Schools

Western

Pythagoreanismfrom c. 530 BCEThe philosophy and strict way of life founded by Pythagoras, later developed by Philolaus and Archytas into an account of the cosmos in terms of number.
Pythagoras
AtomismThe ancient Greek theory, founded by Leucippus and Democritus and revived by Epicurus, that everything is made of indivisible bodies moving in an infinite void.
Democritus and Epicurus
Platonismfrom c. 387 BCEThe philosophy of Plato and his successors, centred on the reality of unchanging Forms that the physical world imperfectly reflects.
Plato
Epicureanismfrom c. 306 BCESchool founded by Epicurus in Athens, teaching that tranquil pleasure is the goal of life and that the world consists of atoms moving in the void.
Epicurus and Lucretius
Stoicismfrom c. 300 BCEHellenistic school founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium, teaching that virtue, a life in agreement with nature and reason, is the only good.
Chrysippus, Seneca, Epictetus and 1 more
PyrrhonismAncient school of scepticism, named after Pyrrho, which set equally strong arguments against each other to reach suspension of judgement and, with it, tranquillity.
Sextus Empiricus
Neoplatonismc. 250 – c. 650 CELate ancient revival of Plato's philosophy, begun by Plotinus, which described all reality as flowing from a single first principle, the One.
Plotinus, Proclus and John Scottus Eriugena
ScholasticismThe method of philosophy and theology in the medieval universities, which used careful logical analysis to reconcile Christian doctrine with reason and Aristotle.
Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and 2 more
Social contract theoryThe tradition, running from Hobbes through Locke to Rousseau, that grounds political authority in an agreement among the people who are to be governed by it.
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and 1 more
RationalismThe view that reason, rather than the senses, is the chief source and test of knowledge.
René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche and 1 more
EmpiricismThe view that knowledge comes ultimately from experience, rather than from reason alone.
John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill
UtilitarianismThe ethical view that actions and policies are right insofar as they produce the greatest happiness, developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
ExistentialismMovement centred on human existence, freedom and responsibility, which reached its height in France after the Second World War and looked back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and 1 more
PragmatismAmerican philosophical tradition, begun by Peirce and James around 1870, that understands knowing the world as inseparable from acting in it, and tests ideas by their practical consequences.
Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey
PhenomenologyThe study of experience as it is lived from the first-person point of view, founded by Edmund Husserl and developed by Heidegger and others.
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and 2 more
Logical EmpiricismMovement of the 1920s to 1950s, centred on the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Society, that sought a scientific philosophy built on logic and experience.
Rudolf Carnap
Frankfurt SchoolMarxist-influenced philosophers and social theorists, from Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research, who joined philosophy and social science in a critique of society aimed at emancipation.
Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas

Arabic and Islamic

IlluminationismSchool founded by Suhrawardi that describes reality as a hierarchy of lights and grounds knowledge in the direct presence of the known to the knower.
Suhrawardi

Indian

Chinese

Japanese

Kyoto SchoolTwentieth-century Japanese philosophers centred on Kyoto University, who drew on Mahāyāna Buddhism and Western philosophy to think through the idea of absolute nothingness.
Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji