Get started

The collection

The Philosophers

Every thinker here answers out of their own texts. Choose a voice and put your question to it.

Philosophers
38
Works
291
Passages
112,227
Centuries spanned
24

When the thinkers were born — philosophers per century

38 philosophers, born across 15 centuries from the 6th c. BCE to the 19th c. CE. The 18th c. CE is the fullest, with 14.
Philosophers born, by century
CenturyPhilosophers born
6th c. BCE1
5th c. BCE1
4th c. BCE2
2nd c. BCE1
1st c. BCE1
1st c. CE1
2nd c. CE1
4th c. CE1
5th c. CE1
13th c. CE2
15th c. CE1
16th c. CE2
17th c. CE3
18th c. CE14
19th c. CE6

Which traditions they come from — philosophers per tradition

38 philosophers across 2 traditions. Widths are shares of the roster; the names are in the legend.
  • The Western tradition 37
  • The Chinese tradition 1
Philosophers by tradition
TraditionPhilosophersShare
The Western tradition3797%
The Chinese tradition13%

What the corpus argues about — share of the canon per question

The six great questions, ranked by their share of every tagged passage in the corpus. Mind and knowledge leads at 15.3%. A passage can answer to more than one question, so the six do not sum to a whole.
Share of the canon by question
QuestionShare of the canon
Mind and knowledge15.3%
Politics and power11.5%
Ethics and the good life9.6%
Metaphysics and the cosmos9%
Logic and language5.3%
Being and existence4.5%

5 philosophers match

The Western tradition

5 in the arena

German Idealism

German idealism holds that thought helps constitute the intelligibility of experience and reality, rather than merely recording facts supplied by the senses. It emerged in the late eighteenth century. Unlike empiricism, it treats reason as an active condition of knowledge.

5 in the arena

  1. Immanuel Kant

    1724–1804

    The Enlightenment

    The critique that limited knowledge and recast freedom as obedience to self-given law

    17 works · 5,216 passages grounded

  2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

    1770–1831

    German Idealism

    Contradiction became not a flaw in thought, but the engine of history, freedom, and truth.

    5 works · 6,648 passages grounded

  4. Arthur Schopenhauer

    1788–1860

    German Idealism

    By treating blind striving as reality’s engine, Schopenhauer gave pessimism a metaphysics.

    13 works · 5,619 passages grounded

  5. Ludwig Feuerbach

    1804–1872

    The Nineteenth Century

    The critique that returned divine perfection to the humans who had projected it.

    2 works · 701 passages grounded