| c. 600s-500s BC | Iranian | founder of a religion named after him whose holy book is the Avesta | Zoroaster |
| 570-495 BC | Greek | proposed the theorem a^2 + b^2 = c^2 | Pythagoras |
| 563-483 BC | Indian | founder of a religion named after him in which followers try to reach a state of enlightment known as "nirvana" | Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) |
| 551-479 BC | Chinese | a collection of his sayings was compiled as "Analects" | Confucius |
| 544-496 BC | Chinese | military general who wrote "Art of War" | Sun Tzu |
| 500s-400s BC | Chinese | founder of Taoism and concept of "The Way" who said "a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step" | Lao Tzu |
| 494-434 BC | Greek | theorized that all matter is made of earth, air, water & fire | Empedocles |
| 470-399 BC | Greek | tutor of Plato who has a "method" named after him & was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock | Socrates |
| 460-370 BC | Greek | theorized that all matter is made of atoms | Democritus |
| 427-347 BC | Greek | student of Socrates & tutor of Aristotle who taught at the Academy & wrote "Republic" & "Apology" | Plato |
| 412-323 BC | Greek | cynic known for carrying a lamp during the day "looking for an honest man" | Diogenes |
| 384-322 BC | Greek | student of Plato & tutor of Alexander the Great who taught at the Lyceum & wrote "Politics", "Physics" & "Metaphysics" | Aristotle |
| 354-430 | Roman | Christian theologian, bishop of Hippo & first archbishop of Canterbury who wrote "Confessions" & "City of God" | Saint Augustine |
| 341-270 BC | Greek | founder of hedonism | Epicurus |
| 334-262 BC | Greek | founder of stoicism | Zeno |
| 4 BC-65 AD | Roman | tutor of Nero who was forced by Nero to commit suicide | Seneca |
| 121-180 | Roman | Roman emperor and stoic philosopher who wrote "Meditations" | Marcus Aurelius |
| c. 672-735 | English | monk & historian who wrote "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" | Bede the Venerable |
| 1079-1142 | French | had an affair with, & exchanged love letters with, his student Heloise | Peter Abelard |
| 1135-1204 | Jewish | wrote "Mishneh Torah" & "Guide for the Perplexed" | Maimonides |
| c. 1214-1292 | English | published a recipe for gunpowder & wrote "Opus Magus" | Roger Bacon |
| 1225-1274 | Italian | Christian theologian, Dominican friar & saint who wrote "Summa Theologica" | Thomas Aquinas |
| 1265-1321 | Italian | wrote the epic poem "The Divine Comedy" which consists of "Inferno", "Purgatorio" & "Paradiso" | Dante Alighieri |
| c. 1287-1347 | English | formulated a logic principle named his "razor" that posits that the simplest solutions are the most likely to be correct | William of Ockham (Occam) |
| 1304-1374 | Italian | wrote hundreds of sonnets to his lover Laura in "Canzoniere" & is known as the "Father of Humanism" | Petrarch |
| 1347-1380 | Italian | female saint who helped convince Pope Gregory XI to move the papacy from Avignon back to Rome | Catherine of Siena |
| 1466-1536 | Dutch | also known as St. Elmo & "Prince of the Humanists" who wrote "In Praise of Folly" & is the patron saint of sailors | Erasmus |
| 1469-1527 | Italian | Florentine who wrote "The Prince" which states "it is far safer to be feared than loved" | Niccolò Machiavelli |
| 1478-1535 | English | wrote "Utopia" & was executed for treason for defying Henry VIII | Thomas More |
| 1483-1546 | German | Christian theologian, critical of indulgences, who posted his 95 Theses on a church door in Wittenberg which started the Reformation & led to him being summoned to the Diet of Worms | Martin Luther |
| 1509-1564 | French | Protestant reformer who founded the Reformed Church in Geneva and taught the concept of predestination | John Calvin |
| 1561-1626 | English | wrote "Novum Organum", "New Atlantis" & the quote "knowledge is power" | Francis Bacon |
| 1588-1679 | English | wrote "Leviathan" which states that life is "nasty, brutish, & short" | Thomas Hobbes |
| 1596-1650 | French | wrote "Discourse on Method" which states "cogito, ergo sum" meaning "I think, therefore I am" | René Descartes |
| 1623-1662 | French | has a "wager", a "triangle", a unit of pressure, and a programming language named after him & invented a mechanical adding machine | Blaise Pascal |
| 1632-1677 | Dutch | excommunicated from Judaism for promoting pantheism & said "nature abhors a vacuum" | Baruch Spinoza |
| 1632-1704 | English | wrote "Two Treatises of Government" & "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", said the human mind is a "tabula rasa" at birth & influenced the Founding Fathers | John Locke |
| 1646-1716 | German | developed calculus independent of Newton; created the integral symbol | Gottfried Leibniz |
| 1694-1778 | French | born Francois-Marie Arouet, wrote "Candide" which states "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" & wrote "if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him" | Voltaire |
| 1711-1776 | Scottish | wrote "A Treatise of Human Nature" | David Hume |
| 1712-1778 | Swiss-French | wrote "Confessions" & "The Social Contract" which states "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains" | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| 1713-1784 | French | chief editor of the "Encyclopédie" | Denis Diderot |
| 1723-1790 | Scottish | wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" & "The Wealth of Nations" which discusses the "invisible hand", promoted laissez-faire capitalism & is considered the father of economics | Adam Smith |
| 1724-1804 | German | from Konigsberg, he wrote "Critique of Pure Reason", developed a moral law called the "categorical imperative" & contrasted a priori & a posteriori knowledge | Immanuel Kant |
| 1729-1797 | Irish | wrote "On the Sublime and Beautiful", a treatise about aesthetics | Edmund Burke |
| 1737-1809 | American | wrote "Common Sense", "The Rights of Man" & "The American Crisis" which criticizes "The Summer Soldier And The Sunshine Patriot" & states "these are the times that try men's souls" | Thomas Paine |
| 1748-1832 | English | founder of utilitarianism which aims to produce the "greatest good for the greatest number" | Jeremy Bentham |
| 1759-1797 | English | feminist who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" & was the mother of author Mary Shelley | Mary Wollstonecraft |
| 1770-1831 | German | explored the concept of the dialectic, proposed that history progresses through phases of thesis, antithesis & synthesis, & heavily influenced Karl Marx | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel |
| 1788-1860 | German | nicknamed the "Philosopher of Pessimism" | Arthur Schopenhauer |
| 1803-1882 | American | leader of the Transcendentalism movement, wrote the essays "Self-Reliance" & "Nature" & the poem "Concord Hymn", nicknamed "The Sage of Concord" & said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| 1805-1859 | French | wrote "Democracy in America" | Alexis de Tocqueville |
| 1806-1873 | English | wrote "On Liberty", "Principles of Political Economy" & "The Subjection of Women" & was a proponent of utilitarianism | John Stuart Mill |
| 1813-1855 | Danish | founder of existentialism, wrote "Fear & Trembling", proposed the concept of a "leap of faith", & said "life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward" | Søren Kierkegaard |
| 1817-1862 | American | transcendentalist who wrote "Walden" & "Civil Disobedience", lived in a cabin by Walden Pond for a few years & said "that government is best that governs least" | Henry David Thoreau |
| 1818-1883 | German | wrote "Das Kapital" & co-wrote "The Communist Manifesto", called the working class the "proletariat", & said "Workers of the world, unite!" & "religion is the opium of the people" | Karl Marx |
| 1820-1895 | German | co-wrote "The Communist Manifesto" with Karl Marx | Friedrich Engels |
| 1820-1903 | English | coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe Darwin's theory of natural selection | Herbert Spencer |
| 1842-1910 | American | brother of novelist Henry who wrote "The Principles of Psychology" & popularized the concept of pragmatism & of the "stream of consciousness" | William James |
| 1844-1900 | German | wrote "Beyond Good and Evil" & "Thus Spake Zarathustra", proposed the idea of the Übermensch (Superman), & said "God is dead" & "what does not kill me, makes me stronger" | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| 1859-1952 | American | educator & psychologist who helped William James popularize the concept of pragmatism | John Dewey |
| 1863-1952 | Spanish-American | said "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" | George Santayana |
| 1872-1970 | British | earl, pacifist & anti-nuclear activist who co-wrote "Principia Mathematica" & won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 | Bertrand Russell |
| 1889-1951 | Austrian-British | wrote "Tractatus" & wrote about the connection between language & philosophy | Ludwig Wittgenstein |
| 1889-1976 | German | existentialist who wrote "Being & Time" | Martin Heidegger |
| 1905-1980 | French | existentialist who wrote "Being & Nothingness", the play "No Exit" & the novel "Nausea", was lovers with Simone de Beauvoir & turned down the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature | Jean-Paul Sartre |
| 1905-1982 | Russian-American | proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, born Alissa Rosenbaum, who wrote "We the Living", "The Fountainhead" & "Atlas Shrugged" | Ayn Rand |
| 1908-1986 | French | existentialist & feminist who wrote "The Second Sex" & was lovers with Jean-Paul Sartre | Simone de Beauvoir |
| 1913-1960 | French | existentialist, born in Algeria, who wrote "The Plague", "The Myth of Sisyphus" & "The Stranger" which begins "Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday" & won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 | Albert Camus |
| 1928-present | American | M.I.T. linguist & activist | Noam Chomsky |
