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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.

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.

The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.

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.

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

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.

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

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

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.

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

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

Falsifiability became science's demarcation criterion.

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.

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

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

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

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