Browse the index

The Art of War is still on military and business curricula worldwide.

Founded Stoicism in the Athenian Stoa Poikile.

Republican theory and oratory that still frame constitutional argument.

The biographer who invented the idea that character makes history.

Enslaved teacher whose Discourses fixed the dichotomy of control at the heart of Stoic practice.

Emperor whose private Meditations founded modern Stoic self-help.

Physician to gladiators and emperors whose anatomy ruled medicine for 1,400 years.

Founded Madhyamaka Buddhism and its logic of emptiness.

Wrote Confessions, the first true autobiography, and shaped Western theology.

Mathematician and astronomer murdered by a mob; symbol of learning against zealotry.

Wrote Consolation of Philosophy awaiting execution; medieval Europe's bridge to antiquity.

Systematised Advaita Vedanta and reorganised Hindu monasticism.

Wrote the medical textbook that trained Europe's doctors until 1650.

Reoriented Islamic thought toward inwardness and challenged the philosophers on their own ground.

His Aristotle commentaries restarted European philosophy.

Guide for the Perplexed reconciled reason and revelation for Judaism.

Sufi poet whose Masnavi is among the best-selling poetry on Earth today.

Fused Aristotle with Christianity; natural-law theory still shapes law and ethics.

Made a dialect into a nation's language and mapped the moral universe.

Founded sociology and economic history with the Muqaddimah.

The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.

Timbuktu's greatest scholar; wrote over 40 works and argued against enslavement of Muslims.

Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.

Cogito ergo sum and coordinate geometry.

Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.

Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.

Ethics identified God with Nature and grounded secular democratic thought.

Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.

The nun who argued for women's right to learn — and was silenced for it.

Weaponised satire for tolerance and free expression.

The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.

The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.

A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.

Dialectic and the history of spirit; the pivot from which Marx and existentialism both turn.

Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.

Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.

First existentialist; wrote on anxiety, despair and the leap of faith.

Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.

Took the reader inside the mind that has decided to do the terrible thing.

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.

Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.

Indian-service judge whose Edinburgh Lectures gave New Thought a systematic metaphysics.

Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.

Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.

Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Poet-philosopher who conceived the idea of Pakistan.

Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.

Twice redirected philosophy — first with logical form, then with language as use.

Wrote Vietnam's declaration of independence quoting Jefferson.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.

Falsifiability became science's demarcation criterion.

Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.

Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.

Taught imagination as the sole creative power; 'assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled'.

Logotherapy: meaning as the primary human drive, tested in the camps.

Poet-president who co-founded Négritude.

Incompleteness theorems set permanent limits on formal systems.

The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the reference work on how republics fail.

The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.

Wrote on attention, affliction and rootedness while working the factory floor.

Founded deep ecology and the case for nature's intrinsic worth.

The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.

The Labyrinth of Solitude defined Mexican self-understanding.

Twenty-seven years in prison, then negotiated the end of apartheid without civil war.

The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.

A Theory of Justice: fairness derived from behind the veil of ignorance.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed rewrote literacy teaching for the global south.

Agronomist whose theory of culture and liberation shaped decolonisation.

Psychiatrist whose Wretched of the Earth remains the core text of decolonisation.

Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.

Built modern African philosophy on Akan concepts and consensual democracy.

Defined the 'triple heritage' framework for African identity.

Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.

Anatomies of power across the Andes and the Caribbean.

'Our Sea of Islands' reframed the Pacific as vast, not small.

Capabilities approach to justice, and a defence of emotion in public reason.

Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.

Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.