ΦTHALASSAJournal of Philosophy

Two and a half thousand years

The timeline

Every thinker in the journal on one line. Within each period the bars are drawn to scale, so you can see who overlapped, who never could have met, and how long the silences between them ran.

45 thinkers, from 624 BCE onward. Dates written with a leading “c.” are scholarly estimates.

624 BCE – 370 BCE

Before Socrates

Ionian ports and Greek colonies in Italy, where nature is first explained without appealing to the gods, and, at the same moment and quite separately, the Chinese court Confucius served.

  1. Thales

    c. 624–c. 546 BCE

    Milesian school

  2. Anaximander

    c. 610–c. 546 BCE

    Milesian school

  3. Anaximenes

    c. 586–c. 526 BCE

    Milesian school

  4. Pythagoras

    c. 570–c. 495 BCE

    Pythagoreanism

  5. Xenophanes

    c. 570–c. 478 BCE

    Ionian

  6. Confucius

    551–479 BCE

    Confucianism

  7. Heraclitus

    c. 540–c. 480 BCE

    Ionian

  8. Parmenides

    c. 515–after 450 BCE

    Eleatic school

  9. Democritus

    c. 460–c. 370 BCE

    Atomism

470 BCE – 262 BCE

Classical Athens

One city, three generations, and the questions the rest of the tradition is a footnote to.

  1. Socrates

    c. 470–399 BCE

    Classical Greek

  2. Plato

    c. 428–348 BCE

    Platonism

  3. Diogenes of Sinope

    c. 412/404–323 BCE

    Cynicism

  4. Aristotle

    384–322 BCE

    Aristotelianism

  5. Epicurus

    341–270 BCE

    Epicureanism

  6. Zeno of Citium

    c. 334–262 BCE

    Stoicism

4 BCE – 180 CE

Hellenistic and Roman

Philosophy as a way of living through an empire you do not control.

  1. Seneca

    c. 4 BCE–65 CE

    Stoicism

  2. Epictetus

    c. 50–135 CE

    Stoicism

  3. Marcus Aurelius

    121–180 CE

    Stoicism

354 CE – 1274 CE

Late antiquity to the Middle Ages

Greek argument absorbed into Christian theology, and kept alive in Arabic before it returns to Latin.

  1. Augustine

    354–430

    Christian Platonism

  2. Al-Farabi

    c. 870–950

    Islamic philosophy

  3. Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

    c. 980–1037

    Islamic philosophy

  4. Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

    1126–1198

    Islamic philosophy

  5. Thomas Aquinas

    1225–1274

    Scholasticism

1469 CE – 1804 CE

The early modern break

Certainty is rebuilt from the ground up, and politics is rebuilt without divine right.

  1. Niccolò Machiavelli

    1469–1527

    Political Realism

  2. Thomas Hobbes

    1588–1679

    Social Contract

  3. René Descartes

    1596–1650

    Rationalism

  4. Baruch Spinoza

    1632–1677

    Rationalism

  5. John Locke

    1632–1704

    Empiricism

  6. David Hume

    1711–1776

    Empiricism

  7. Immanuel Kant

    1724–1804

    Transcendental idealism

1759 CE – 1952 CE

The long nineteenth century

Reason gets a critique, morality gets a genealogy, and history gets a motor.

  1. Mary Wollstonecraft

    1759–1797

    Feminism

  2. G. W. F. Hegel

    1770–1831

    German idealism

  3. Arthur Schopenhauer

    1788–1860

    Pessimism

  4. John Stuart Mill

    1806–1873

    Utilitarianism

  5. Søren Kierkegaard

    1813–1855

    Existentialism

  6. Karl Marx

    1818–1883

    Marxism

  7. William James

    1842–1910

    Pragmatism

  8. Friedrich Nietzsche

    1844–1900

    Nihilism

  9. John Dewey

    1859–1952

    Pragmatism

1889 CE – 1986 CE

The twentieth century

Freedom, absurdity and political judgement, written in the shadow of two wars.

  1. Ludwig Wittgenstein

    1889–1951

    Analytic philosophy

  2. Martin Heidegger

    1889–1976

    Phenomenology

  3. Jean-Paul Sartre

    1905–1980

    Existentialism

  4. Hannah Arendt

    1906–1975

    Political philosophy

  5. Simone de Beauvoir

    1908–1986

    Existentialism

  6. Albert Camus

    1913–1960

    Absurdism

Bars are scaled within their own period, not across the whole timeline, because two thousand years compressed to one line would leave the Greeks invisible. To see who taught whom rather than who merely overlapped, follow the lines of influence.