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100 Greatest Western Philosophers



Criteria: These Western philosophers are ranked according to their influence on Western thought, reputation as a philosopher and body of philosophical work (in terms of influence, acclaim and popularity). Philosophers with no surviving works are relegated to honorable mentions. A selected philosophical work is listed for each philosopher when applicable.

List Compiled and Edited By: Tim
List Begun: 2026-10-05
Greatest Western Philosophers
  1. Plato
    (c. 428 - 348 BC) - The Republic
  2. Aristotle
    (384 - 322 BC) - Nicomachean Ethics
  3. Immanuel Kant
    (1724 - 1804) - Critique of Pure Reason
  4. Thomas Aquinas
    (1225 - 1274) - Summa Theologica
  5. Friedrich Nietzsche
    (1844 - 1900) - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  6. Rene Descartes
    (1596 - 1650) - Meditations on First Philosophy
  7. David Hume
    (1711 - 1776) - A Treatise of Human Nature
  8. Georg Friedrich Hegel
    (1770 - 1831) - Phenomenology of Spirit
  9. St. Augustine
    (354 - 430) - Confessions
  10. Karl Marx
    (1813 - 1883) - The Communist Manifesto
  11. John Locke
    (1632- 1704) - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
  12. Avicenna
    (c. 980 - 1037) - The Book of Healing
  13. Ludwig Wittgenstein
    (1889 - 1951) - Philosophical Investigations
  14. Martin Heidegger
    (1889 - 1976) - Being and Time
  15. Plotinus
    (c. 204/5 - 270) - The Enneads
  16. Soren Kierkegaard
    (1813 - 1855) - Fear and Trembling
  17. John-Jacques Rousseau
    (1712 - 1778) - The Social Contract
  18. Gottfried Leibniz
    (1646 - 1716) - Monadology
  19. Baruch Spinoza
    (1632 - 1677) - Ethics
  20. Bertrand Russell
    (1872 - 1970) - The Problems of Philosophy
  21. Thomas Hobbes
    (1588 - 1679) - Leviathan
  22. John Rawls
    (1921 - 2002) - A Theory of Justice
  23. John Stuart Mill
    (1806 - 1873) - On Liberty
  24. Ralph Waldo Emerson
    (1803 - 1882) - Essays: First Series
  25. Gottlob Frege
    (1848 - 1925) - The Foundations of Arithmetic
  26. Niccolò Machiavelli
    (1469 - 1527) - The Prince
  27. Arthur Schopenhauer
    (1788 - 1860) - The World as Will and Representation
  28. Francis Bacon
    (1561 - 1626) - Novum Organum
  29. Karl Popper
    (1902 - 1994) - The Logic of Scientific Discovery
  30. George Berkeley
    (1685 - 1753) - A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
  31. William James
    (1842 - 1910) - The Principles of Psychology
  32. John Dewey
    (1859 - 1952) - Art as Experience
  33. Jean-Paul Sartre
    (1905 - 1980) - Being and Nothingness
  34. Simone de Beauvoir
    (1908 - 1986) - The Second Sex
  35. Jeremy Bentham
    (1748 - 1832) - An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
  36. Voltaire
    (1694 - 1778) - Philosophical Letters
  37. Hannah Arendt
    (1906 - 1975) - The Human Condition
  38. Albert Camus
    (1913 - 1960) - The Myth of Sisyphus
  39. Michel Foucault
    (1926 - 1984) - Discipline and Punish
  40. Noam Chomsky
    (1928 - ) - Syntactic Structures
  41. Henry David Thoreau
    (1817 - 1862) - Walden
  42. Anselm of Canterbury
    (1033 - 1109) - Proslogion
  43. Duns Scotus
    (c. 1265/66 - 1308) - Ordinatio
  44. William Ockham
    (c. 1287 - 1347) - Summa Logicae
  45. Pierre Bayle
    (1647 - 1706) - Historical and Critical Dictionary
  46. Gilles Deleuze
    (1925 - 1995) - Difference and Repetition
  47. Auguste Comte
    (1797 - 1857) - Course of Positive Philosophy
  48. G.E. Moore
    (1873 - 1958) - Principia Ethica
  49. Charles Sanders Peirce
    (1839 - 1914) - Illustrations of the Logic of Science
  50. Willard Van Orman Quine
    (1908 - 2000) - Two Dogmas of Empiricism
  51. Marcus Aurelius
    (121 - 180) - Meditations
  52. Averroes
    (1126 -1198) - The Incoherence of the Incoherence
  53. Blaise Pascal
    (1623 - 1662) - Pensées
  54. Giordano Bruno
    (1548 - 1600) - De umbris idearum
  55. Maimonides
    (1135 - 1204) - Mishneh Torah
  56. Boethius
    (с. 480 - 524) - On the Consolation of Philosophy
  57. Jürgen Habermas
    (1929 - 2026) - The Theory of Communicative Action
  58. Jacques Derrida
    (1930 - 2004) - Speech and Phenomena
  59. Thomas Kuhn
    (1922 - 1996) - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  60. Richard Rorty
    (1931 - 2007) - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
  61. Saul Kripke
    (1940 - ) - Naming and Necessity
  62. Henri de Saint-Simon
    (1760 - 1825) - Nouveau Christianisme
  63. al-Ghazali
    (1058 - 1111) - The Incoherence of the Philosophers
  64. Montesquieu
    (1689 - 1755) - The Spirit of Law
  65. Denis Diderot
    (1713 - 1784) - Jacques the Fatalist
  66. Mary Wollstonecraft
    (1759 - 1797) - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  67. Henri Bergson
    (1859 - 1941) - Time and Free Will
  68. Alfred North Whitehead
    (1861 - 1947) - Process and Reality
  69. Rudolf Carnap
    (1891 - 1970) - The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language
  70. Theodor W. Adorno
    (1903 - 1969) - Dialectic of Enlightenment
  71. Peter Singer
    (1946 - ) - Animal Liberation
  72. Judith Butler
    (1956 - ) - Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
  73. Seneca
    (c. 4 BC - 65) - Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium
  74. al-Farabi
    (c. 870 - c. 950) - Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir
  75. Peter Abelard
    (1079 - 1142) - Sic et Non
  76. Thomas Paine
    (1737 - 1809) - Common Sense
  77. Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    (1908 - 1961) - Phenomenology of Perception
  78. Cicero
    (106 - 43 BC) - De Oratore
  79. Lucretius
    (c. 99 - 55 BC) - On the Nature of Things
  80. Sextus Empiricus
    (c. 160 - 210) - Outlines of Pyrrhonism
  81. Erasmus
    (c. 1466 - 1536) - The Praise of Folly
  82. Thomas More
    (1478 - 1535) - Utopia
  83. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
    (1762 - 1814) - Foundations of Natural Right
  84. Friedrich Schelling
    (1775 - 1854) - System of Transcendental Idealism
  85. Herbert Spencer
    (1820 - 1903) - The Man Versus the State
  86. George Santayana
    (1863 - 1952) - The Sense of Beauty
  87. Hans-Georg Gadamer
    (1900 - 2002) - Truth and Method
  88. Jacques Lacan
    (1901 - 1981) - Écrits
  89. Slavoj Žižek
    (1949 - ) - The Sublime Object of Ideology
  90. Frantz Fanon
    (1908 - 1961) - The Wretched of the Earth
  91. Claude Lévi-Strauss
    (1908 - 2009) - Tristes Tropiques
  92. Simone Weil
    (1909 - 1943) - The Need for Roots
  93. Donald Davidson
    (1917 - 2003) - Mental Events
  94. Elizabeth Anscombe
    (1919 - 2001) - Philosophical Investigations
  95. Ayn Rand
    (1905 - 1982) - Atlas Shrugged
  96. Judith Jarvis Thomson
    (1929 - ) - A Defense of Abortion
  97. Luce Irigaray
    (1930 - ) - Speculum of the Other Woman
  98. Thomas Nagel
    (1937 - ) - What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
  99. Robert Nozick
    (1938 - 2002) - Anarchy, State, and Utopia
  100. John McDowell
    (1942 - ) - Mind and World
Honorable Mentions
  1. A.J. Ayer
    (1910 - 1989) - Language, Truth, and Logic
  2. Jacob Böhme
    (1575 - 1624) - The Signature of All Things
  3. John Calvin
    (1509 - 1564) - Institutes of the Christian Religion
  4. R.G. Collingwood
    (1889 - 1943) - The Idea of History
  5. Democritus
    (460 - 360 BC)
  6. Daniel Dennett
    (1942 - 2024) - Consciousness Explained
  7. Diogenes the Cynic
    (412 - 323 BC)
  8. Émile Durkheim
    (1858 - 1917) - The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
  9. Epicurus
    (341 - 270 BC) - Letter to Menoeceus
  10. Paul Feyerabend
    (1924 - 1994) - Against Method
  11. Sigmund Freud
    (1856 - 1939) - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
  12. Erich Fromm
    (1900 - 1980) - The Art of Loving
  13. Pope Gregory I
    (c. 540 - 604) - Dialogues
  14. Heraclitus
    (fl. c. 500 BC)
  15. Hypatia of Alexandria
    (c. 350/370 - 415)
  16. Karl Jaspers
    (1883 - 1969) - Philosophy
  17. Christine Korsgaard
    (1952 - ) - Self-Constitution
  18. Imre Lakatos
    (1922 - 1974) - Proofs and Refutations
  19. Emmanuel Levinas
    (1906 - 1995) - Totality and Infinity
  20. Martha Nussbaum
    (1947 - ) - The Fragility of Goodness
  21. Parmenides
    (born c. 515 BC)
  22. Hilary Putnam
    (1926 - 2016) - Philosophy of Logic
  23. Pyrrho
    (c. 360 - c. 270 BC)
  24. Pythagoras
    (c. 570 - c. 495 BC)
  25. John Searle
    (1932 - 2025) - Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
  26. Wilfrid Sellars
    (1912 - 1989) - Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
  27. Adam Smith
    (1723 - 1790) - The Theory of Moral Sentiments
  28. Socrates
    (c. 470 - 399 BC)
  29. Emanuel Swedenborg
    (1688 - 1772) - Heaven and Hell
  30. Thales
    (c. 624 - c. 546 BC)
  31. Alexis de Tocqueville
    (1805 - 1859) - Democracy in America
  32. Max Weber
    (1864 - 1920) - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
  33. Cornel West
    (1953 - ) - Race Matters
  34. Zeno of Citium
    (c. 334 - 262 BC)
  35. Zeno of Elea
    (c. 490 - 430 BC)
  36. Zoroaster
    (c. 624-599 – c. 547-522 BC)
Greatest philosophers worldwide
  1. Confucius
    (c. 551 - c. 479 BC) - Confucianism
  2. Plato
    (c. 428 - 348 BC) - "The Republic"
  3. Aristotle
    (384 - 322 BC) - "Nicomachean Ethics"
  4. The Buddha
    (c. 563-480 – 483-400 BC) - Buddhism
  5. Immanuel Kant
    (1724 - 1804) - "Critique of Pure Reason"
  6. Avicenna
    (c. 980 - 1037) - "The Book of Healing"
  7. Zhu Xi
    (1130 - 1200) - Neo-Confucianism
  8. Thomas Aquinas
    (1225 - 1274) - "Summa Theologica"
  9. Adi Shankara
    (c. 700 - c. 750) - Advaita Vedanta
  10. Karl Marx
    (1813 - 1883) - "The Communist Manifesto"
Greatest philosophers pre-socratics (Greece)
  1. Pythagoras
    (c. 570 - c. 495 BC) - Pythagoreanism, mysticism
  2. Thales
    (c. 624 - c. 546 BC) - considered the first Western philosopher; natural philosophy; "Everything is water"
  3. Parmenides
    (born c. 515 BC) - Monism; truth/opinion distinction
  4. Heraclitus
    (fl. c. 500 BC) - Fire is the arche; Logos; Flux; Unity of opposites
  5. Zeno of Elea
    (c. 490 - 430 BC) - Monism; Zeno's paradoxes
  6. Xenophanes
    (c. 570 - c. 470 BC) - Polytheistic religious views as human projections; Earth is the arche; The distinction between knowledge and mere true belief
  7. Anaxagoras
    (c. 500 - c. 428 BC) - Nous
  8. Democritus
    (c. 460 - c. 370 BC) - Atomism
  9. Leucippus
    (fl. c. 5th century BC) - Atomism
  10. Empedocles
    (c. 494 - c. 434 BC) - four classical elements; Love and Strife
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First published:
2026-10-05

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