The Greek Philosophers
From Socrates to Aristotle
The thinkers who invented Western philosophy. Their questions about truth, justice, beauty, and the good life remain as urgent today as they were in ancient Athens.
Profiles in this collection
Pythagoras
Pythagoras was a philosopher and mathematician who founded a religious-philosophical community in southern Italy and whose school made groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, music theory, and cosmology. The Pythagorean theorem, the discovery of musical intervals as numerical ratios, and the idea that the cosmos is fundamentally mathematical all trace back to his tradition.
Socrates
Socrates is the foundational figure of Western philosophy, a man who wrote nothing but transformed the intellectual world through relentless questioning. Tried and executed by Athens for impiety and corrupting the youth, his method of rigorous dialogue - the Socratic method - and his example of the examined life became the model for philosophical inquiry ever after.
Plato
Plato was the Athenian philosopher who founded the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, and whose dialogues - above all the Republic - laid the foundations of Western philosophy, political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology. Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized all of Western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato."
Aristotle
Aristotle was the most wide-ranging intellect of the ancient world, a philosopher who made foundational contributions to logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, biology, physics, poetics, and rhetoric. A student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great, he founded the Lyceum in Athens and created the framework of systematic inquiry that shaped Western and Islamic thought for two millennia.
Seneca the Younger
Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman who served as tutor and advisor to the emperor Nero. His moral essays and letters are among the most accessible works of ancient philosophy, and his unflinching suicide on Nero's orders became an iconic image of philosophical courage.
Marcus Aurelius
The closest the ancient world came to Plato's ideal of the philosopher-king, Marcus Aurelius governed Rome during a time of plague, war, and crisis while composing the Meditations - a private journal of Stoic self-reflection that became one of the most beloved works of philosophy in any language.
Augustine of Hippo
The most influential theologian in Western Christianity, whose Confessions invented the autobiography and whose City of God reimagined the relationship between faith and civilization. A former Manichaean and self-described sinner, Augustine's dramatic conversion story shaped Christian thought for fifteen centuries.
Thomas Aquinas
Dominican friar and the greatest philosopher-theologian of the medieval West. His Summa Theologiae, a systematic synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, became the cornerstone of Catholic thought and one of the most influential works in the history of Western philosophy.