19th Century
20 philosophers
Nietzsche
God is dead announced the death of traditional values in modern society. The Ubermensch or...
Kierkegaard
The father of existentialism. Wrote under multiple pseudonyms representing different philo...
Heidegger
Being and Time is one of the most influential and difficult philosophy books. Dasein or be...
Wittgenstein
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was completed in the trenches of World War I. Whereof o...
Russell
Principia Mathematica attempted to ground all mathematics in logic. His paradox about sets...
Frege
The father of analytic philosophy and modern logic. Invented quantifiers and the predicate...
Mill
On Liberty is the foundational text of liberal democracy. Educated by his father from age ...
Peirce
The founder of pragmatism, though the name was popularized by William James. Invented semi...
William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience is a classic in the psychology of religion. Brother ...
Dewey
The most influential American philosopher of education. Progressive education: learning by...
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto was published with Engels in 1848. Capital analyzed capitalism as ...
Mikhail Bakunin
The great anarchist rival of Marx. The passion to destroy is also a creative passion. Warn...
Henri Bergson
Elan vital is the creative impulse driving evolution. Duree, lived time, differs utterly f...
Edmund Husserl
Founded phenomenology, the rigorous science of consciousness. Back to the things themselve...
Karl Jaspers
Coined the term Axial Age for the great awakening of thought from 800 to 200 BC. Limit sit...
G.E. Moore
Principia Ethica argued that good is simple and indefinable. Named the naturalistic fallac...
Rudolf Carnap
A leader of the Vienna Circle. Argued that traditional metaphysics is neither true nor fal...
Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man argued that consumer capitalism absorbs all opposition. Fused Freud wi...
Antonio Gramsci
Theorized cultural hegemony, rule through consent rather than force. Organic intellectuals...
Nishida Kitaro
Founder of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. His first book, An Inquiry into the Go...