Who Influenced Whom

Founder of the Academy, whose theory of Forms set the agenda for Western metaphysics for two millennia.

• → Influenced: Aristotle
• → Influenced: Immanuel Kant
• → Influenced: G. W. F. Hegel

Plato's greatest student and rival; systematised logic, biology, ethics, and politics into the first encyclopedic science.

• ← Influenced: Plato
• → Influenced: Niccolò Machiavelli

Sought certainty in the thinking self and geometric method, opening the rationalist current of modern philosophy.

• ← Influenced: Euclid
• → Influenced: John Locke
• → Reacted against: David Hume
• → Influenced: Immanuel Kant

Radical empiricist whose critique of causation and the self, he said, woke Kant from his 'dogmatic slumber'.

• ← Reacted against: René Descartes
• ← Influenced: John Locke
• → Influenced: Immanuel Kant
• → Influenced: Adam Smith

Reconciled reason and experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, resetting philosophy after Hume and Newton.

• ← Influenced: Plato
• ← Influenced: René Descartes
• ← Influenced: David Hume
• ← Influenced: Isaac Newton
• ← Influenced: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• → Influenced: G. W. F. Hegel

History as the dialectical self-development of Spirit — a system Marx would later turn 'right-side up'.

• ← Influenced: Plato
• ← Influenced: Immanuel Kant
• → Influenced: Karl Marx
• → Reacted against: Friedrich Nietzsche

Diagnosed the 'death of God' and the will to power, unsettling ethics for every thinker who came after.

• ← Reacted against: G. W. F. Hegel
• ← Influenced: Charles Darwin
• → Influenced: Sigmund Freud
• ← Influenced: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• ← Influenced: William Shakespeare

His Elements made deductive proof the model of certain knowledge — a template later borrowed by philosophers and scientists alike.

• → Influenced: Isaac Newton
• → Influenced: René Descartes

Unified terrestrial and celestial motion under mathematical law; the Principia became the very image of scientific reason.

• ← Influenced: Euclid
• → Influenced: Immanuel Kant

Natural selection gave life a history without design, reshaping biology, psychology, and philosophy alike.

• → Influenced: Friedrich Nietzsche
• → Influenced: Sigmund Freud

The Wealth of Nations turned the market's 'invisible hand' into the founding problem of economics.

• ← Influenced: John Locke
• ← Influenced: David Hume
• → Reacted against: Karl Marx
• → Influenced: John Maynard Keynes

Fused Hegel's dialectic with classical economics into a theory of class, capital, and historical change.

• ← Influenced: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• ← Influenced: G. W. F. Hegel
• ← Reacted against: Adam Smith

Rewrote economics around demand and the state's role in stabilising it, answering both Smith and the Depression.

• ← Influenced: Adam Smith

Grounded knowledge in experience and government in consent — the intellectual root of liberal politics.

• ← Influenced: René Descartes
• → Influenced: David Hume
• → Influenced: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• → Influenced: Adam Smith
• ← Reacted against: Thomas Hobbes

The social contract and the general will reframed legitimacy, feeding both democratic revolution and Romantic revolt.

• ← Influenced: John Locke
• → Influenced: Immanuel Kant
• → Influenced: Karl Marx

Severed politics from moral idealism, describing power as it is rather than as it ought to be.

• ← Influenced: Aristotle
• → Influenced: Thomas Hobbes

Derived the sovereign state from fear and self-interest in a state of nature — modern political science begins here.

• → Reacted against: John Locke
• ← Influenced: Niccolò Machiavelli

Made the unconscious a subject of study, drawing on Darwin, Nietzsche, and the tragedians for his map of the mind.

• ← Influenced: Charles Darwin
• ← Influenced: Friedrich Nietzsche
• ← Influenced: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• ← Influenced: William Shakespeare

His novels of guilt, freedom, and faith read as philosophy in fiction — Nietzsche and Freud both drew from them.

• → Influenced: Friedrich Nietzsche
• → Influenced: Sigmund Freud
• ← Influenced: William Shakespeare

Gave modern language its deepest portraits of inwardness — a wellspring later mined by philosophers and psychologists.

• → Influenced: Sigmund Freud
• → Influenced: Fyodor Dostoevsky
• → Influenced: Friedrich Nietzsche