All Thinkers

Thinkers Timeline

Key thinkers across history — grouped by era, colour-coded by discipline. Click any card to explore ideas, quotations, and classroom contexts.

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Subject: Philosophy × Era: Modern × Location: Italy ×
Modern — 1800 to 1950
Antonio Gramsci 1891-1937 · Italy, Southern Europe →
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and political organiser. He was born in Sardinia, the island off the coast of Italy, into a poor family and grew up in significant poverty. He won a scholarship to the University of Turin, where he became involved in socialist politics. He was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became its leader. When Mussolini's fascist government came to power, Gramsci was arrested in 1926 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The fascist prosecutor famously said at his trial: we must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years. The effort failed. In prison, Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, a collection of philosophical and political reflections covering more than three thousand pages, which he smuggled out in fragments and which were published after his death. He died in prison in 1937, aged 46, his health destroyed by years of harsh imprisonment. The Prison Notebooks were eventually published in the 1950s and became one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century.
"All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals."
Umberto Eco 1932-2016 · Italy, Southern Europe →
Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, literary theorist, and novelist. He was born in Alessandria in northern Italy and studied philosophy at the University of Turin, writing a doctoral thesis on the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. He then worked in Italian public broadcasting and as a journalist before becoming a professor of semiotics, the study of signs and meaning, at the University of Bologna, where he taught for the rest of his career. He was an enormously prolific scholar who published major academic works on medieval aesthetics, semiotics, the interpretation of texts, and the philosophy of language. In 1980, when he was nearly fifty, he published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, a detective story set in a fourteenth-century Italian monastery. It became an international bestseller translated into dozens of languages, and was followed by several more novels of similar ambition. Eco was unusual in being genuinely important both as an academic philosopher and as a popular novelist, and he saw these two activities as deeply connected: both were explorations of how human beings make and interpret meaning.
"A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had freely told what he knew, what a multiplication of forms, categories, of appearances!"