Where philosophy was born and where it travelled — from the Ionian coast and Athens to Baghdad, Córdoba, Paris, and the modern Enlightenment.
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The first philosophy travelled along the Ionian coast and the north Aegean — from the physicists of Miletus and the flux of Ephesus to the atoms of Abdera — the earliest attempt to explain the world by reason alone.
Miletus → Ephesus → Samos → Abdera
Pythagoras carried number-mysticism from Samos to Croton, and the Eleatics answered from nearby Elea — Magna Graecia became a second cradle of thought beside Ionia.
Samos → Croton → Elea
After Alexander, philosophy spread outward from Athens across the Mediterranean — the schools of the Garden and the Stoa reaching Cyrene, Alexandria's library, and at last the Roman elite.
Athens → Cyrene → Alexandria → Rome
When the Latin West forgot Aristotle, the Islamic world preserved and advanced him — from Alexandria's texts to Baghdad's House of Wisdom and the commentators of Córdoba, who handed philosophy back to Europe.
Alexandria → Baghdad → Córdoba
Averroes' commentaries crossed the Pyrenees into the Latin universities, where Aquinas and his rivals wove Aristotle into Christian theology — the great synthesis of the medieval mind.
Córdoba → Paris
The Enlightenment made new capitals of thought — Spinoza's Amsterdam, Hume's Edinburgh, Kant's Königsberg, Hegel's Berlin — where philosophy turned from God and nature to the mind that knows them.
Edinburgh → Amsterdam → Paris → Königsberg → Berlin
Where philosophy began: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes first asked what the world is made of without appealing to the gods — the opening move of the whole Western tradition.
The capital of classical philosophy: Socrates in the agora, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, and later the Stoa and the Garden of Epicurus — four schools in one city.
The great library-city of the Hellenistic world and later the home of Neoplatonism, where Plotinus' pupils and the scholar Hypatia taught philosophy alongside mathematics and astronomy.
The capital where Stoicism became the philosophy of statesmen and slaves alike — Seneca the courtier, Epictetus the freedman, and Marcus Aurelius the emperor who wrote his Meditations on campaign.
The Abbasid capital whose House of Wisdom translated Greek philosophy into Arabic, where al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna kept Aristotle alive and reshaped him for a thousand years.
The medieval university that was the arena of scholasticism, where Abelard disputed and Thomas Aquinas fused Aristotle with Christian theology into a vast, ordered summa.
Home of Heraclitus, the dark philosopher of flux, who taught that everything flows, that strife is the father of all things, and that no one steps twice into the same river.
The brilliant capital of Muslim Spain, home of Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle whose work, carried into Latin Europe, lit the fuse of scholastic philosophy.
The tolerant merchant republic where Spinoza ground lenses and reasoned, more geometrico, toward a single infinite substance he called God-or-Nature — and was expelled for it.
The Prussian capital where Hegel lectured on a history unfolding as the self-realization of Spirit — a system so vast that the whole nineteenth century argued for or against it.
The island birthplace of Pythagoras, who carried the idea that number is the hidden order of the cosmos westward to a brotherhood in southern Italy.
The northern city of Democritus, who with Leucippus proposed that everything is made of indivisible atoms moving in a void — an idea that waited two thousand years for its vindication.
The southern-Italian colony of Parmenides, who argued that being is one and unchanging, and of Zeno, whose paradoxes of motion have troubled logicians ever since.
Where Pythagoras founded his mystical brotherhood, binding mathematics, music, and the transmigration of souls into a way of life that ruled the city for a generation.
The African city of Aristippus and the Cyrenaic school, who took Socrates' teaching in the opposite direction from the Stoics — holding that immediate pleasure is the only good.
The Baltic city Immanuel Kant never left, from which his Critique of Pure Reason redrew the boundary between what the mind can know and what lies forever beyond it.
The capital of the Scottish Enlightenment and the city of David Hume, whose sceptical empiricism about cause, self, and reason 'woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber'.