Philosophical Schools

The tradition that began when Greek thinkers started explaining the world by argument rather than myth. Every school below traces its descent from that first move.

from Western Philosophy

The first philosophers, in Miletus, sought a single underlying stuff (archē) behind all things — water for Thales, the boundless for Anaximander, air for Anaximenes.

from Western Philosophy

A brotherhood holding that number is the essence of reality. Their fusion of mathematics, music, and mysticism shaped Plato and, through him, all later idealism.

from Western Philosophy

Parmenides and Zeno argued that change and plurality are illusions — being simply is. Their paradoxes forced every later thinker to justify the reality of motion.

from Western Philosophy

Everything is atoms moving in the void. This materialist picture, from Leucippus and Democritus, fed directly into Epicureanism and, much later, modern physics.

from Western Philosophy

Wrote nothing, yet fathered a lineage. By relentless questioning he turned philosophy from nature toward the good life, virtue, and the examined self.

from Socrates

Plato's Academy taught that the changing world copies eternal Forms grasped by reason. It ran for nearly nine centuries and set the agenda for Western metaphysics.

from Socrates

Plato's greatest pupil grounded knowledge in observation and logic. The Peripatetic school's works on physics, ethics, and syllogism ruled science for two millennia.

from Socrates

Taking Socrates' asceticism to the limit, the Cynics rejected wealth, status, and convention to live according to nature. They were the immediate teachers of the Stoics.

from Platonism (Academy)

Plotinus recast Plato into a mystical system where all reality emanates from a single One. It became the bridge carrying Greek metaphysics into Christian and Islamic thought.

from Cynicism

Founded by a former Cynic, Stoicism taught that virtue is the only good and that peace comes from accepting what we cannot control. Its practical ethics still guide readers today.

from Atomism

Building on atomism, Epicurus argued that pleasure — understood as tranquillity and the absence of pain — is the goal of life, and that we need not fear the gods or death.

from Platonism (Academy)

The Skeptics suspended judgement on all claims to knowledge, seeking peace of mind through doubt itself. Revived in the Renaissance, they provoked Descartes' search for certainty.

from Aristotelianism

Medieval thinkers used Aristotelian logic to systematise Christian doctrine in the universities, debating faith and reason with dazzling technical rigour.

from Scholasticism

Aquinas fused Aristotle with Christian theology into a vast synthesis of faith and reason that remains the philosophical backbone of Catholic thought.

from Skepticism

Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz held that reason, not the senses, is the surest road to knowledge — beginning from indubitable first principles like 'I think, therefore I am'.

from Western Philosophy

Locke, Berkeley, and Hume countered that all knowledge comes from experience — the mind begins as a blank slate. Hume's skepticism about cause and self shook philosophy awake.

from Rationalism

Kant reconciled rationalism and empiricism: the mind actively shapes experience through its own categories. His 'Copernican revolution' reset the terms of nearly all later philosophy.

from Kantianism

Fichte, Schelling, and above all Hegel pushed Kant further, casting reality itself as the unfolding of Spirit through history by dialectical contradiction.

from German Idealism

Marx turned Hegel's dialectic 'right side up', locating the engine of history in material and economic conditions rather than ideas — and set out to change the world, not just interpret it.

from German Idealism

Rebelling against Hegel's system, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche put the concrete, choosing, suffering individual at the centre — seeding both existentialism and much of continental thought.

from Empiricism

The first distinctly American school held that the meaning and truth of an idea lie in its practical consequences. Peirce, James, and Dewey made experience and action the test of thought.

from Empiricism

Begun by Frege and Russell, the analytic tradition made logic and language the tools of philosophy, prizing clarity and argument. It dominates the English-speaking world today.

from Analytic Philosophy

The Vienna Circle held that only statements verifiable by experience or logic are meaningful, dismissing metaphysics as nonsense. Its collapse redirected analytic philosophy for decades.

from Kantianism

Husserl called philosophy back 'to the things themselves', describing the structures of conscious experience directly. It became the root of most 20th-century continental thought.

from Phenomenology

Drawing on Kierkegaard and Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre made human freedom, anxiety, and the search for meaning in a godless world the central philosophical problem.

from Phenomenology

Gadamer and Ricoeur made interpretation itself the core of philosophy: to understand anything — a text, a culture, ourselves — is always to interpret from within a tradition.