Philosophy & Belief
The big questions, the thinkers who asked them and the world's religions.
Featured in Philosophy & Belief
Start with these, then follow the links inside each article wherever they lead.
Socrates
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher from Classical Athens, perhaps the first Western moral philosopher, and a major inspiration on his student Plato, who largely founded the tradition of Western philosophy. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon.
Plato
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher of Classical Athens who is most commonly considered the foundational thinker of the Western philosophical tradition. An innovator of the literary dialogue and dialectic forms, Plato influenced all the major areas of theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the collection of philosophical theories that would later become known as Platonism.
Aristotle
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings span the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts.
Confucius
Confucius, born Kong Qiu, was a Chinese philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. Much of the shared cultural heritage of the Sinosphere originates in the philosophy and teachings of Confucius.
Buddhism
Buddhism, also known as Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and philosophy based on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a śramaṇa (wandering ascetic) and religious teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE. It is the world's fourth-largest religion, with about 320 million followers, known as Buddhists, who comprise 4.1% of the global population.
Stoicism
Stoicism is a philosophical movement and practical guide to living, emphasizing daily self-discipline and moral improvement, which originated in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece and continued well into the Roman Imperial period. The ancient Stoics believed that the universe operated according to reason, or logos, providing a unified account of the world, constructed from ideals of rational discourse, monistic physics, and naturalistic ethics.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. Born in Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, he is considered one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who started his career as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, at age 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel.
Existentialism
Existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual's struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence. In examining meaning, purpose, and value, existentialist thought often includes concepts such as existential crises, angst, courage, and freedom.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is a family of theories in normative ethics that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number.
Ethics
Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right.
Epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called the theory of knowledge, it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience.
Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic.
Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. The Gospels state that Jesus is the Son of God and rose from the dead after his crucifixion, whose coming as the messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament and chronicled in the New Testament.
Islam
Islam is an Abrahamic religion based on the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. The monotheistic religion has an estimated 2 billion worldwide adherents, called Muslims.
Hinduism
Hinduism is an umbrella term for a range of Indian religious and spiritual traditions (sampradayas) that are unified by adherence to Dharma, a cosmic order maintained by its followers through rituals and righteous living, as expounded in the Vedas. The word Hindu originated as an exonym, and while Hinduism has been called the oldest surviving religion in the world, it is also described since the 19th century by the term Sanātana Dharma (lit. 'eternal dharma').
Judaism
Judaism is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, ethnic religion that comprises the collective spiritual, cultural, and legal traditions of the Jewish people. Religious Jews regard Judaism as their means of observing the Mosaic covenant, which they believe was established between God and the Jewish people.
Taoism
Taoism or Daoism is a philosophical and religious tradition indigenous to China, emphasizing harmony with the Tao (道). With a range of meanings and interpretations in Chinese philosophy, translations of Tao include 'way', 'road', 'path', or 'technique', generally understood in the Taoist sense as an enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality.
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment, was a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing in Europe and Western civilization, emerging in the late 17th century in Western Europe. It reached its peak in the 18th century as its ideas spread more widely across Europe and into the European colonies in the Americas and Oceania.
Social contract
In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory of state that conceives of a legitimate state as arising from the agreement of citizens who consent to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, social contractarianism is a core concept of modern theories of constitutionalism.
René Descartes
René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist whose work was foundational to mathematics and modern philosophy. He connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry and introduced a systematic method of inquiry that became influential in early modern philosophy.
John Locke
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". His important works include A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Two Treatises of Government (1689/90), both published anonymously, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90).
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Free will
Free will is generally understood as the capacity or ability of people to either choose between different possible courses of action, exercise control over their actions in a way that is necessary for moral responsibility, or be the ultimate source or originator of their actions. There are different theories as to its nature, and these aspects are often emphasized differently depending on philosophical tradition, with debates focusing on whether and how such freedom can coexist with physical determinism, divine foreknowledge, and other constraints.
Sikhism
Sikhism, also known as Sikhi, is an Indian religion and philosophy that originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent around the end of the 15th century CE. It is one of the most recently founded major religions and is followed by 25-30 million adherents, known as Sikhs. Sikhism developed from the spiritual teachings of Guru Nanak, the faith's first guru, and the nine Sikh gurus who succeeded him.
Shinto
Shinto, also called Shintoism, is a religion from Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, it is often regarded by its practitioners as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher and political theorist, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, philosophe, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist who is known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, political economist, and politician. He was a paradigmatic philosopher of liberalism and has been described as "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, and revolutionary socialist. He developed the theory of historical materialism, analysing societal structure and change, particularly class struggle under capitalism, and predicting the system's ultimate replacement by communism.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic nature or most fundamental structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the conceptual framework of human understanding.
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world. The mind-body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed; these include the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.
Laozi
Laozi is the name traditionally given to an ancient Chinese philosopher, also identified as Li Er or Lao Dan, who is regarded as the author or originating teacher associated with the Tao Te Ching (Pinyin: Dào Dé Jīng), one of the foundational texts of Taoism. Traditional accounts place him in the 6th century BC state of Chu during China's Spring and Autumn period (c. 770, c. 481 BC), describe him as a keeper of archival records at the Zhou court, and remember him as an elder contemporary of Confucius (c. 551, c. 479 BC).
The Buddha
Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist legends, he was born in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, to royal parents of the Shakya clan, but renounced his home life to live as a wandering ascetic.
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, theologian, and philosopher. He is considered one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Catholic theology and Western philosophy.
Guides in Philosophy & Belief
What is philosophy?
The main branches of philosophy, the questions each one asks, and why the subject still matters.
Theories of ethics: consequences, duties and virtues
The three great approaches to right and wrong, what each gets right, and where each runs into trouble.
Logic and good reasoning
Deduction, induction and the common fallacies that make weak arguments sound convincing.
Stoicism: the philosophy of what you can control
How an ancient Greek and Roman school taught people to meet hardship calmly, and why its ideas are popular again.
The world's major religions
An even-handed introduction to the beliefs, practices and histories of the largest religious traditions.
Political philosophy and the social contract
Why should anyone obey a government? Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the debate over rights, liberty and justice.