Philosophy
190 ideas and 330 connections. The big questions and the thinkers who asked them, West and East, from the first Greek and Chinese sages to today.
Tip: the map works best on a bigger screen. Pinch to zoom, drag to move.
Reality, mind & God
Knowledge, logic & science
Ethics & how to live
Zoom in to reveal more detail, out for the big picture · click a dot to open it · click a ◆ on a line for how two items connect · +N = hidden details · drag to move · tap an era at the top to jump to it.■ philosopher⬢ school or movement◎ idea or argument▮ book or text● event◯? big question
Before Socrates & the first sages800 – 470 BC
The first Greek thinkers ask what everything is made of; Confucius, Laozi and the Buddha teach.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle & the Axial Age470 – 300 BC
Socrates questions, Plato imagines Forms, Aristotle organizes knowledge.
Hellenistic, Roman & Han thought300 BC – AD 400
How to live well: Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics; Han Confucianism; Indian schools.
Faith and reason400 – 1400
Christian, Islamic and Jewish thinkers join faith and reason; Neo-Confucianism.
Renaissance & the new science1400 – 1650
Humanism, Machiavelli, Bacon and Descartes begin modern thought.
Reason, experience & Enlightenment1650 – 1800
Reason versus experience; Locke, Hume, Rousseau and Kant.
The 19th century1800 – 1900
History, utility, will and revolution: Hegel, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche.
The 20th century1900 – 1970
Logic and language, existentialism, science and justice.
Contemporary1970 – today
Mind, ethics, justice and technology today.
Every item as its own page (190)
Before Socrates & the first sages
- The Upanishads
- Brahman and Atman: the self and ultimate reality
- Thales of Miletus
- The Presocratic philosophers
- What is ultimately real?
- Laozi, the "Old Master"
- Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans
- Confucius (Kongzi)
- Heraclitus: everything flows
- Ren (humaneness) and li (ritual propriety)
- Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
- Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path
- No-self (anatta) and impermanence
- Parmenides of Elea
- The Analects (Lunyu)
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle & the Axial Age
- Socrates
- The Hundred Schools of Thought
- Zeno of Elea and his paradoxes of motion
- The Sophists (Protagoras, Gorgias)
- Democritus and atomism
- Mozi and Mohism: impartial care
- The Socratic method and "the unexamined life"
- What is a good life?
- Daoism: the Way (dao) and effortless action (wu wei)
- The Cynics (Antisthenes, Diogenes)
- Trial and death of Socrates
- The Daodejing (Tao Te Ching)
- Plato
- Plato's theory of Forms
- Plato's Republic
- What is justice?
- The Allegory of the Cave
- What can we know?
- Legalism: rule by law and punishment
- Aristotle's logic and the syllogism
- Virtue ethics and eudaimonia (Nicomachean Ethics)
- Aristotle's four causes
- Aristotle
- Is human nature good or bad?
- Mencius (Mengzi): human nature is good
- Zhuangzi and the butterfly dream
- Epicurus and Epicureanism
Hellenistic, Roman & Han thought
- Ancient Skepticism (Pyrrho to Sextus Empiricus)
- Do we have free will?
- Stoicism (founded by Zeno of Citium)
- Xunzi: human nature is bad
- Qin unification and the burning of books
- The classical Indian schools (darshanas)
- The Bhagavad Gita
- Confucianism as Han state orthodoxy
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
- Natural law (the Stoics and Cicero)
- Seneca the Younger
- Epictetus and the dichotomy of control
- Nagarjuna and Madhyamaka (the Middle Way)
- Emptiness (sunyata) and the two truths
- Nyaya: Indian logic and theory of knowledge
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- Plotinus and Neoplatonism
- Augustine of Hippo
- The problem of evil
Faith and reason
- Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
- Wonhyo: 'one mind' and harmonizing disputes
- Chan (Zen) Buddhism
- Adi Shankara and Advaita Vedanta
- Greek-to-Arabic translation movement (House of Wisdom)
- Philosophy in the Islamic world (falsafa)
- Avicenna (Ibn Sina)
- Neo-Confucianism
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Anselm's ontological argument
- Does God exist?
- Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers
- Scholasticism and the recovery of Aristotle
- Zhu Xi and the Four Books
- Principle (li) and material force (qi)
- Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
- Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed
- Dogen and Soto Zen
- Thomas Aquinas
- Aquinas' Five Ways
- William of Ockham
- Ockham's razor
- Joseon Korea founded on Neo-Confucian lines
Renaissance & the new science
- Renaissance humanism
- Wang Yangming: unity of knowing and acting
- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
- The Protestant Reformation
- Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- The Scientific Revolution
- Yi Hwang (Toegye)
- The Four-Seven Debate (Toegye and Gi Daeseung)
- Yi I (Yulgok)
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays
- Galileo and the trial of 1633
- Francis Bacon and the scientific method
- "I think, therefore I am" (the cogito)
- René Descartes
- Mind–body dualism
- What is the mind?
Reason, experience & Enlightenment
- The social contract
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
- Blaise Pascal and the wager
- Baruch Spinoza
- Silhak (Practical Learning) and Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan)
- The Enlightenment
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- British empiricism
- John Locke
- What makes you the same person over time?
- "The best of all possible worlds"
- George Berkeley: to be is to be perceived
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Voltaire
- David Hume
- Hume's problem of induction
- The is–ought gap
- Montesquieu and the separation of powers
- What is beauty? The question of aesthetics
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Adam Smith, moral philosopher and economist
- Jeremy Bentham
- The Wealth of Nations
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Immanuel Kant
- The categorical imperative
- Utilitarianism: the greatest happiness principle
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The 19th century
- G. W. F. Hegel
- Hegel's dialectic and the Phenomenology of Spirit
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- John Stuart Mill
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Karl Marx
- Historical materialism and class struggle
- The Communist Manifesto
- Darwin's theory of evolution
- On Liberty and the harm principle
- Das Kapital
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Pragmatism
- Gottlob Frege and modern logic
- "God is dead"
- The will to power and the Übermensch
- On the Genealogy of Morals
- William James
The 20th century
- Husserl and phenomenology
- Analytic philosophy
- Bertrand Russell
- Gandhi's satyagraha (nonviolent resistance)
- The Kyoto School (Nishida Kitaro)
- John Dewey: democracy, education and inquiry
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Critical theory (the Frankfurt School)
- Logical positivism and the Vienna Circle
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
- Karl Popper and falsifiability
- Albert Camus and the absurd
- Existentialism
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Does life have meaning?
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- The Axial Age (Jaspers' idea)
- Turing's imitation game ("Can machines think?")
- Hannah Arendt
- W. V. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
- Philosophical Investigations and language games
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- The Gettier problem
- Postmodernism and post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida)
- The trolley problem
Contemporary
- Applied ethics (bioethics, animals, global poverty)
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
- The veil of ignorance
- Peter Singer: the drowning child and Animal Liberation
- Philosophy of artificial intelligence
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
- Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
- The capabilities approach (Sen and Nussbaum)
- Searle's Chinese room
- MacIntyre, Sandel and the communitarians
- The ethics of care (Gilligan, Noddings)
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons
- Chalmers and the hard problem of consciousness
- Nick Bostrom: superintelligence and the simulation argument
- Effective altruism and longtermism
- Can chatbots think? The large language model debate