A statue of the philosopher Epicurus, carved later, long after he died - Epicurean philosophy When did Epicurus live? Another philosophical group which developed in the Hellenistic period, around the same time as [...]
Diogenes the Cynic with his lamp (Roman sculpture, once in the Villa Albani) - the Cynics Who started Cynic philosophy? One of Socrates' students, Antisthenes, started his own group of philosophers [...]
Thomas Paine (by Matthew Pratt, about 1790) In the late 1700s AD, around the same time that Voltaire, du Chatelet, and Rousseau were writing philosophy in France, and Hume was writing in England, Thomas Paine was [...]
Mary Wollstonecraft - European philosophy Who was Mary Wollstonecraft? Mary Wollstonecraft was the most famous woman among the Enlightenment philosophers of the 1700s AD. Damaris Masham Mary Astell Enlightenment philosophy All our [...]
Voltaire - a French philosopher Voltaire took ideas about religion, science, and human rights that were just getting started in the 1700s AD, and encouraged new ways of thinking about [...]
Jean-Paul Sartre - a French philosopher After World War I, many people in Europe felt that the old world had ended and a new world was beginning. Jean-Paul Sartre grew [...]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a European philosopher Rousseau was born in 1712 AD into a Protestant family living in Geneva, and his mother died of an infection she caught while he was being born. Like the [...]
Damaris Masham's house, Oates, in England Why did Masham become a philosopher? Damaris Masham's dad was a philosopher, and when she grew up her boyfriend, John Locke, was also a philosopher. [...]
Karl Marx, a European philosopher and economist How did Hegel inspire Marx? The famous German philosopher Hegel died when Karl Marx was 13 years old. Marx must have heard a lot about [...]
Niccolo Machiavelli When did Machiavelli live? Around 1500 AD, Machiavelli was working for the government in the city-state of Florence. Florence was smack in the middle of the Renaissance, which meant that everybody [...]
