Thinkers Timeline

Wang Yangming was a Chinese philosopher, scholar, and military general. He is one of the most important Confucian thinkers of the second millennium CE. His ideas about knowledge, action, and the human mind shaped Chinese, Japanese, and Korean thought for centuries. He was born in 1472 in what is now Zhejiang province, in eastern China. He died in 1529, aged 56. His full name was Wang Shouren. 'Yangming' is a name he later took from a place where he lived for some years. He came from a scholarly family. His father had passed the highest level of the imperial civil service examinations. Wang Yangming was clever from childhood. He passed the highest examinations himself in 1499. For most of his career he served as an official in the Ming dynasty government. He was sometimes successful, sometimes in trouble. In 1506 he protested against a corrupt eunuch official at court. He was beaten with bamboo rods and exiled to a remote post in southwestern China. The exile lasted three years. During this time, in a bamboo hut in the mountains, he had what is sometimes called his philosophical awakening. He understood, he said later, that the principles of right action were already inside the human mind. They did not need to be sought outside, in books or in the external world. After his return from exile, he continued government service. He became a respected military commander. He put down major rebellions in the Ming Empire. Despite this success, he had political enemies. He was repeatedly given difficult assignments and then attacked when they were not perfectly resolved. He died in 1529 from illness, far from home, on his way back from another military campaign. His philosophy survived him and reshaped East Asian thought.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher who lived through one of the most turbulent periods in British history — the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the Interregnum. He spent years in exile in France and worked as a tutor to the future King Charles II. His most famous work, Leviathan (1651), is one of the foundational texts of Western political philosophy. In it he argued that without government, human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — and that people therefore have a rational self-interest in submitting to the authority of a sovereign state. He is considered one of the founders of modern political science and social contract theory.

Zera Yacob was an Ethiopian philosopher of the seventeenth century. His main work is a short book called the Hatata, which means 'inquiry' or 'investigation'. According to the Hatata itself, he was born on 28 August 1599 near Aksum, an ancient city in northern Ethiopia. His father was a poor farmer. Despite this, his father sent him to school. He studied the Psalms of David and was educated in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian faith. He was a quick learner and went on to higher religious schooling for ten years. The Hatata describes a hard turning point in his life. The Ethiopian emperor Susenyos had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1622 and ordered all his subjects to follow him. Zera Yacob refused. He was denounced by enemies and feared for his life. He fled with a small bag of gold and the Book of Psalms. He found a cave near the Tekezé River and lived there as a hermit for two years. He prayed, thought, and developed his philosophy. After the death of Susenyos in 1632, his son Fasilides became emperor and restored the Orthodox faith. Zera Yacob came out of hiding. He was given shelter by a wealthy man named Habtu, whose son Walda Heywat became his student. Zera Yacob worked as a teacher and scribe. In 1668, when he was about 68, he wrote down the Hatata at Walda Heywat's request. He died in 1692 or 1693, aged about 93. The text was rediscovered in Europe in the early 1900s.

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher. He is one of the most important thinkers of the early modern period. He was born on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam. His family was Portuguese Jewish. They had fled Portugal to escape violent persecution by Catholic rulers. The Netherlands at the time was unusual in Europe. It was more tolerant of Jews than most countries. But Jewish communities there stayed careful, afraid of upsetting their Christian neighbours. Young Baruch (Hebrew for 'blessed') was a brilliant student of Hebrew and Jewish religious texts. His father ran a small trading business. When the father died, Spinoza helped manage it for a short time. But by his early twenties, he was moving away from traditional Jewish belief. He read Descartes and other new European philosophers. He began to question the Bible. He asked whether miracles really happened. He doubted that God was a person who ruled the world from outside it. In 1656, when he was 23, the Jewish community of Amsterdam formally expelled him. The document is one of the harshest such orders in Jewish history. It cursed him and forbade any Jew from speaking to him or even coming within four paces of him. The exact reasons were not recorded. His dangerous religious ideas are the most likely cause. He never tried to rejoin. He made his living grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. This was precise, patient work. He lived simply, in rented rooms, never marrying. He refused a university chair at Heidelberg because he feared it would limit his freedom to think. He published only two books in his lifetime, one of them anonymously. His greatest work, the Ethics, came out after his death. He died on 21 February 1677, aged 44, probably from a lung disease made worse by glass dust from his work.

John Locke was an English philosopher. He is one of the most influential political thinkers in world history. He was born on 29 August 1632 in a small village in Somerset, in the south-west of England. His father was a country lawyer who had fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War. Young John grew up during that war, watching England struggle over who should rule. He was a brilliant student. He went to Westminster School in London and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He stayed at Oxford as a teacher for many years. He studied medicine and science as well as philosophy. He worked with the famous scientist Robert Boyle. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society, Britain's most important scientific group. His medical training later saved the life of his friend and patron, Lord Ashley, by performing an operation to remove a cyst from his liver. Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) became a powerful politician. Locke worked as his secretary, adviser, and family doctor. This brought Locke deep into English politics. When Shaftesbury fell out with King Charles II in the early 1680s, Locke too was in danger. He fled to the Netherlands in 1683. He stayed there for six years, writing the books that would make him famous. In 1688, King James II was overthrown in what English people called the Glorious Revolution. William and Mary took the throne. Locke returned home safely. In 1689 and 1690, he published three of the most important books of his age: A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Each changed its field. He never married. He spent his last years at a country house in Essex, writing and corresponding with scholars across Europe. He died on 28 October 1704, aged 72.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher and writer. He is one of the most important thinkers of the European Enlightenment. He was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, which was then an independent city-state, not part of France or Switzerland. His mother died nine days after his birth. His father was a watchmaker who taught him to read and love books. When Rousseau was ten, his father got into a fight and had to flee Geneva. Young Jean-Jacques was left with relatives. At fifteen, he left Geneva and wandered across Europe. He worked as a servant, a private tutor, and a music copyist. He taught himself by reading. He met a wealthy older woman named Madame de Warens, who took him in for several years. His early life was unstable. He had little formal education. He would later turn this outsider experience into a source of philosophical insight. He moved to Paris in 1742. He made his name in 1750 when he won an essay competition on whether progress in arts and sciences had improved human morals. His answer, surprisingly, was no. The essay made him famous. For the next twenty years, he wrote a series of books that changed European thought. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) argued that civilisation had corrupted humanity. Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century. The Social Contract (1762) proposed a new theory of political legitimacy. Emile, or On Education (1762) proposed a revolutionary theory of how to raise children. Rousseau had six children with his partner, Thérèse Levasseur, and placed all of them in a foundling hospital. He did this against her wishes. The facts are hard to reconcile with his writing on education and family. He spent his final years moving from country to country, often in conflict with authorities who banned his books. He died on 2 July 1778 in Ermenonville, France, aged 66.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist. He was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and studied at the University of Glasgow and then at Oxford. He became a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he taught ethics, politics, and economics. He is best known for two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which is about how human beings understand right and wrong through imagining how others feel, and The Wealth of Nations (1776), which examined how economies work and what makes countries rich or poor. He lived during a time of enormous economic change: the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain and the rapid growth of international trade. He was trying to understand these changes and work out what principles should guide economic life. He has often been called the father of modern economics, though his ideas are more complex than they are often presented to be.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. He was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, a city in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). His family was Lutheran and not wealthy. His father was a saddle-maker. His mother, who died when he was 13, was a strong early influence and encouraged his studies. He studied at the University of Königsberg from the age of 16. He worked for several years as a private tutor for noble families before returning to the university as a lecturer in 1755. He became a full professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. He stayed in Königsberg his whole life. He is said never to have travelled more than about 150 kilometres from his birthplace. His daily routine was famously strict: neighbours were said to set their watches by his afternoon walks. For most of his career he was a respected but not famous teacher. Then, starting in his late fifties, he wrote a series of huge books that changed philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgement (1790) set out a new system. He wrote important shorter works on ethics, religion, politics, and history. He continued writing until his death on 12 February 1804, aged 79. His work is hugely influential, but parts of it are also troubling. He wrote racist statements about non-European peoples. These texts sat alongside his claims about universal human dignity. Modern scholarship has taken this tension seriously, and honest study of Kant now includes this difficulty.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and legal reformer. He was the founder of modern utilitarianism. He was born on 15 February 1748 in London, into a wealthy lawyer's family. He was a child prodigy. He started learning Latin at age three and entered Oxford University at twelve. He qualified as a lawyer but never practised law. He thought the English legal system was a mess of confused rules that harmed the people it was meant to serve. He spent the rest of his life trying to reform it. He inherited enough money to live without working. For nearly 60 years, he wrote almost every day. He produced thousands of pages on law, government, punishment, economics, and ethics. Much of his work was not published during his lifetime. He would start a book, follow his thoughts into new topics, and leave the book unfinished. His friends and disciples, including James Mill and later James's son John Stuart Mill, edited and published large parts of his work. Bentham's main book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, appeared in 1789. It set out his core principle: the measure of a good action or a good law is whether it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This principle, called the 'principle of utility', became the foundation of utilitarianism. His influence on law and politics in Britain was enormous. He helped design prisons, wrote model constitutions for foreign governments, and shaped the reform movements of the early 19th century. He had unusual ideas. He designed a new kind of prison, the Panopticon, that has since become a famous image of surveillance. He argued against laws punishing homosexual acts, centuries before this became widely accepted. He left instructions for his body to be preserved after death and displayed in a wooden cabinet. His preserved body, called the 'auto-icon', is still on display at University College London, which he helped inspire. He died on 6 June 1832 in London, aged 84.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He was the last of the great system-builders in Western philosophy. He was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart in southern Germany. His father was a civil servant. His mother taught him Latin before he started school but died when he was eleven. He had one sister, Christiane, who became very close to him. Hegel studied philosophy and theology at the University of Tübingen. There he became friends with two other young men who would become famous: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three were excited by the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 when Hegel was nineteen. For years Hegel struggled to find an academic post. He worked as a private tutor in Switzerland, then in Frankfurt. In 1801 he became an unpaid lecturer at the University of Jena. There he wrote his first major book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He famously finished the manuscript on the same day Napoleon's army arrived in the city in October 1806. The book was published in 1807. Hegel's career then bounced around. He worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg, then as a high school principal in Nuremberg. He married Marie von Tucher in 1811. In 1816 he became a professor at Heidelberg, then at Berlin from 1818. By the 1820s he was the most famous philosopher in Germany. His lectures filled large halls. He died of illness, possibly cholera, on 14 November 1831 in Berlin, aged 61.

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an English fossil collector and self-taught palaeontologist whose discoveries on the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset transformed scientific understanding of the deep past. She was born into a poor Dissenting Protestant family that made part of its living by selling curiosities — fossils and shells — to summer visitors on the south coast of England. Her father Richard taught her and her brother Joseph how to find fossils in the crumbling cliffs of the Blue Lias. He died when she was eleven, leaving the family in debt. Mary took up fossil hunting as a trade to support her mother and brother. At about twelve, she and Joseph uncovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton known to science, a marine reptile that had been unknown before. Over the following decades Mary made many further extraordinary finds on her own: the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur outside the usual fossil record, important ichthyosaurs, and fossil fish with preserved ink sacs. She learned enough anatomy, geology, and classical languages to read the scientific papers written about her finds — and to correct them. The gentlemen geologists who bought her specimens and published descriptions of them sometimes credited her by name and sometimes did not. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven, still poor despite the scientific importance of what she had found.