Greatest Western Philosophers

[Tim]

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.

Link: https://digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/book ... phers.html

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

A.J. Ayer (1910 - 1989) - Language, Truth, and Logic
Jacob Böhme (1575 - 1624) - The Signature of All Things
John Calvin (1509 - 1564) - Institutes of the Christian Religion
R.G. Collingwood (1889 - 1943) - The Idea of History
Democritus (460 - 360 BC)
Daniel Dennett (1942 - 2024) - Consciousness Explained
Diogenes the Cynic (412 - 323 BC)
Émile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) - The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Epicurus (341 - 270 BC) - Letter to Menoeceus
Paul Feyerabend (1924 - 1994) - Against Method
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980) - The Art of Loving
Pope Gregory I (c. 540 - 604) - Dialogues
Heraclitus (fl. c. 500 BC)
Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350/370 - 415)
Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969) - Philosophy
Christine Korsgaard (1952 - ) - Self-Constitution
Imre Lakatos (1922 - 1974) - Proofs and Refutations
Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) - Totality and Infinity
Martha Nussbaum (1947 - ) - The Fragility of Goodness
Parmenides (born c. 515 BC)
Hilary Putnam (1926 - 2016) - Philosophy of Logic
Pyrrho (c. 360 - c. 270 BC)
Pythagoras (c. 570 - c. 495 BC)
John Searle (1932 - 2025) - Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
Wilfrid Sellars (1912 - 1989) - Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
Adam Smith (1723 - 1790) - The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Socrates (c. 470 - 399 BC)
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772) - Heaven and Hell
Thales (c. 624 - c. 546 BC)
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859) - Democracy in America
Max Weber (1864 - 1920) - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Cornel West (1953 - ) - Race Matters
Zeno of Citium (c. 334 - 262 BC)
Zeno of Elea (c. 490 - 430 BC)
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 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

[ManPerson]

I'm gonna be the one to address the elephant in the room and ask whether Socrates should be on here.

[ManPerson]

Also, I think Hume seems low and should be around #8, but that's mostly just based on my gut feeling.

[ManPerson]

Do you consider Marcus Aurelius to be eligible?

[Tim]

Do you consider Marcus Aurelius to be eligible?

Sure, why not?

[Tim]

I'm gonna be the one to address the elephant in the room and ask whether Socrates should be on here.

If we do remove him, should Thales & Pythagoras be relegated to honorable mentions as well?

[Tim]

Also, I think Hume seems low and should be around #8, but that's mostly just based on my gut feeling.

Guess I can see that.

[ManPerson]

I'm gonna be the one to address the elephant in the room and ask whether Socrates should be on here.

If we do remove him, should Thales & Pythagoras be relegated to honorable mentions as well?

I'm assuming you're going to put Socrates in the hms too?

If so, then I think that makes sense.

[ManPerson]

Do you consider Marcus Aurelius to be eligible?

Sure, why not?

He probably wouldn't, but that's probably not a good standard to decide who should be on the list.

[Fido]

I agree with putting them on the HMs because if not I can't see Pythagoras that low.

This may be of interest: https://beckchris.com/people/the-greate ... me-ranked/

And the discussion on the old forum: https://web.archive.org/web/20240515170 ... =59&t=1617

[Sherick]

Plotinus and Avicenna seem far too low. If we were talking about the most influential philosophers they would be top 10, at least.

[Tim]

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.

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. Epicurus (341 - 270 BC) - Letter to Menoeceus
36. Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832) - An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
37. Voltaire (1694 - 1778) - Philosophical Letters
38. Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) - The Human Condition
39. Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) - The Myth of Sisyphus
40. Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) - Discipline and Punish
41. Noam Chomsky (1928 - ) - Syntactic Structures
42. Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) - Walden
43. Anselm of Canterbury (1033 - 1109) - Proslogion
44. Duns Scotus (c. 1265/66 - 1308) - Ordinatio
45. William Ockham (c. 1287 - 1347) - Summa Logicae
46. Pierre Bayle (1647 - 1706) - Historical and Critical Dictionary
47. Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995) - Difference and Repetition
48. Auguste Comte (1797 - 1857) - Course of Positive Philosophy
49. G.E. Moore (1873 - 1958) - Principia Ethica
50. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914) - Illustrations of the Logic of Science

Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142) - Sic et Non
Theodor W. Adorno (1903 - 1969) - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Elizabeth Anscombe (1919 - 2001) - Philosophical Investigations
Averroes (1126 -1198) - The Incoherence of the Incoherence
A.J. Ayer (1910 - 1989) - Language, Truth, and Logic
Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) - Time and Free Will
Boethius (с. 480 - 524) - On the Consolation of Philosophy
Jacob Böhme (1575 - 1624) - The Signature of All Things
Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) - De umbris idearum
Judith Butler (1956 - ) - Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970) - The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language
Cicero (106 - 43 BC) - De Oratore
R.G. Collingwood (1889 - 1943) - The Idea of History
Donald Davidson (1917 - 2003) - Mental Events
Democritus (460 - 360 BC)
Daniel Dennett (1942 - 2024) - Consciousness Explained
Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) - Speech and Phenomena
Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784) - Jacques the Fatalist
Diogenes the Cynic (412 - 323 BC)
Erasmus (c. 1466 - 1536) - The Praise of Folly
Frantz Fanon (1908 - 1961) - The Wretched of the Earth
al-Farabi (c. 870 - c. 950) - Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir
Paul Feyerabend (1924 - 1994) - Against Method
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814) - Foundations of Natural Right
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980) - The Art of Loving
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002) - Truth and Method
al-Ghazali (1058 - 1111) - The Incoherence of the Philosophers
Jürgen Habermas (1929 - 2026) - The Theory of Communicative Action
Heraclitus (fl. c. 500 BC)
Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350/370 - 415)
Luce Irigaray (1930 - ) - Speculum of the Other Woman
Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969) - Philosophy
Christine Korsgaard (1952 - ) - Self-Constitution
Saul Kripke (1940 - ) - Naming and Necessity
Thomas Kuhn (1922 - 1996) - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981) - Écrits
Imre Lakatos (1922 - 1974) - Proofs and Refutations
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009) - Tristes Tropiques
Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) - Totality and Infinity
Lucretius (c. 99 - 55 BC) - On the Nature of Things
Maimonides (1135 - 1204) - Mishneh Torah
Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180) - Meditations
John McDowell (1942 - ) - Mind and World
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961) - Phenomenology of Perception
Montesquieu (1689 - 1755) - The Spirit of Law
Thomas More (1478 - 1535) - Utopia
Thomas Nagel (1937 - ) - What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002) - Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Martha Nussbaum (1947 - ) - The Fragility of Goodness
Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809) - Common Sense
Parmenides (fl. c. 515 BC)
Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) - Pensées
Pyrrho (c. 360 - c. 270 BC)
Pythagoras (c. 570 - c. 495 BC)
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908 - 2000) - Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) - Atlas Shrugged
Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760 - 1825) - Nouveau Christianisme
George Santayana (1863 - 1952) - The Sense of Beauty
Friedrich Schelling (1775 - 1854) - System of Transcendental Idealism
John Searle (1932 - 2025) - Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
Wilfrid Sellars (1912 - 1989) - Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
Seneca (c. 4 BC - 65) - Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium
Peter Singer (1946 - ) - Animal Liberation
Adam Smith (1723 - 1790) - The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160 - 210) - Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Socrates (c. 470 - 399 BC)
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) - The Man Versus the State
Thales (c. 624 - c. 546 BC)
Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929 - ) - A Defense of Abortion
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859) - Democracy in America
Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) - The Need for Roots
Cornel West (1953 - ) - Race Matters
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) - Process and Reality
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797) - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Zeno of Citium (c. 334 - 262 BC)
Zeno of Elea (c. 490 - 430 BC)
Slavoj Žižek (1949 - ) - The Sublime Object of Ideology
Zoroaster (c. 1200-900 – 1133-833 BC)

[ManPerson]

Would you consider Fanon to be a philosopher?

[Tim]

Sure, added him to the honorable mentions section.

[Tim]

Greatest philosophers worldwide draft:

1. Confucius (c. 551 - c. 479 BC)
2. Plato (c. 428 - 348 BC) - The Republic
3. Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) - Nicomachean Ethics
4. The Buddha (c. 563-480 – 483-400 BC)
5. Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) - Critique of Pure Reason
6. Avicenna (c. 980 - 1037) - The Book of Healing
7. Zhu Xi (1130 - 1200)
8. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274) - Summa Theologica
9. Adi Shankara (c. 700 - c. 750)
10. Karl Marx (1813 - 1883) - The Communist Manifesto

Ignoring no surviving works rule for this one.

[ManPerson]

Might as well throw Socrates back in then if surviving works don't matter here.

I could see Lao Tzu somewhere in there.

Buddha seems debatable as philosopher but if you count him I think he'd probably be even higher.

[Sherick]

Thing about Socrates is not only did he leave no works, he left no attributable philosophy. Almost everything attributed to him is actually attributable to Plato, and everyone after Plato simply quotes Plato.

[Tim]

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. Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981) - Écrits
79. Slavoj Žižek (1949 - ) - The Sublime Object of Ideology
80. Cicero (106 - 43 BC) - De Oratore
81. Lucretius (c. 99 - 55 BC) - On the Nature of Things
82. Sextus Empiricus (c. 160 - 210) - Outlines of Pyrrhonism
83. Erasmus (c. 1466 - 1536) - The Praise of Folly
84. Thomas More (1478 - 1535) - Utopia
85. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814) - Foundations of Natural Right
86. Friedrich Schelling (1775 - 1854) - System of Transcendental Idealism
87. Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) - The Man Versus the State
88. George Santayana (1863 - 1952) - The Sense of Beauty
89. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002) - Truth and Method
90. Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) - Atlas Shrugged
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. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929 - ) - A Defense of Abortion
96. Luce Irigaray (1930 - ) - Speculum of the Other Woman
97. Thomas Nagel (1937 - ) - What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
98. Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002) - Anarchy, State, and Utopia
99. John McDowell (1942 - ) - Mind and World
100. Frantz Fanon (1908 - 1961) - The Wretched of the Earth

A.J. Ayer (1910 - 1989) - Language, Truth, and Logic
Jacob Böhme (1575 - 1624) - The Signature of All Things
John Calvin (1509 - 1564) - Institutes of the Christian Religion
R.G. Collingwood (1889 - 1943) - The Idea of History
Democritus (460 - 360 BC)
Daniel Dennett (1942 - 2024) - Consciousness Explained
Diogenes the Cynic (412 - 323 BC)
Émile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) - The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Epicurus (341 - 270 BC) - Letter to Menoeceus
Paul Feyerabend (1924 - 1994) - Against Method
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980) - The Art of Loving
Pope Gregory I (c. 540 - 604) - Dialogues
Heraclitus (fl. c. 500 BC)
Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350/370 - 415)
Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969) - Philosophy
Christine Korsgaard (1952 - ) - Self-Constitution
Imre Lakatos (1922 - 1974) - Proofs and Refutations
Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) - Totality and Infinity
Martha Nussbaum (1947 - ) - The Fragility of Goodness
Parmenides (born c. 515 BC)
Hilary Putnam (1926 - 2016) - Philosophy of Logic
Pyrrho (c. 360 - c. 270 BC)
Pythagoras (c. 570 - c. 495 BC)
John Searle (1932 - 2025) - Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
Wilfrid Sellars (1912 - 1989) - Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
Adam Smith (1723 - 1790) - The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Socrates (c. 470 - 399 BC)
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772) - Heaven and Hell
Thales (c. 624 - c. 546 BC)
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859) - Democracy in America
Max Weber (1864 - 1920) - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Cornel West (1953 - ) - Race Matters
Zeno of Citium (c. 334 - 262 BC)
Zeno of Elea (c. 490 - 430 BC)
Zoroaster (c. 624-599 – c. 547-522 BC)

Expanded the ranked list to 100 + Epicurus to honorable mentions due to lack of survived works.