Thinkers Timeline

Adi Shankara (traditionally 788-820, though some scholars propose earlier dates) was an Indian philosopher and theologian whose consolidation of the Advaita Vedanta school shaped Hindu thought more decisively than any other single figure in the tradition. He was born in Kaladi in what is now Kerala, in southern India, into a Nambudiri Brahmin family. Traditional biographies describe his father as dying when he was young and his mother as devout and learned. He is said to have become a renunciate at eight — a striking step taken, according to tradition, with his mother's reluctant consent. He studied under Govinda Bhagavatpada, himself a student of Gaudapada, whose commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad provided Shankara with much of his philosophical starting point. Shankara spent his short life travelling across the Indian subcontinent, debating rival philosophers, establishing monasteries, and writing prolifically. He founded four major monastic centres (mathas) at the cardinal points of India — at Sringeri in the south, Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, and Jyotirmath in the north — each to be led by a lineage-holder called a Shankaracharya. This institutional network remains active today. His writing output was extraordinary for someone who lived only thirty-two years by traditional reckoning. His commentaries on the three foundational texts of Vedanta — the Upanishads (particularly the ten principal Upanishads), the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras — are the authoritative statements of Advaita Vedanta. He also wrote shorter philosophical works including the Upadesasahasri (A Thousand Teachings), and devotional hymns including the Bhaja Govindam, that remain widely recited. Traditional accounts place his death at Kedarnath in the Himalayas. The dating of his life has been contested — some scholars propose sixth- or seventh-century dates based on textual evidence — but the ninth century remains the conventional position.

Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE), known in the Western world as Avicenna, was a Persian Muslim philosopher and physician. He was born near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. He was exceptionally gifted: he is said to have memorised the Quran by age ten, and by eighteen was a practising physician whom established doctors came to consult. He lived an active and often difficult life, working as a physician and court official for various rulers across Central Asia and Persia while writing philosophy and science at an extraordinary pace. He wrote more than 200 books. His most important works are the Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical textbook across Europe and the Islamic world for five centuries, and the Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa), a massive encyclopaedia of philosophy and science. He died at 57 years old, in 1037 CE, in what is now western Iran.

Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, theologian, and teacher. He was one of the most influential and controversial intellectual figures of the 12th century. He helped lay the foundations of the Scholastic method that would dominate medieval European universities. He was born in 1079 in Le Pallet, near Nantes in western France. He died in 1142, aged about 63. He came from a minor noble family. He was the eldest son. He could have inherited the family's modest lands. He gave up the inheritance to study philosophy. He became a wandering student in northern France, going from teacher to teacher. He was clever, ambitious, and difficult. He repeatedly fell out with his teachers and set up rival schools. By his thirties he was the most famous teacher of philosophy in Paris. In the 1110s he met Heloise, the brilliant niece of a Paris cathedral canon named Fulbert. Heloise was about 20 years younger than Abelard. He arranged to lodge in Fulbert's house and tutor her. They became lovers. She became pregnant. Abelard arranged a secret marriage to protect her reputation, though Heloise initially resisted. When Fulbert discovered the relationship, he had Abelard attacked and castrated. Abelard withdrew to a monastery. Heloise became a nun. They never lived together again, though they corresponded for the rest of their lives. Abelard kept teaching and writing. He produced original works on logic, ethics, and theology. His positions were sometimes radical for his time. He was condemned for heresy twice, in 1121 and 1140. He died in a monastery while travelling to defend himself in Rome. His remains were eventually buried with Heloise's at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where their joint tomb is still a popular site for visitors.

Heloise was a French abbess, philosopher, and letter-writer. She was one of the most original intellectual voices of the 12th century. She is often remembered chiefly for her tragic love affair with the philosopher Peter Abelard, but she was a serious thinker in her own right and a successful religious leader for over 30 years. She was probably born around 1100 in France. She died in 1164, aged about 64. Her family background is unclear. She seems to have come from minor French nobility. She was raised partly in the convent of Argenteuil near Paris. By her teens she was already famous for her learning. She read Latin, Greek (very rare for a woman of her time), and Hebrew. She studied Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, the Church Fathers, and the philosophy of her own day. Her uncle Fulbert, a canon at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, brought her to live with him in the city to continue her education. In her late teens she became a private student of Peter Abelard, the most famous philosopher in Paris. He was about 20 years older than her. They became lovers. She became pregnant with their son Astrolabe. Abelard arranged a secret marriage, which Heloise initially opposed because she thought it would damage Abelard's career. When her uncle Fulbert tried to publicise the marriage, Abelard sent Heloise to a convent. Fulbert thought Abelard had abandoned her and arranged Abelard's castration in revenge. After the catastrophe, Abelard pushed Heloise to take religious vows. She became a nun, then prioress, then abbess of a community Abelard had founded called the Paraclete. She ran it successfully for over 30 years. She was widely respected by religious authorities including Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny. The famous correspondence with Abelard came years later, after she happened to read his autobiography. She died at the Paraclete and was eventually buried with Abelard.

Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in Latin Europe as Averroes, was a philosopher, jurist, physician, and astronomer from Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled region of the Iberian Peninsula. He was born in Córdoba into a distinguished family of Maliki jurists: his grandfather and father had both served as chief judges of the city. He received a rigorous education in Islamic law, theology, medicine, philosophy, and the natural sciences. He served as a judge in Seville and later as chief judge of Córdoba, and also worked as court physician to the Almohad caliphs. In 1169, the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf asked him to write commentaries on the works of Aristotle that would make them more accessible, and this became his life's greatest project. He wrote short, middle, and long commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle's surviving works, along with his own treatises on law, medicine, and philosophy. Late in life he fell out of favour during a period of religious reaction: his books were burned and he was exiled to a small town outside Córdoba. He was rehabilitated before his death but died in Marrakesh in 1198. His commentaries were quickly translated into Latin and Hebrew, where they shaped medieval European philosophy more deeply than they shaped the Islamic world that produced them.

Zhu Xi was a Chinese philosopher, teacher, and government official of the Southern Song dynasty. He was born on 18 October 1130 in Youxi, in Fujian province. His father was a minor official who lost his job shortly before Zhu Xi was born. The family was not rich, but his father valued education and taught his son the Confucian classics. Zhu Xi was a gifted student. He passed the highest civil service exam, called the jinshi, at age eighteen. Most people who passed this exam did so around age thirty-five. As a young man, he studied Buddhism and Daoism as well as Confucianism. In his late twenties he met a teacher named Li Tong, who convinced him to commit fully to Confucianism. Li Tong came from a new wave of Chinese thinkers called the Neo-Confucians. Zhu Xi absorbed their ideas and went much further, producing a grand philosophical system that would shape Chinese thought for centuries. He held government posts only for about nine years in total. He preferred teaching and writing. He rebuilt and taught at the famous White Deer Hollow Academy. He edited and wrote commentaries on classical texts. His sharp criticism of corrupt officials earned him enemies. In 1196, his opponents attacked his teachings as 'false learning' and stripped him of his posts. He died on 23 April 1200, aged 69, still in political disgrace. Several thousand people braved official disapproval to attend his funeral. Within a few decades of his death, his teachings were rehabilitated. They then became the official philosophy of China for more than 600 years.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and theologian whose synthesis of Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy became the most influential intellectual achievement of medieval Catholic thought and remains a central reference in Catholic philosophy and theology today. He was born around 1225 at the family castle of Roccasecca, in the Kingdom of Sicily (in present-day Italy), to the noble family of the Counts of Aquino. His parents sent him at age five to the nearby Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, intending him for a monastic career that would eventually make him abbot. In 1239 political conflicts disrupted this plan and he was sent to the University of Naples, where he encountered the works of Aristotle and the new Dominican Order. In 1244 he joined the Dominicans — a decision his family opposed so strongly that they kidnapped him and held him under house arrest for over a year. He persisted, reached Paris in 1245, and became a student of the great Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus. He followed Albertus to Cologne, then returned to Paris, where he became a master of theology in 1256. Over the next eighteen years he wrote at an extraordinary rate — the Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265), the Summa Theologiae (begun 1265, unfinished), extensive commentaries on Aristotle, commentaries on several books of the Bible, disputed questions, and many other works. He held teaching posts at Paris and at the Dominican study house in Rome and spent his final years in Naples. In December 1273, while celebrating Mass, he had some experience that he described only as straw compared to what he had seen, and he stopped writing. He died a few months later, in March 1274, while travelling to attend the Council of Lyon. He was canonised in 1323. His works have been studied continuously in Catholic institutions for over seven centuries and have influenced philosophy and theology well beyond Catholicism.

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.