About this catalogue
This is an open, growing reference to the history of philosophy. The aim is completeness with depth: not just names and dates, but for each thinker — what they supported and why, the causes they championed, the issues they wrestled with, the hurdles they faced, every work (surviving or lost), their place on the timeline, and their legacy.
How it is built
Every philosopher is a structured record with the same fields, so the catalogue reads consistently no matter the era. Entries are hand-curated for accuracy first, then the roster grows era by era. The data lives in versioned files, which makes corrections and additions easy to track.
Each entry is written from established scholarship and cross-checked against the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia. Every philosopher page links to both for further reading, and disputed dates or contested claims are flagged as such.
The complete arc — from the first philosophers to 2026
All six volumes are now live: the story runs unbroken from Thales, the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi in the 6th century BCE to living philosophers of the present day.
- Volume I — Ancient Greece & Rome (live): Thales to Boethius, c. 624 BCE – 524 CE — 52 philosophers across the Presocratic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, and Late-Antique schools.
- Volume II — Medieval & Scholastic (live): Augustine to William of Ockham (354–1362 CE) — the Latin Christian West, from the Church Fathers and Christian Neoplatonism through the golden age of Scholasticism and the great mystics.
- Volume III — Islamic, Jewish & Byzantine (live): al-Kindī to Gemistos Plethon (801–1452 CE) — the falāsifa (al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Averroes), kalām and Sufism (al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī), Illuminationism (Suhrawardī), Jewish philosophy (Maimonides), and Byzantine Platonism.
- Volume IV — Indian & Chinese (live): the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi (6th c. BCE) to Wang Yangming (1529 CE) — Buddhism and Chan/Zen (Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti, Huineng), Jainism (Mahāvīra), the Hindu darśanas — Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Vedānta — the Cārvāka materialists, and the Chinese schools (Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Legalism, Neo-Confucianism).
- Volume V — Early Modern (live): Machiavelli (1469) to Immanuel Kant (1804) — Renaissance realism and skepticism (Machiavelli, Montaigne), Rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), Empiricism (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume), the Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Wollstonecraft), and Kant's critical philosophy.
- Volume VI — 19th–21st century (live): Hegel (1770) to living philosophers — German Idealism (Hegel, Schopenhauer), Marxism, utilitarianism (Mill, Singer), existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir), pragmatism (Peirce, James), analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger), political philosophy (Arendt, Rawls, Nussbaum), philosophy of science (Popper, Kuhn), Foucault, and the global voices of Nishida and Fanon — through to Chalmers and Singer today.
Ways in
The roster and timeline organize philosophy by who and when. Three other views organize it by ideas and connections.
- Paths through Philosophy — eleven great questions, each a hand-curated thread of thinkers answering, transforming, and overturning one another across the centuries and across cultures. On each path, the “Responding to” line is a live link to whoever a thinker was answering.
- The Influence Map — the whole catalogue as one graph: every philosopher a point on a timeline, grouped by tradition, and every “influenced by” relation a real edge drawn straight from the data. Follow a thread and watch an idea cross from Athens to Baghdad to Paris.
- The Atlas — the same network, made immersive: one zoomable canvas that moves from the great traditions, down through their schools, to individual thinkers and finally the books they wrote. Pull back for the shape of the whole; zoom in for the detail.
A note on accuracy
Dates for ancient figures are scholarly approximations and are marked as such. For most Presocratics no complete work survives — the catalogue records this honestly, distinguishing texts that survive, survive only in fragments, or are lost entirely.