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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.

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

Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.

His Aristotle commentaries restarted European philosophy.

Guide for the Perplexed reconciled reason and revelation for Judaism.

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.

Made English a literary language with The Canterbury Tales.

Proved that art and science are one act of looking.

The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.

Don Quixote, the first modern novel and the most translated after the Bible.

Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.

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.

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.

Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.

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

Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.

Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.

Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

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

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

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

The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.

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

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

A Doll's House detonated 19th-century assumptions about marriage.

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.

Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

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

Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.

Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.

Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.

Ulysses reorganised what a novel could attempt.

Kristin Lavransdatter; medieval Norway rendered with modern psychology.

Gave bureaucratic dread an adjective in every major language.

The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.

Filled New York auditoriums in the Depression; his writing shaped early Alcoholics Anonymous.

Wrote as dozens of invented authors; The Book of Disquiet.

Requiem memorised by friends because writing it down was fatal.

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

Poet and dramatist murdered by fascists; Spain's enduring wound.

Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.

Falsifiability became science's demarcation criterion.

Independent People gave a small nation a world literature.

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

Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.

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

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.

The Captive Mind dissected intellectual submission to totalitarianism.

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

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

The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.

Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.

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

Blindness and the parable of institutional collapse.

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

Built a new documentary genre from thousands of interviews.

Flights and The Books of Jacob; constellation-form fiction.