeno's life. He founded the Hellenistic philosophy in the early 3rd century BC in Athens. with its school known as stoicism. -
341 BCE
Epicurus
He was a Greek philosopher of the Hellenistic period. He was the founder ancient Greek philosophical school of Epicureanism, whose main goal was to attain a happy, tranquil life, characterized by the absence of pain and fear, through the cultivation of friendship, freedom and an analyzed life. -
1225
Thomas Aquinas
He (AKA Thomas of Aquin or Aquino) was an Italian philosopher and theologian of the Medieval period. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology at the the peak of Scholasticism in Europe, and the founder of the Thomistic school of philosophy and theology. Combining the theological principles of faith with the philosophical principles of reason, he ranked among the most influential thinkers of medieval Scholasticism. -
Immanuel Kant
He is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. He made the Kantian ethics which developed as a result of Enlightenment rationalism, is based on the view that the only intrinsically good thing is a good will; an action can only be good if its maxim – the principle behind it – is duty to the moral law. -
John Rawls
He was an American moral and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls, in which the author attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society) by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social contract. -
Jürgen Habermas
He is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. The Theory of Communicative Action (German: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) is a two-volume 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas, in which Habermas continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language", which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967).
