Philosophy
Philosophy supplies the arguments that everything else runs on: what counts as evidence, what a person is owed, what a state may do. The figures collected here wrote the texts that later became constitutions, research ethics and everyday common sense.
87 indexed lives · 8 Nobel laureates · 39 countries
Where to start
Rabindranath Tagore
1861 – 1941First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.
Nelson Mandela
1918 – 2013Twenty-seven years in prison, then negotiated the end of apartheid without civil war.
Elias Canetti
1905 – 1994Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.
Nobel recognition in Philosophy
- Rabindranath Tagore
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1913
- Elias Canetti
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981
- Albert Camus
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1957
- Octavio Paz
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1990
- Nelson Mandela
Nobel Peace Prize, 1993
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Nobel Peace Prize, 1964
- Amartya Sen
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998
- Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2010
Philosophy across the centuries
1st–5th century · 8
6th–14th century · 9
15th–17th century · 10
18th century · 5
19th century · 24
- Phineas Quimby1802 – 1866
- John Stuart Mill1806 – 1873
- Søren Kierkegaard1813 – 1855
- Warren Felt Evans1817 – 1889
- Frederick Douglass1818 – 1895
- Karl Marx1818 – 1883
- Fyodor Dostoevsky1821 – 1881
- Leo Tolstoy1828 – 1910
- William James1842 – 1910
- Friedrich Nietzsche1844 – 1900
- Thomas Troward1847 – 1916
- José Martí1853 – 1895
- Sigmund Freud1856 – 1939
- John Dewey1859 – 1952
- Rabindranath Tagore1861 – 1941
- Rudolf Steiner1861 – 1925
- W. E. B. Du Bois1868 – 1963
- Mahatma Gandhi1869 – 1948
- Muhammad Iqbal1877 – 1938
- Ernest Holmes1887 – 1960
- Ludwig Wittgenstein1889 – 1951
- Ho Chi Minh1890 – 1969
- B. R. Ambedkar1891 – 1956
- Jorge Luis Borges1899 – 1986
20th century · 28
- Karl Popper1902 – 1994
- Jean-Paul Sartre1905 – 1980
- Elias Canetti1905 – 1994
- Neville Goddard1905 – 1972
- Viktor Frankl1905 – 1997
- Léopold Sédar Senghor1906 – 2001
- Kurt Gödel1906 – 1978
- Hannah Arendt1906 – 1975
- Simone de Beauvoir1908 – 1986
- Simone Weil1909 – 1943
- Arne Næss1912 – 2009
- Albert Camus1913 – 1960
- Octavio Paz1914 – 1998
- Nelson Mandela1918 – 2013
- Iris Murdoch1919 – 1999
- John Rawls1921 – 2002
- Paulo Freire1921 – 1997
- Amílcar Cabral1924 – 1973
- Frantz Fanon1925 – 1961
- Martin Luther King Jr.1929 – 1968
- Kwasi Wiredu1931 – 2022
- Ali Mazrui1933 – 2014
- Amartya Senb. 1933
- Mario Vargas Llosa1936 – 2025
- Epeli Hau'ofa1939 – 2009
- Martha Nussbaumb. 1947
- David Frawleyb. 1950
- Vandana Shivab. 1952