Who influenced whom? The lineages of philosophy
217 documented links between philosophers and movements, from antiquity to today and from China to Europe: what they handed down, what they contested. Every link is sourced, and you can find it on the Atlas frieze.
Explore the influence frieze →Each card links two figures, the earlier one on the left. The height of the bridge gives the gap in time, its stroke the kind of link: solid when a thought is continued, dashed when it is reinterpreted, double for a synthesis, dotted for a transmission, barred when it is challenged. "Attested" means the reading is documented; "indirect", that it goes through others or stays implicit.
Antiquity
From the Presocratics to the Hellenistic schools, from Confucius to Buddhism: the first lineages, in Greece, China and India.
Confucianism challenged by Taoism
partly defines itself against : where the latter grounds order in ritual and social virtue, the Zhuangzi mocks propriety and sets against it spontaneity and non-action.
Sources (1)
- Zhuangzi; Laozi, Tao Te Ching
Taoism synthesized by Buddhism
Entering China, blends with the sensibility: first translated through the vocabulary of the dao and wu wei, it gives rise to Chan, the ancestor of Zen, where Indian meditation weds the naturalness and spontaneity dear to . The filiation is rarely claimed as such, yet the Chan school bears its imprint.
Sources (1)
- Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, vol. 1
Confucianism challenged by Mohism
arose against : against its costly rites, court music, long mourning periods and above all its graded love, it set the criterion of common benefit and impartial concern for all.
Sources (1)
- Mozi, ch. 39 ("Against the Confucians")
Socrates continued by Antisthenes
A listener of , keeps from him moral askēsis and the self-sufficiency of virtue, which he radicalises into a contempt for convention, the seedbed of .
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI
Parmenides reinterpreted by Plato
inherits from the demand for a stable, intelligible being, the bedrock of his theory of Forms; but to account for error and change he commits, in the Sophist, a "parricide", admitting against the master a measure of non-being.
Sources (2)
- Plato, Sophist
- Plato, Parmenides
Socrates continued by Plato
, a pupil of , makes him the central figure of his dialogues and carries on his questioning of definition and virtue, which he then unfolds into a metaphysics of the Forms that Socrates never stated.
Sources (1)
- Plato, Apology; Phaedo
Antisthenes continued by Diogenes of Sinope
takes up the ideal of self-sufficiency of and pushes it to the extreme, into a provocative practice of destitution and freedom. The direct teacher-pupil filiation is traditional but debated.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI
Plato challenged by Diogenes of Sinope
defines his Cynicism against : he mocks the ("I see the cup, but not cupness") and "Plato's man", which he ridicules with a plucked chicken, opposing to the idealist's abstractions a nominalist, bodily naturalism.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI
Platonism reinterpreted by Skepticism
Academic is born within 's own Academy: , and then Carneades, turn the school's dialectic against , making the suspension of judgment the true fidelity to the Socratic method of examination. The Platonic search for knowledge thus reverses into an art of asserting nothing.
Sources (1)
- Cicero, Academica; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I
Plato challenged by Aristotle
Trained for twenty years at the Academy, keeps from the demand for science and definition, but rejects the separation of the Forms: form exists only in individual substances, not in a world apart.
Sources (1)
- Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.9
Confucius continued by Mencius
carries on the ethics of and gives it a ground: the innate goodness of the human heart, which one need only cultivate, against doctrines of self-interest.
Sources (1)
- Mencius (Mengzi)
Mohism challenged by Mencius
accuses the impartial concern of of denying one's father, since it puts other people's parents on a par with one's own, and defends against it a love that extends by degrees outward from the family.
Sources (1)
- Mencius, 3B9 and 7A26
Laozi reinterpreted by Zhuangzi
radicalises the themes associated with : the dao, non-action and the relativity of distinctions, which he unfolds through parables and paradoxes rather than maxims.
Sources (1)
- Zhuangzi
Hui Shi reinterpreted by Zhuangzi
Friend and chief sparring partner of , supplies, through his paradoxes of the School of Names, the logical material that Zhuangzi turns into a philosophy of the relative and of the equivalence of viewpoints.
Sources (1)
- Zhuangzi, chapter "All Under Heaven" and the dialogues
Diogenes of Sinope continued by Crates
A disciple of , takes up the Cynic way of life but inflects it into a gentler, philanthropic figure; Zeno's teacher, he would be the relay toward Stoicism.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI
Buddhism reinterpreted by Pyrrho
accompanied Alexander to India and met "gymnosophists" there. A kinship between his suspension of judgment and Indian thought, even , is defended by some historians and disputed by others: the link remains a hypothesis.
Sources (2)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, IX.61
- Debate between E. Flintoff (1980), C. Beckwith (2015) and R. Bett
Stoicism challenged by Epicureanism
, notably in , fights providence and fate in the name of a world without design, born of the chance of atoms and in which the soul is mortal.
Sources (1)
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Heraclitus continued by Stoicism
takes up from its physics of fire and logos: a rational, divine principle pervades and orders a cosmos in perpetual becoming, down to the conflagration that reabsorbs and regenerates it.
Sources (2)
- Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII
Socrates continued by Stoicism
claims as its model of the sage: virtue as knowledge, the unity of the virtues and the idea that no one does wrong willingly pass from the dialogues into the ethics of the Stoa.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, VII; Plato's Socratic dialogues
Cynicism continued by Stoicism
arises in the wake of , from which it takes the ideal of self-sufficiency, life according to nature and cosmopolitanism; but it tempers its provocation and anticonformism by embedding it in a systematic physics and logic, where virtue is no longer a defiance of convention but accord with the reason that orders the world.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VII
Plato continued by Stoicism
physics draws from 's Timaeus the idea of a living cosmos, ordered and governed by a rational providence, which it recasts into a materialism of breath and immanent logos.
Sources (1)
- Plato, Timaeus
Epicureanism challenged by Stoicism
A major rivalry of the Hellenistic age: from to the dialogues in which Cicero reports it, hones its theses against , setting against the swerve of atoms and pleasure the doctrines of providence, fate and virtue as the only good.
Sources (1)
- Cicero, On Fate; On the Ends of Good and Evil
Crates continued by Zeno of Citium
c. 325 BCE25 yearscontinued byc. 298 BCEBefore founding the Stoa, studied under the Cynic : from him he takes the ideal of self-sufficiency and life according to nature, an ethical core he would recast into a system.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII
Stoicism challenged by Arcesilaus
's Academic skepticism is forged by refuting epistemology: against the cognitive impression supposed to guarantee truth, he sets the suspension of judgement.
Sources (1)
- Cicero, Academica; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Confucius reinterpreted by Xunzi
claims as his master but reorients the inheritance toward a human nature that must be straightened: study and ritual manufacture virtue, not an innate goodness.
Sources (1)
- Xunzi
Mencius challenged by Xunzi
c. 330 BCE60 yearschallenged byc. 272 BCEexplicitly contests 's thesis: human nature is not good but bad, and only the discipline of ritual and study can correct it.
Sources (1)
- Xunzi, "Human Nature Is Bad"
Zeno of Citium continued by Chrysippus
c. 298 BCE55 yearscontinued byc. 242 BCEPassed on through Cleanthes, 's doctrine was systematised by Chrysippus across logic, physics and ethics, so thoroughly that antiquity said without Chrysippus, no Stoa.
Sources (1)
- Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII
Epicurus transmitted by Lucretius
Three centuries after , transmits to the Roman world, in a great poem, his atomist physics and his ethics of release from the fear of the gods and of death.
Sources (1)
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura)
Epicurus reinterpreted by Seneca
Across the rivalry of the schools, quotes and appropriates as a moral authority in his Letters, on death, friendship and the right measure of desire.
Sources (1)
- Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Chrysippus continued by Epictetus
supplies the doctrinal groundwork that expounds and cites as an authority: the analysis of assent and the division between what is up to us and what is not.
Sources (1)
- Epictetus, Discourses
Buddhism reinterpreted by Vedānta (Advaita)
is forged in a close debate with : and then take up the dialectical tools of emptiness and the two truths, only to recast them in the non-dualism of the Upaniṣads, where the absolute is not void but Brahman. So close was the proximity that rivals called Śaṅkara a crypto-Buddhist.
Sources (1)
- Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya-kārikā; Śaṅkara, Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya, II.2; R. King, Early Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism
Buddhism challenged by Nyāya
For a thousand years engaged in a sustained controversy with the logicians of , Dignāga and Dharmakīrti: against no-self it defends a substantial self; against the theory of (), real universals; against the momentariness of things, their duration.
Sources (2)
- Uddyotakara, Nyāyavārttika
- Udayana, Ātmatattvaviveka
Madhyamaka challenged by Nyāya
defends the means of knowledge against the objection: they establish themselves, as a lamp lights itself in lighting up objects, and denying all valid knowledge undermines the denial itself.
Sources (1)
- Nyāya-sūtra, II.1.8-20, and Vātsyāyana's commentary
Nyāya challenged by Madhyamaka
turns the demand for grounding back on : if the means of knowledge validate everything, what validates them? He also attacks the list of debate categories Nyāya had codified.
Sources (2)
- Nāgārjuna, Vigrahavyāvartanī (The Dispeller of Disputes)
- Nāgārjuna, Vaidalyaprakaraṇa
Epictetus continued by Marcus Aurelius
takes up from , whom he gratefully credits, the discipline of judgement and the distinction between what is up to us and what is not, practised daily in his private notes.
Sources (1)
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, I.7
Pyrrho transmitted by Sextus Empiricus
codifies, centuries later, the tradition stemming from : suspension of judgement and the balanced opposition of arguments, of which his writings are the chief surviving source.
Sources (1)
- Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism
The Buddha reinterpreted by Nāgārjuna
rereads the 's teaching on dependent origination and turns it into a systematic doctrine of emptiness, founding the Madhyamaka school and its middle way.
Sources (1)
- Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā)
Plato reinterpreted by Plotinus
rereads through his texts, six centuries later, and draws from them : a hierarchical metaphysics of the One, the Intellect and the Soul that goes beyond the letter of the dialogues.
Sources (1)
- Plotinus, Enneads
Aristotle reinterpreted by Plotinus
absorbs major pieces of into his Neoplatonism, foremost the Intellect as thought thinking itself, while rejecting the categories as applied to the intelligible.
Sources (1)
- Plotinus, Enneads (V and VI)
Plotinus reinterpreted by Augustine
receives from the Neoplatonists, foremost, a metaphysics of inwardness and of the soul's ascent toward the immaterial, which he reconfigures within Christian theology.
Sources (1)
- Augustine, Confessions, VII.9
Middle Ages
Greek philosophy passes into Arabic, then Latin; India and China develop their great schools.
Platonism reinterpreted by Boethius
's Consolation of Philosophy breathes late : the soul's ascent toward the Good, an ordering providence, evil deprived of being, in a prose that Christianises the heritage without citing it.
Sources (1)
- Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
Aristotle transmitted by Boethius
set himself the task of translating and commenting on 's Organon: he thereby became the only logical Aristotle known to the early Latin Middle Ages.
Sources (1)
- Boethius, translations and commentaries on Aristotle's Organon
Bādarāyaṇa transmitted by Śaṅkara
's are the base text that comments on: he transmits them by reading them non-dualistically (his Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya), grounding on that authority and anchoring there the identity of the self and .
Sources (1)
- Śaṅkara, Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya (Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras)
Gauḍapāda continued by Śaṅkara
systematises by leaning explicitly on , whose doctrine of the non-duality of the self and the absolute he carries on.
Sources (1)
- Śaṅkara, Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras
Platonism synthesized by Falsafa
read Aristotle through and Proclus, whose Arabic paraphrases circulated under Aristotle's name: the Theology of Aristotle and the Book of Causes. The Neoplatonic doctrine of fused there with Aristotelian metaphysics to yield the cosmology of intellects of al-Fārābī and Avicenna.
Sources (2)
- The so-called Theology of Aristotle (paraphrase of Enneads IV-VI)
- Book of Causes (after Proclus, Elements of Theology)
Aristotle reinterpreted by Avicenna
recasts 's metaphysics by Neoplatonising it: the distinction of essence and existence, the necessary being, the hierarchy of intellects.
Sources (1)
- Avicenna, The Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa)
Confucianism reinterpreted by Neo-Confucianism
refounded around the Four Books, the Mencius among them, and a line of transmission of the Way (daotong) that leaps over the centuries to the Cheng brothers; the classics received a metaphysical reading they did not have before.
Sources (1)
- Zhu Xi, Collected Commentaries on the Four Books (Sishu zhangju jizhu)
Taoism reinterpreted by Neo-Confucianism
The Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate of , which came out of circles, became the cosmology of : the "Ultimateless" and yin-yang were put in the service of a Confucian ethics. The diagram's Taoist origin, reported by tradition, was held against Zhu Xi by his opponents.
Sources (1)
- Zhou Dunyi, Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (Taijitu shuo)
Buddhism challenged by Neo-Confucianism
defined itself against , accused of taking the world as empty and of fleeing family and political duties. Yet it borrowed Buddhism's questions about mind, nature and meditation, to which it gave Confucian answers.
Sources (1)
- Zhu Xi and Lü Zuqian, Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsilu), XIII
Augustine continued by Anselm of Canterbury
392680 yearscontinued by1071extends the Augustinian method of credo ut intelligam, faith seeking understanding, all the way to the so-called ontological argument of the Proslogion.
Sources (1)
- Augustine, Confessions; Anselm, Proslogion
Falsafa challenged by al-Ghazālī
refutes twenty theses of the philosophers, notably the eternity of the world and the necessity of the causal link, and declares three of them incompatible with Islam: the eternity of the world, divine knowledge restricted to universals and the denial of bodily resurrection.
Sources (1)
- al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers
Aristotle reinterpreted by Averroes
, "the Commentator", makes the axis of his philosophy and writes great commentaries aimed at recovering the authentic doctrine, against Neoplatonising readings.
Sources (1)
- Averroes, Long Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics
al-Ghazālī challenged by Averroes
108575 yearschallenged by1162answers point by point: to deny natural causality is to deny science itself, since to know a thing is to know its causes.
Sources (1)
- Averroes, The Incoherence of the Incoherence
Aristotle reinterpreted by Maimonides
's Guide for the Perplexed sets out to reconcile 's physics and metaphysics with the Torah, even at the cost of limiting his reach on the creation of the world.
Sources (1)
- Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed
Kalām challenged by Maimonides
sets out and then refutes the premises of the theologians (atomism, the continuous re-creation of the world, the possibility of everything imaginable), which he judges to rest on imagination rather than on the nature of things.
Sources (1)
- Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I.71-76
Falsafa continued by Maimonides
thinks within the framework of : he recommends above every other author and takes up his conception of the prophet as a philosopher endowed with a perfect imagination.
Sources (2)
- Maimonides, Letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon
- Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II.36-38
Nāgārjuna reinterpreted by Dōgen
Through the Mahāyāna and Chan traditions, inherits an understanding of emptiness strongly marked by , which he enacts in his thought of seated meditation and impermanence.
Sources (1)
- Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō
Aristotle synthesized by Thomas Aquinas
integrates the physics, psychology and metaphysics of , "the Philosopher", into a vast synthesis with Christian doctrine, making Aristotelian reason the instrument of theology.
Sources (1)
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
Augustine continued by Thomas Aquinas
inherits from , whom he cites tirelessly, the conception of evil as a of good and the free-will defence against the problem of evil, along with the broad Christian-Platonist frame. Yet he re-grounds this legacy on the metaphysics of , shifting Augustinianism toward a theology of being.
Sources (1)
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (the many "Augustinus dicit" citations)
Boethius transmitted by Thomas Aquinas
hands the Latin world its logical and metaphysical vocabulary (person, nature, eternity) and the method of the theological tractates that takes up and comments on.
Sources (1)
- Boethius, Opuscula sacra; The Consolation of Philosophy
Avicenna reinterpreted by Thomas Aquinas
takes up from the real distinction of essence and existence, but recasts it: where Avicenna treats existence as an accident added to essence, Aquinas thinks it as the act of being () that God confers, thereby correcting his model within his own metaphysics of being.
Sources (1)
- Aquinas, De ente et essentia; Summa contra Gentiles
Averroes transmitted by Thomas Aquinas
's commentaries transmit to the Latin world and shape 's reading of him, even as Aquinas combats the Averroist thesis of the unicity of the intellect.
Sources (1)
- Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists
Maimonides reinterpreted by Thomas Aquinas
discusses Rabbi Moses at length on faith and reason, creation in time and negative theology, at times following him, at times correcting him.
Sources (1)
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae; Summa contra Gentiles
Albert the Great continued by Thomas Aquinas
's master at Cologne, introduces him to the systematic study of Aristotle and to reconciling natural philosophy with faith.
Sources (1)
- Biographical tradition: William of Tocco, Life of St Thomas Aquinas
Renaissance and early modern age
From the Renaissance to Leibniz: the rediscovery of the Ancients and the birth of modern philosophy.
Lucretius continued by Michel de Montaigne
read and annotated , which he laces with quotations throughout the . His uptake of 's naturalism is selective: he draws above all on death, the bodily condition and the refusal of dogmatism, rather than on a system. The reading is direct, yet the filiation stays indirect, made of literary borrowings without acknowledged mastership.
Sources (2)
- Montaigne's hand-annotated copy of On the Nature of Things (extant marginalia)
- Among the most frequent quotations in the Essays, especially on death and the bodily condition
Seneca continued by Michel de Montaigne
, alongside Plutarch, is the chief moral source of the Essays: continues the meditation on death, constancy and self-examination. He then loosens it toward a more natural, fluctuating wisdom, faithful to flux rather than to the sage's firmness.
Sources (2)
- Montaigne, Essays (esp. the early "Stoic" chapters)
- Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Sextus Empiricus reinterpreted by Michel de Montaigne
The Renaissance rediscovery of arms the "Apology for Raymond Sebond": takes up the arsenal of , the modes of suspending judgement against reason's claims. Yet he turns it into a humane, lived doubt, the What do I know?, rather than a system.
Sources (2)
- Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Essays, II, 12)
- Sextus Empiricus in Latin (Henri Estienne and Gentian Hervet editions, 1562-1569)
Aristotelianism challenged by Bacon
builds his reform of method against scholastic , judged barren: to syllogistic logic he opposes a Novum Organum, induction grounded in experience and observation.
Sources (1)
- Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
Rationalism challenged by Empiricism
British defines itself against : the first book of 's sets out to refute innate principles, before the second derives all our ideas from experience, first sensation then reflection. Against the order of reasons deduced a priori, it sets the patient gathering of simple ideas.
Sources (1)
- Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I
Skepticism challenged by Descartes
takes up the arguments of (the illusion of the senses, the dream, the evil genius) but reverses their use: radical doubt becomes a method for reaching an indubitable certainty that overcomes it.
Sources (1)
- Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Stoicism reinterpreted by Descartes
The third maxim of 's provisional morality, to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, makes its own the division between and what is not. The générosité of the Passions of the Soul carries this self-mastery forward, but Descartes refounds it on rather than on consent to fate.
Sources (1)
- Descartes, Discourse on Method, part III; The Passions of the Soul, art. 153; letters to Elisabeth
Augustine reinterpreted by Descartes
's cogito has a famous Augustinian precedent, the si fallor, sum: bequeaths him the self-certainty drawn from doubt itself and the turn toward interiority, which Descartes recasts as the foundation of knowledge, acknowledging no borrowing.
Sources (1)
- Augustine, The City of God, XI, 26; Descartes, letter to Colvius (1640)
Anselm of Canterbury reinterpreted by Descartes
's ontological argument resurfaces, through scholastic relays, in 's Fifth Meditation, which derives God's existence from his essence, with no acknowledged borrowing.
Sources (1)
- Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, V
Aristotelianism challenged by Hobbes
builds his mechanism against scholastic , whose Aristotelity he mocks: no more essences or final causes, only bodies in motion, right into politics.
Sources (1)
- Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 46
Epicureanism reinterpreted by Hobbes
The materialism of reaches through a documented but indirect relay, his friend Gassendi, restorer of Epicurus in Mersenne's circle: atoms, fear and covenant there prefigure his physics and his contract.
Sources (1)
- Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum; the Mersenne circle
Machiavelli continued by Hobbes
Like , grounds politics on man as he is, driven by fear and interest, not on an ideal. He systematizes the dark anthropology into a geometric science of the state, but shifts the source of order to the contract and the absolute sovereign, where Machiavelli located it in the founder's virtù and the clash of humors.
Sources (1)
- Realist filiation classically noted (F. Meinecke, The Idea of Reason of State)
Descartes challenged by Hobbes
In the Third Objections to the Meditations, directly contests : the thing that thinks may well be corporeal. On this central point of dualism, the confrontation crystallises his materialism against the Cartesian immaterial soul.
Sources (1)
- Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Third Set of Objections and Replies
Michel de Montaigne challenged by Pascal
builds himself against : he admires the portrait of human wretchedness yet condemns its nonchalance about salvation and its complacency. He turns Montaigne's doubt toward the wager and , where the essayist had merely rested in it.
Sources (2)
- Pascal, "Conversation with M. de Sacy on Epictetus and Montaigne"
- Pascal, Pensées
Stoicism reinterpreted by Spinoza
Spinoza's Ethics takes up the therapeutic gesture of : bondage arises from the passions, freedom from understanding them, and one is delivered from disturbance by knowing necessity. Yet commends neither indifference nor a hardening of the heart: for him wisdom culminates in active joy and the intellectual love of God, not in the of the Stoic sage.
Sources (1)
- Spinoza, Ethics, III-V; Susan James, 'Spinoza the Stoic'
Machiavelli reinterpreted by Spinoza
salutes as a most penetrating mind and takes up his realism, the analysis of human beings as they are; but he puts that lucidity in the service of an opposite end, democracy and freedom, not the preservation of the prince.
Sources (1)
- Spinoza, Political Treatise, ch. V and X
Descartes reinterpreted by Spinoza
takes up the demonstrative rigour and method of , but overturns his metaphysics: instead of two substances and an external God, a single infinite substance of which everything is a mode.
Sources (1)
- Spinoza, Ethics
Hobbes challenged by Locke
Without ever naming , builds his contract against Hobbesian absolutism: the same materials, the state of nature and the covenant, but turned into a limited and revocable power. A filiation reconstructed by historians.
Sources (1)
- Locke, Two Treatises of Government
Neo-Confucianism reinterpreted by Leibniz
read 's through the treatises of the missionaries Longobardo and Sainte-Marie, who saw materialism in it, and recognized in it instead a natural theology close to his own, proof in his eyes that reason can reach God without revelation.
Sources (1)
- Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (1716)
Descartes reinterpreted by Leibniz
starts from the Cartesian problems of substance and mechanism, but contests 's physics of extension to ground a dynamics of monads, points of force without parts.
Sources (1)
- Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics
Confucianism reinterpreted by The Enlightenment
Translated into Latin by the Jesuits, Confucius became for Wolff, Voltaire and Quesnay the model of an ethics and a government founded on reason without revelation: a weapon of the against the authority of the Church.
Sources (2)
- Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687)
- Wolff, Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica (1721)
Bacon continued by The Enlightenment
bequeaths to the Enlightenment the programme of a knowledge founded on experience and turned toward utility, « knowledge is power ». and salute him as the inspiration of the Encyclopédie, whose Preliminary Discourse traces his genealogy of the sciences.
Sources (1)
- d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie (1751)
Rationalism continued by The Enlightenment
From the Enlightenment inherits confidence in a reason able to judge on its own, and 's methodical doubt as a weapon against prejudice. The current's radical wing also extends, more underground, and its critique of revealed religion.
Sources (1)
- Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932)
Locke continued by The Enlightenment
's gives the philosophes their epistemology, the and the critique of innate ideas; his and supply them with natural rights, government by consent and . hails him from the Philosophical Letters onward as the model of the English sage.
Sources (2)
- Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1734)
- d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie
Newton continued by The Enlightenment
's mechanics, deducing the system of the world from a few mathematical laws, becomes the Enlightenment's paradigm of knowledge: popularizes it in France, and the programme of extending the « Newtonian method » to morals and society runs through the whole century.
Sources (2)
- Voltaire, Elements of Newton's Philosophy (1738)
- d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie
The Enlightenment continued by Liberalism
Political liberalism extends the : from it, it draws the natural rights of the individual, toleration, government founded on consent, and distrust of any absolute power. adds the separation of powers as a safeguard against despotism. From the Enlightenment liberalism keeps the individual come of age, capable of conducting themselves by their own reason.
Sources (2)
- Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
- Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784)
Locke reinterpreted by George Berkeley
accepts the of , for whom every idea comes from experience, but radicalises it into immaterialism: denying material substance, admitting only perceived ideas and the minds that perceive them.
Sources (1)
- Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
Locke reinterpreted by Hume
pushes Locke's analysis of ideas drawn from experience to its skeptical conclusions: an associationist theory of the mind and the dissolution of personal identity and of necessary causation.
Sources (1)
- Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
George Berkeley reinterpreted by Hume
inherits from the critique of abstract ideas and the recentring of all knowledge on perceptions, which he extends from matter to the mind itself.
Sources (1)
- Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
Machiavelli reinterpreted by Rousseau
openly claims Machiavelli: under the guise of teaching kings, gives great lessons to peoples, "the book of republicans." He inherits the Machiavelli of the , the love of liberty and the distrust of the great, folding it into his theory of popular sovereignty.
Sources (1)
- Rousseau, The Social Contract, III.6 (note)
Hobbes challenged by Rousseau
reverses 's : far from a « war of all against all », it is peaceful, and man within it is naturally good, moved by self-love and , not by fear and pride. Hobbes, Rousseau charges, projected onto natural man the passions of already-social man; it is not nature but society that makes man wicked.
Sources (1)
- Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)
Locke reinterpreted by Condillac
radicalizes 's empiricism into sensationalism: through the fiction of a statue awakened sense by sense, he undertakes to derive all the faculties from sensation alone, doing away with the reflection Locke held to be a distinct source.
Sources (1)
- Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations (1754)
From the Enlightenment to the 19th century
From the Enlightenment to Nietzsche: critique, the great systems, and the first answers from elsewhere.
Hume challenged by Thomas Reid
builds his common-sense philosophy against 's skepticism: if the principles of empiricism lead to doubting the external world and the self, they should yield to the first certainties that nature imposes on every human being.
Sources (1)
- Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764)
Stoicism continued by Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments makes self-command, 's name for self-mastery, the virtue that crowns the others, and its impartial spectator takes up the movement of , the widening of self-concern to embrace others. Smith devotes long pages to the Stoics, while judging their apathy too severe for the sympathy that grounds his own morality.
Sources (1)
- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, parts VI-VII
Hume continued by Smith
A close friend of , extends his morality of sentiments: sympathy is the spring of moral judgment. He recasts it, however, around the impartial spectator, an inner tribunal that corrects our partialities.
Sources (1)
- Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
The Enlightenment challenged by Burke
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, attacks Enlightenment politics: to abstract rights and the rationalist he opposes inherited rights, useful prejudices and the accumulated wisdom of tradition. It is the founding act of modern conservatism.
Sources (1)
- Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Stoicism reinterpreted by Kant
A reader of Cicero and Seneca, takes from ethics the thesis that virtue is the only unconditioned good, which he transposes into the good will, and the discipline of judgment, which he turns into duty done out of pure respect for the law. Apatheia becomes in him a rational self-command, and the cosmopolitanism of the Porch a cosmopolitan right. Yet he never claims this debt, transmitted in part through Rousseau and the Wolffian school.
Sources (1)
- Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; The Doctrine of Virtue (Ak. 6:408-409); Klaus Reich, 'Kant and Greek Ethics'
Stoicism challenged by Kant
breaks with the ancient of which is the highest representative: to make the pursuit of happiness the mainspring of virtue is, for him, to lapse into heteronomy. He rejects the thesis that virtue suffices for the highest good, and grants happiness only a hoped-for place, proportioned to desert, never a valid moral motive.
Sources (1)
- Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Dialectic, Ak. 5:111-114; 5:126); Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 6:57n
Empiricism synthesized by Kant
Against dogmatism, retains from that all knowledge begins with experience; his Critique synthesises the two traditions: without intuition concepts are empty, without concepts intuitions are blind.
Sources (1)
- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
Rationalism synthesized by Kant
takes from the demand for a priori knowledge, universal and necessary, but confines it to the conditions of possible experience: pure concepts know nothing beyond appearances.
Sources (1)
- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
The Enlightenment continued by Kant
brings the Enlightenment to its philosophical completion: he overcomes the quarrel of in his criticism, and makes the autonomy of reason the heart of his morality and of his very definition of Enlightenment, « man's emergence from his immaturity ».
Sources (2)
- Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784)
- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
Hume challenged by Kant
draws a skeptical conclusion from empiricism: no impression delivers the necessary connection between a cause and its effect, only habit does. says this woke him from his dogmatic slumber, and he builds critical philosophy against that skepticism, lodging causality in the a priori conditions of experience rather than in things themselves.
Sources (1)
- Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)
Rousseau continued by Kant
acknowledges owing to that he learned to honour mankind: he takes up the dignity of the person and moral autonomy, shifting the centre of philosophy from knowledge toward practical freedom.
Sources (1)
- Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
Kant reinterpreted by German Idealism
German Idealism is born from and against him: it takes up his transcendental turn, the subject that constitutes experience, but refuses the unknowable thing in itself at which Kant halted reason. treats that limit as an inconsistency and transforms criticism into absolute idealism, in which reason reaches the totality of the real; he contests the fixity of the Kantian oppositions, appearance and thing in itself, by integrating them into the dialectical movement of Spirit. Kant, for his part, had explicitly disowned this overcoming.
Sources (2)
- Hegel, Science of Logic
- Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (§ on critical philosophy)
Epicureanism reinterpreted by Utilitarianism
A reconstructed, unclaimed filiation: the hedonism of , which measures the good by pleasure and the absence of disturbance, distantly prefigures the calculus of pains and pleasures of , which Bentham nonetheless refounds on collective happiness.
Sources (1)
- Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
The Enlightenment continued by Utilitarianism
inherits the secular, reforming morality of the Enlightenment: 's principle of utility extends 's reformed penal thought and the calculus of pains and pleasures already present in .
Sources (1)
- Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
Hume continued by Bentham
reports that on reading the scales fell from his eyes: there he finds psychological naturalism and the idea that utility is the measure of good, which he erects into the principle of .
Sources (1)
- Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1776), preface
Beccaria continued by Bentham
hails as a master: his penal reform, which measures punishment by social utility rather than vengeance, offers the first model of the calculus of pains and pleasures that utilitarianism erects into a principle.
Sources (2)
- Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764)
- Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Spinoza reinterpreted by Romanticism
reawakens , long held to be accursed: the pantheism controversy (Jacobi, 1785) places him back at the centre, and his single, immanent, living God-nature becomes the soul of 's and of 's cosmic piety. The Romantics make of him less the cold geometer of the Ethics than a mystic of the unity of the whole, the « God-intoxicated man ».
Sources (2)
- F. H. Jacobi, Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785)
- Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason (1987)
The Enlightenment challenged by Romanticism
is born in head-on reaction to the Enlightenment: to universal reason, mechanism and the cult of progress it opposes feeling, imagination, the singular genius of a people and the mystery of a living nature. It nonetheless extends the sensibility of , an Enlightenment philosopher turned into its own counter-current: the Romantic reaction thus grows from within the very thing it contests.
Sources (2)
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1965)
- Herder, This Too a Philosophy of History (1774)
Rousseau continued by Romanticism
recognizes as its precursor: it takes up and radicalizes his rehabilitation of feeling against reason, his cult of nature and of the authenticity of the self, and his critique of civilization. The Confessions and the Reveries inaugurate the Romantic exploration of inwardness, and the « religion of the heart » of the Savoyard vicar heralds the religious feeling of the Romantics.
Sources (2)
- Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932)
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism
Kant reinterpreted by Romanticism
's third Critique arms Romanticism: his theory of , to whom « nature gives the rule to art », his analysis of the and his productive imagination become the bedrock of Romantic aesthetics. Romanticism also extends the momentum of post-Kantian idealism, while overstepping the limit Kant set to reason: it claims to reach, through art and intuition, the very absolute Kant declared unknowable.
Sources (2)
- Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790)
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism
Heraclitus continued by Hegel
recognizes in the thinker of becoming and of the unity of opposites: "there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not taken up in my Logic", he says, making the Heraclitean flux a moment of his own dialectic of being and nothing.
Sources (1)
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Aristotle continued by Hegel
holds to be one of the most speculative of thinkers: he takes from him actuality (energeia), immanent end, and the universal that exists only in its individuals, against the abstract universal, and closes his Encyclopedia with a citation from the Metaphysics, thought thinking itself.
Sources (1)
- Encyclopedia, §577; Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Spinoza reinterpreted by Hegel
holds Spinozism to be an unavoidable passage: to begin to philosophise is to be a Spinozist. He takes up the demand for a single absolute, but faults 's substance for being inert and remakes it as subject.
Sources (1)
- Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Kant continued by Hegel
inherits from the unity of the subject and the antinomies of reason, but reproaches him with the unknowable thing-in-itself, a residue of dualism, and the merely subjective status of the categories: what Kant took for the limits of reason, Hegel makes the dialectical motor of the real itself.
Sources (1)
- Faith and Knowledge (1802); Science of Logic
Fichte continued by Hegel
From , keeps the I as self-positing activity and the primacy of the practical; but he refuses to leave the not-I, nature, as an ought-to-be the I never reaches, a "bad infinity": one must reconcile opposites, not oppose them endlessly.
Sources (1)
- The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy (1801)
Schelling challenged by Hegel
Friends and allies in their youth, and break in 1807: Hegel mocks the Schellingian Absolute, an undifferentiated identity reached at once by intuition, as "the night in which all cows are black", and sets against it the patient labor of the concept, the only path to the Absolute.
Sources (1)
- Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Schopenhauer challenged by Hegel
's contempt for was visceral and public: in Berlin he scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's, and spoke to an empty room. Against the optimism of a meaning of history and the omnipotence of the concept, he sets a metaphysics of the blind , the primacy of intuition over discourse, and a history without progress or reason.
Sources (1)
- Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851); preface to The World as Will and Representation
Buddhism reinterpreted by Schopenhauer
finds in an Eastern confirmation of his thought: the centrality of suffering, detachment, and the denial of the will to live as a path of deliverance.
Sources (1)
- Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena
Plato reinterpreted by Schopenhauer
names and his two masters. He takes up the Platonic Ideas but shifts them: no longer separate intelligible realities, they become the eternal grades of the 's objectification, which only contemplates in aesthetic experience.
Sources (1)
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Book III (1818)
Vedānta (Advaita) reinterpreted by Schopenhauer
draws from the Upaniṣads and , which he revered, the motif of the veil of appearances (Māyā) and the metaphysical unity behind plurality, which he retranslates into his philosophy of the will.
Sources (1)
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818)
Kant reinterpreted by Schopenhauer
adopts the Kantian division between appearance and thing-in-itself, but identifies the latter with the will: a blind, endless striving of which the world of representations is only the manifestation.
Sources (1)
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818)
The Enlightenment continued by Comte
systematizes the authority the Enlightenment granted to science: his law of three stages makes the « positive » age the culmination of the progress of mind sketched by , whom he claims as his chief precursor.
Sources (1)
- Comte, Course in Positive Philosophy (1830-1842)
Hegel challenged by Kierkegaard
defines his project against 's system: dialectical mediation dissolves singular existence, whereas the individual, in anxiety and choice, will not be absorbed into the universal.
Sources (1)
- Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846)
Hegel challenged by Ludwig Feuerbach
, a Left Hegelian, turns against himself: what Hegel calls God or absolute Spirit is only the essence of man, projected and alienated into a heaven. Theology must be reversed into anthropology, and idealism grounded on sensuous nature.
Sources (1)
- Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841)
Bentham reinterpreted by Mill
Raised in 's , keeps its principle but reforms it: he introduces a qualitative hierarchy of pleasures and makes room for individual liberty against the mere calculus of quantities.
Sources (1)
- Mill, Utilitarianism (1861)
Comte continued by Mill
corresponds with and adopts the positive method, explanation by laws rather than by ultimate causes, while rejecting his religion of Humanity and his contempt for individual liberty.
Sources (1)
- Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
Romanticism continued by Existentialism
gathers from Romanticism the exaltation of the singular individual against the system and the abstract universal, the primacy of , passion and anguish, and the demand for . , a critical reader of Romanticism and of Hegel, is its decisive relay: the Romantic « self », irreducible to reason, becomes the existing individual who chooses himself.
Sources (2)
- Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989)
- Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1841)
Phenomenology continued by Existentialism
Twentieth-century existentialism inherits its method from : to describe phenomena as they give themselves to consciousness, prior to theories. But it shifts the object, from constituting consciousness toward concrete existence, freedom, anguish and the body: draws from intentionality a consciousness given over to nothingness and choice, recasts description as an analytic of being-in-the-world. The heirs reshape even the method itself, anchoring it in the perceiving body.
Sources (3)
- Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
- Sartre, Being and Nothingness
- Heidegger, Being and Time
Liberalism challenged by Marxism
builds itself as the critique of : behind the formal equality of rights and the freedom of markets, exposes the relations of production that enslave labour, and treats bourgeois rights as the ideology of a class. He nonetheless retains its horizon of emancipation, which he means to carry beyond political rights, into real life.
Sources (1)
- Marx, On the Jewish Question; Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party; Marx, Capital
Hegel reinterpreted by Marx
keeps 's dialectic but stands it on its feet: it is no longer Spirit but the material relations of production that move history, of which the ideal is only the reflection.
Sources (1)
- Marx, Afterword to the Second Edition of Capital (1873)
Marx continued by Friedrich Engels
works out with , and after him, the critique of political economy and the materialist conception of history, whose systematic formulation and diffusion he secures.
Sources (1)
- Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
Schopenhauer continued by Leo Tolstoy
discovered Schopenhauer in the summer of 1869 and was enthralled, going so far as to hang his portrait in his study. The spiritual crisis of A Confession, the horror at the nothingness of death, the search for renunciation and a universal , owes much to Schopenhauerian pessimism and , which Tolstoy then reorients toward the Gospel.
Sources (1)
- Tolstoy, letters to Fet (1869); A Confession (1882)
Mill continued by Sidgwick
systematises after , making it more rigorous and more demanding in point of impartiality, seeking to reconcile it with the intuitions of common sense.
Sources (1)
- Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874)
Empiricism continued by Pragmatism
extends by anchoring meaning and truth in experience, but shifts the criterion toward the practical consequences of an idea rather than its sensory origins. James indeed claims a radical empiricism.
Sources (1)
- William James, Pragmatism (1907)
Plato reinterpreted by Nietzsche
The influence runs not through 's own theses but through his character : in the , Plato puts into his mouth the right of the stronger and the denunciation of the morality of the weak, precisely in order to refute them. reactivates this immoralist position, which scholars liken to his morality of masters, and turns it against the morality of Socratic and Platonic inspiration.
Sources (1)
- A standard scholarly comparison (E. R. Dodds, commentary on the Gorgias); Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
Platonism challenged by Nietzsche
defines his task as an inversion of Platonism: against and its true world that devalues the sensible, he means to restore innocence to the earth and the body.
Sources (1)
- Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; posthumous fragments
Michel de Montaigne reinterpreted by Nietzsche
hails as a free spirit and a model: writing the self, affirming the body and the earth, gaining in the joy of living by his reading alone. He takes up the essay's candor and recasts it within his own genealogical, life-affirming stance.
Sources (2)
- Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator" (Untimely Meditations III), in praise of Montaigne
- Nietzsche, posthumous notebooks
Romanticism reinterpreted by Nietzsche
inherits more from Romanticism than he admits: the Dionysian of The Birth of Tragedy, art held to be « the metaphysical activity par excellence », the revolt against Socratic reason and the Enlightenment all come from this source, transmitted through and Wagner. But he soon turns these weapons against Romanticism itself, which he denounces as nostalgia, weakness and flight: he gathers its energy in order to reject its melancholy.
Sources (2)
- Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 370 (« What is Romanticism? »)
Schopenhauer challenged by Nietzsche
As a young man, hails as his educator and inherits his tragic reading of existence and the centrality of the will. He then turns the inheritance around: against pessimism and the denial of the will to live, he sets the affirmation of life and the will to power.
Sources (1)
- Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, Untimely Meditations III (1874)
William Kingdon Clifford challenged by William James
186215 yearschallenged by1876's "The Will to Believe" answers head-on: against the maxim that it is always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, James defends the right, on the vital questions that evidence cannot settle, to risk a belief.
Sources (2)
- James, The Will to Believe (1896)
- Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief" (1877)
Charles Sanders Peirce reinterpreted by William James
popularises and loosens the pragmatist maxim of , which tied the meaning of an idea to its conceivable effects, steering it toward a psychological, pluralist theory of truth and belief.
Sources (1)
- James, Pragmatism (1907)
Henri Bergson reinterpreted by William James
190025 yearsreinterpreted by1876hails as an ally against intellectualism: he takes up his critique of frozen concepts and his flowing duration to feed his radical empiricism and his pluralistic universe.
Sources (1)
- James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
Kant reinterpreted by Charles Sanders Peirce
reads closely and works through him at length: he recasts the table of categories and the architectonic of the first into his own triad (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness) and his realism about universals. Kant remains the philosopher from whom he thinks, even where he corrects him.
Sources (1)
- Peirce, Collected Papers (recurring engagement with the Critique of Pure Reason)
Nietzsche reinterpreted by Max Weber
, for whom a thinker's honesty is measured by his stance toward and Marx, transposes the genealogical suspicion into sociology: his analysis of values, of ressentiment and of the "disenchantment of the world" owes much to the Nietzschean diagnosis.
Sources (2)
- Weber, Science as a Vocation / Politics as a Vocation
- Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Schopenhauer reinterpreted by Sigmund Freud
finds in , whom he says he read little, the intuition of a blind will beneath clear consciousness: the primacy of drive, repression, and sexuality as an obscure force are sensed there before psychoanalysis brings them to light.
Sources (1)
- Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914)
Descartes reinterpreted by Husserl
takes up from the quest for an apodictic ground rooted in the ego, the return to the I think as the indubitable soil of knowledge. But he rejects its decisive step: the ego of the reduction is no longer a thinking substance cut off from the world, it is the transcendental ego whose analysis unfolds intentional life.
Sources (1)
- Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
Franz Brentano continued by Husserl
, whose direct pupil was, transmits to him the thesis that all consciousness is consciousness OF something, as the mark of the mental, the seed of phenomenology. Husserl acknowledges the debt yet transforms his teacher's descriptive intentionality into a transcendental structure of constituting consciousness.
Sources (1)
- Husserl, Logical Investigations; his acknowledgment of Brentano as his teacher
20th and 21st centuries
Phenomenology, analytic philosophy, the Kyoto School: the lineages of the 20th century to today.
Empiricism continued by Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophy sees itself as the heir of British , from which it takes the anchoring of knowledge in experience and the distrust of speculative metaphysics. But it recasts it by fusing it with modern logic: for the association of ideas it substitutes the logical analysis of propositions, of which is the bridge. The logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle radicalizes the program, only the verifiable having meaning.
Sources (2)
- Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914)
- Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
William James continued by John Dewey
187630 yearscontinued by1906carries on 's , the emphasis on experience and the consequences of ideas, steering it toward the logic of inquiry, education and democracy.
Sources (1)
- Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)
Charles Sanders Peirce continued by John Dewey
takes up 's logic of inquiry and his , extending pragmatism toward instrumentalism and democratic inquiry: the fixation of belief becomes a social, experimental process oriented to action.
Sources (1)
- Dewey, "The Development of American Pragmatism"; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
William James reinterpreted by Nishida
187630 yearsreinterpreted by1908's starts from 's radical empiricism, which he cites from his very first pages, but he turns it into the single principle from which subject and object proceed, in a perspective nourished by Zen.
Sources (1)
- Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), I
Leo Tolstoy continued by Gandhi
186940 yearscontinued by1909recognizes in , with whom he corresponds, a master of nonviolence: the law of love and the Christian refusal to return evil for evil, which he transposes into a method of mass political action, satyagraha.
Sources (2)
- Tolstoy, A Letter to a Hindu (1908)
- Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Madhyamaka reinterpreted by Kyoto School
makes the of the "field" where Western nihilism, as diagnosed by Nietzsche and Heidegger, is passed through and overcome: a Buddhist notion becomes the answer to a crisis of European modernity.
Sources (1)
- Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, ch. 4
Heidegger reinterpreted by Kyoto School
, and Kuki Shūzō studied with in Freiburg. The took up his question of nothingness and his reading of nihilism and carried them toward Buddhist emptiness, where Heidegger remained within the horizon of being.
Sources (2)
- Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness
- Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics
Machiavelli reinterpreted by Antonio Gramsci
takes up Machiavelli in his Prison Notebooks: the "Modern Prince" is no longer a man but the revolutionary party, a collective prince that, like the Machiavellian myth, crystallizes and organizes the collective will. The founder's virtù becomes hegemony built through organization.
Sources (1)
- Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, "Notes on Machiavelli" (The Modern Prince)
Marx reinterpreted by Antonio Gramsci
rereads by shifting the analysis from the economic base toward culture: the concept of hegemony explains how a class rules through consent and civil society, not by force alone.
Sources (1)
- Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
Schopenhauer reinterpreted by Wittgenstein
The young read Schopenhauer, and the Tractatus keeps the trace of it: the metaphysical subject as the 'limit of the world' rather than a part of it, a solipsism that coincides with realism, and above all an ethics and a 'mystical' consigned beyond what can be said. The Schopenhauerian becomes there the seat of a meaning that escapes language.
Sources (1)
- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), §§5.6, 6.4
Leo Tolstoy continued by Wittgenstein
At the front in 1914, read and reread 's The Gospel in Brief, which sustained him and which he pressed on everyone. From it comes part of his ethical and religious seriousness: value is not argued but lived; what matters, in the Tractatus, is the ethics one cannot say.
Sources (1)
- Wartime correspondence; Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief
Frege continued by Wittgenstein
came to philosophy through 's logic, whom he consulted before Frege sent him on to . The Tractatus inherits his logical rigour, the distinction of sense and reference, and the context principle; the later Wittgenstein moves away from him, seeking meaning in use rather than in an ideal logical thought.
Sources (1)
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Preface); Philosophical Investigations
Russell reinterpreted by Wittgenstein
's student at Cambridge, received from him the new logic and analysis as method, but turned that inheritance around: the Tractatus recasts logical atomism into a theory of language as a picture of the world, up to that limit where what matters most "can only show itself". Russell, in turn, acknowledged the depth of his former pupil.
Sources (2)
- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
- Russell, introduction to the Tractatus
Empiricism synthesized by Russell
claims the mantle of British , which he refounds by fusing it with the new mathematical logic: sense-data plus logical analysis, in place of the association of ideas.
Sources (1)
- Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World
Leibniz reinterpreted by Russell
's book on (1900) is a seedbed of analytic philosophy: he shows there that Leibniz's metaphysics rests on his logic, a programme he turns into a method of analysis.
Sources (1)
- Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900)
Hegel challenged by Russell
was trained in the neo-Hegelian idealism that dominated Cambridge, and his philosophy is born of the break he dated to 1898: what he rejects is the thesis that nothing is intelligible outside the whole, and that every relation is internal to its terms. His is first of all that refusal turned into a method — a world of independent facts, analysable piece by piece. The settling of accounts remains polemical: A History of Western Philosophy treats with a brusqueness his readers have often held against him.
Sources (1)
- Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959), ch. VI-VII
Mill continued by Russell
's secular godson, inherits his empiricism and liberalism: knowledge grounded in experience and the defence of liberties run through all his public work.
Sources (1)
- Russell, Autobiography
Frege continued by Russell
discovered late, while the were under way, and acknowledged having been anticipated on the essentials: the project of deriving arithmetic from logic, and the apparatus of quantifiers that makes it possible. It was in reading Frege that he wrote to him in 1902 with the paradox that wrecked his attempt — the most consequential letter in the history of logic. He then made Frege known to the English-speaking world, while refusing the distinction between sense and reference, against which he set his own .
Sources (1)
- Russell, Principia Mathematica, appendix A; letter to Frege, 16 June 1902
Plato reinterpreted by Simone Weil
reads as a mystic: the Good beyond being, the conversion of the gaze out of the cave become in her the waiting for God and attention, a Christianized Platonism in which the true is received rather than conquered.
Sources (2)
- Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks
- Weil, Pre-Christian Intuitions
Wittgenstein reinterpreted by Rudolf Carnap
The Tractatus was the bedside book of the Vienna Circle: and the logical positivists read into it a charter of verificationism, reducing meaning to empirical verifiability. Wittgenstein distanced himself: they had missed, he said, what the book showed without saying, the ethical and the mystical. The misunderstanding grounds part of analytic philosophy.
Sources (1)
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap)
Russell transmitted by Rudolf Carnap
What passes on is a maxim of method, which puts at the head of his enterprise: wherever possible, substitute out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities. The Logical Structure of the World (1928) applies it to the letter, rebuilding every scientific concept from a base of elementary experiences. The programme then moves away from its model: Carnap gives up 's realism, and the idea that metaphysics could be true or false rather than devoid of meaning.
Sources (1)
- Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World (1928), preface and § 3
Romanticism reinterpreted by Heidegger
takes up from Romanticism its critique of the world-as-machine and of calculative reason, its listening to nature and its privileging of the poetic as access to being. His reading of Hölderlin, the Romantic poet held to voice the « default of the gods » and the danger of technology, lies at the heart of his late thought: « to dwell poetically » extends the Romantic dream of a re-enchanted world.
Sources (2)
- Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry (1944)
- Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1954)
Nietzsche reinterpreted by Heidegger
devotes extensive lecture courses to , whom he reads as the last great metaphysician: the will to power and nihilism become the completion and the destiny of Western metaphysics.
Sources (1)
- Heidegger, Nietzsche (lectures 1936-1940)
Husserl reinterpreted by Heidegger
Husserl's assistant and then successor, shifts from transcendental consciousness toward the question of being: no longer describing lived experiences, but existence as being-in-the-world.
Sources (1)
- Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
Husserl reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty
carries on the late 's analyses of the life-world and the lived body, but anchors the whole of phenomenology in embodied perception rather than in a pure consciousness.
Sources (1)
- Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Heidegger reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty
1933contemporariesreinterpreted by1935takes up 's being-in-the-world and the pre-theoretical world, but redirects them to the perceiving body: it is the flesh, not the analytic of being, that originally opens the world.
Sources (1)
- Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Kierkegaard challenged by Camus
In The Myth of Sisyphus, calls 's leap of faith philosophical suicide: the absurd defines itself against that religious escape, as a demand for lucidity without consolation.
Sources (1)
- Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Marxism challenged by Camus
The Rebel is written against as a religion of History: refuses that the revolutionary end justify terror and sets revolt, which posits a limit, against the revolution that abolishes it.
Sources (1)
- Camus, The Rebel
Nietzsche reinterpreted by Camus
reads as a critical heir: he takes up the diagnosis of nihilism and the love of fate, but turns them into an ethics of measure, the absurd calling for revolt rather than the approval of everything.
Sources (1)
- Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus; The Rebel
Augustine reinterpreted by Hannah Arendt
3921,550 yearsreinterpreted by1941devotes her dissertation to love in , where she draws the motif that will run through her work: the human being as a "beginning" who, in being born, introduces something new into the world.
Sources (1)
- Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (1929)
Heidegger reinterpreted by Hannah Arendt
193310 yearsreinterpreted by1941's student, shifts his analysis of existence toward the political: against the primacy of death, she thinks natality, the capacity to begin, and concerted action among human beings as the proper site of freedom.
Sources (1)
- Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)
Kierkegaard continued by Sartre
takes from the themes of anxiety, choice and existential singularity, secularising them: existence precedes essence, without the leap of faith that had crowned them.
Sources (1)
- Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
Husserl reinterpreted by Sartre
takes from intentionality, all consciousness is consciousness of something, but radicalises it: consciousness, emptied of all substantial content, is nothing but nihilation and freedom.
Sources (1)
- Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (1936)
Heidegger reinterpreted by Sartre
existentialises 's analyses, being-in-the-world, facticity, anxiety, within a framework centred on freedom and project, which Heidegger would reject as a humanist misreading.
Sources (1)
- Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)
Sartre reinterpreted by Frantz Fanon
takes from , who will preface The Wretched of the Earth, freedom-in-situation and the role of the other's gaze, in order to think colonial alienation and liberating violence; yet he reproaches him, as early as "Black Orpheus", for dissolving black experience into an abstract dialectic.
Sources (2)
- Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
- Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Henri Bergson continued by Jankélévitch
190045 yearscontinued by1944A great reader of , to whom he devotes his first book, extends his thought of duration and intuition into a philosophy of the instant, of the irreversible, and of the "I-know-not-what".
Sources (1)
- Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (1931)
Sartre reinterpreted by Beauvoir
In constant dialogue with , transforms the categories of freedom and situation into an ethics of ambiguity and an analysis of gendered oppression, where existentialism had stayed abstract.
Sources (1)
- Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Hume challenged by Popper
takes 's problem of induction, that no accumulation of observations justifies a law, to be insoluble, and sidesteps it: science does not verify, it refutes; a theory counts only if it is falsifiable.
Sources (1)
- Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
Heidegger challenged by Jonas
193315 yearschallenged by1948A pupil of , breaks with his existentialism, indifferent to nature, to found an ontology of the living and an ethics of responsibility toward future generations.
Sources (1)
- Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (1979)
Romanticism reinterpreted by Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics inherits from , often without saying so, its revolt against nature reduced to a machine and a stock of resources: the living, sublime nature, worthy of respect for itself, which ecology turns into a moral value and no longer merely an aesthetic one.
Husserl continued by Emmanuel Levinas
introduces to France and receives from him the descriptive method of intentionality, which he will then reorient from objects toward the face of the other and the primacy of ethics.
Sources (1)
- Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (1930)
Heidegger challenged by Emmanuel Levinas
193320 yearschallenged by1951builds his thought in close contestation of : against the primacy of ontology, he posits ethics as first philosophy, the face of the other preceding any understanding of being.
Sources (1)
- Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)
Nietzsche continued by Foucault
takes from the genealogical method: the critique of origins and of the universal pretensions of truth and the subject, which he unfolds into an analysis of the relations between knowledge and power.
Sources (1)
- Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971)
Pierre Hadot reinterpreted by Foucault
196610 yearsreinterpreted by1955borrows from the ancient spiritual exercises and the "care of the self", which he recasts into an aesthetics of existence, a self-fashioning Hadot will reproach him for having cut off from its universal aim.
Sources (2)
- Foucault, The History of Sexuality III, The Care of the Self (1984)
- Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life
Husserl continued by Paul Ricœur
translates and annotates , whose descriptive method he carries on; he then articulates it with a hermeneutics of symbol and narrative, where direct phenomenology reaches its limits.
Sources (1)
- Ricoeur, translation and commentary of Husserl's Ideas I (1950)
Popper challenged by Feyerabend
194810 yearschallenged by1959is formed in contact with before turning his anti-dogmatism against him: no single method governs science, and progress requires, on the contrary, an epistemological anarchism, anything goes.
Sources (1)
- Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)
Wittgenstein continued by Elizabeth Anscombe
's student, translator and literary executor, extends his manner: she carries the attention to ordinary language toward action and intention, founding contemporary philosophy of action.
Sources (2)
- Anscombe, Intention (1957)
- Anscombe, translation of the Philosophical Investigations
Spinoza reinterpreted by Arne Næss
grounds his deep ecology in : Nature as the one substance of which we are modes, and self-realization widened to the whole of the living, against the separate, mastering human being.
Sources (2)
- Næss, "Spinoza and Ecology" (1977)
- Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1976)
Kant continued by Rawls
claims a political revival of 's moral constructivism: the original position and the veil of ignorance recast the Kantian demand to treat each person as an end and to ground universalisable principles.
Sources (1)
- Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
Transhumanism challenged by Habermas
challenges the liberal eugenics transhumanism carries: a being genetically programmed by others could no longer experience itself as the sole author of its life, breaking the moral symmetry and reciprocity between persons and between generations.
Sources (1)
- Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (2001)
Husserl challenged by Derrida
forms deconstruction through his engagement with , whose texts he comments: he tracks the privilege granted to presence and to the voice, and shows that the sign and différance work through a consciousness Husserl believed immediate to itself.
Sources (1)
- Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (1967)
Rawls challenged by Nozick
196210 yearschallenged by1970frames his libertarian theory of the minimal state as a direct response to : distributive justice violates individual rights, since any redistribution treats persons as means.
Sources (1)
- Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Rawls challenged by Michael Walzer
196210 yearschallenged by1970contests 's universalism: there are no principles of justice valid everywhere, but social goods whose meaning each community fixes; justice consists in respecting the boundaries between these spheres rather than applying a single formula.
Sources (1)
- Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983)
Sidgwick continued by Derek Parfit
1869110 yearscontinued by1980regards as the greatest of the utilitarians and takes up his "point of view of the universe", the demand for impartiality, which he deepens in a search for convergence among the great moral theories.
Sources (1)
- Parfit, On What Matters (2011)
Sidgwick continued by Singer
1869110 yearscontinued by1981takes from the impartial universalism, the point of view of the universe, and extends it into practical ethics: moral consideration must widen to every being capable of suffering.
Sources (1)
- Singer, Practical Ethics (1979)
Richard Ryder continued by Singer
19755 yearscontinued by1981borrows from the term speciesism, the prejudice that excludes animals from the moral circle on the sole ground of species, and makes it the pivot of his defense of animal liberation.
Sources (2)
- Singer, Animal Liberation (1975)
- Ryder, "Speciesism" (1970)
Aristotle continued by Martha Nussbaum
renews the ethics of : the human good is the flourishing of capacities proper to our nature. From it she draws the capabilities approach, a list of the real freedoms a just society must guarantee to each person.
Sources (2)
- Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2000)
- Nussbaum, "Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach"
Russell reinterpreted by Galen Strawson
What is taken up is an argument, not a doctrine: physics gives us only the structure of things, never their intrinsic nature, and experience is the one portion of the world we know otherwise than from outside. exploits that vacant place in a direction did not take: he peoples it with experiential properties, as far as panpsychism, where Russell held the stuff to be , that is, precisely neither mental nor physical. The label 'Russellian monism' covers both and blurs the gap: houses a thesis of agnosticism about the stuff and a thesis about its nature.
Sources (1)
- G. Strawson, "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2006)
Transhumanism challenged by Fukuyama
deems transhumanism 'the world's most dangerous idea': by reshaping human nature, enhancement would erode the basis of equal dignity on which rights rest, and risk splitting humanity in two. He counters the project with a defense of human nature as a normative limit.
Sources (2)
- Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (2002)
- Fukuyama, 'Transhumanism', Foreign Policy (2004)
Transhumanism challenged by Sandel
sees in enhancement the expression of a Promethean will to mastery: wanting to choose and optimize everything would lose the sense of life's 'giftedness', and with it the humility, solidarity and gratitude rooted in what we did not choose.
Sources (1)
- Sandel, The Case Against Perfection (2007)
Bacon continued by Transhumanism
Transhumanism extends 's program: turning knowledge into effective power over nature, through experimental science, to relieve the human condition. It radicalizes that promise by stretching this command of nature to the human body and mind themselves.
Sources (1)
- Bacon, Novum Organum; New Atlantis
Descartes continued by Transhumanism
The Cartesian formula of man as "master and possessor of nature" gives transhumanism its motto, from which it erases the cautious "as if": the mastery sought is no longer analogical but literal, and extends to human nature itself.
Sources (1)
- Descartes, Discourse on the Method, VI
Condorcet continued by Transhumanism
had already written into the Enlightenment idea of progress the indefinite perfectibility of man, up to the possible lengthening of human life. Transhumanism takes up this hope and hands it the means of biotechnology.
Sources (1)
- Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795)
Nietzsche reinterpreted by Transhumanism
Transhumanism sometimes claims 's overman, reinterpreted as a biotechnological posthuman. The lineage is largely an over-reading: the Nietzschean overcoming is spiritual and tragic, not technical, and Nietzsche would likely be deeply critical of this craving for absolute control, in which he would see a refusal of becoming and finitude, a hatred of life contrary to amor fati.
Sources (1)
- Sorgner, 'Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism' (2009)