Top 10 Greatest Philosophers of All Time

Student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great; wrote approximately 200 treatises covering logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, biology and politics; founded the Lyceum in Athens in 335 BC

Student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle; wrote The Republic defining justice and the ideal state; founded the Academy in Athens around 387 BC, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world

German philosopher whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) transformed Western philosophy; developed the categorical imperative as the foundation of moral philosophy; never left his hometown of Konigsberg

German philosopher who coined "God is dead" in The Gay Science (1882); wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) and developed the concept of the Ubermensch (Superman); influenced existentialism and postmodernism

French philosopher who wrote "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); considered the father of modern Western philosophy and analytic geometry

English philosopher whose Two Treatises of Government (1689) established natural rights theory; his ideas of life, liberty and property directly influenced the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution

German philosopher whose Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels) and Das Kapital (1867) formed the basis for communist theory; his ideas shaped the governance of nations containing over 1.5 billion people in the 20th century

Scottish philosopher who argued in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that knowledge comes only from sense experience; his skepticism influenced Kant and established empiricism as the dominant British philosophical tradition

Chinese philosopher who taught ren (benevolence) and li (ritual propriety) through 3,000 students; his collected sayings in the Analects formed Confucianism, which shaped East Asian culture, governance and ethics for 2,500 years