Philosophy

800 BCE O.S. – ongoing93 items

philosophy
“The Three Vinegar Tasters”: Confucius, the Buddha and Laozi at one jar of vinegar, by Kanō Isen’in Naganobu, c. 1802–1816. Honolulu Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
“The Three Vinegar Tasters”: Confucius, the Buddha and Laozi at one jar of vinegar, by Kanō Isen’in Naganobu, c. 1802–1816. Honolulu Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Three beginnings, and what came of them

Within a few generations of each other, people in three places with no contact started asking the same kind of question: what the world is made of, how to live, what can be known. Thales in Ionia, the Buddha on the Ganges and Confucius in Lu all lived around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Karl Jaspers called this the “Axial Age” in 1949. This timeline follows the three lines, and the ones they fed, to the twentieth century.

How it is drawn

  • Traditions as parallel bands: the Upanishads and the renouncers, Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, the Hundred Schools of China, the classical Indian schools, philosophy in the Islamic world, Neo-Confucianism, scholasticism, the age of reason, the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century, and analytic and continental philosophy. Each event sits inside its tradition’s band, so the lanes stay apart where they overlap in time.

  • Thinkers and works as events, with a few lives, schools and long projects as periods of their own. Some voices stand outside every band: Christine de Pizan, Nezahualcóyotl in Texcoco, Zera Yacob in Ethiopia, Sor Juana in Mexico City, Du Bois, Ambedkar.

  • The map runs from Mexico City to Kyoto: Athens and Alexandria, Sarnath and Nalanda, Qufu and Chang’an, Baghdad, Shiraz and Aleppo, Hippo and Frenda in North Africa, Naples, Paris and Jena.

Filter by ethics for how to live, logic for argument and language, politics for the state and justice, religion for reason and faith, women for the women the canon left out, and translation for texts that crossed from one tradition into another.

Dates

Ancient dates are uncertain, and the notes say by how much. Confucius’s 551–479 BCE is traditional; the Buddha’s dates are disputed by a century; Laozi may never have lived. Everything before 1582 is in the Julian calendar, the convention for ancient and medieval history. Events in the Islamic world are entered in the Hijri calendar, as the Arabic sources count them: al-Ghazālī finished his Incoherence of the Philosophers on 11 Muharram 488. Open an event to see it in either calendar.

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.

Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2, 982b, trans. W. D. Ross.

Items

  1. Upanishads and renouncers

    400 years

  2. Greek philosophy, Thales to Aristotle

    ≈ 278 years

  3. Thales and the eclipse

    Miletus

  4. The Hundred Schools of Thought

    330 years

  5. Confucius

    72 years · Qufu, the capital of Lu

  6. Pythagoras settles at Croton

    Croton (Crotone), Calabria

  7. Parmenides’ poem

    Elea (Velia), Campania

  8. The Buddha teaches at Sarnath

    Deer Park, Sarnath

  9. Mozi preaches impartial care

  10. The Analects compiled

  11. The trial and death of Socrates

    The Agora, Athens

  12. Plato founds the Academy

    The Academy, Akadimia Platonos

  13. The Jixia Academy at Linzi

    ≈ 129 years · Linzi, capital of Qi

  14. Aristotle opens the Lyceum

    The Lyceum, Rigillis Street, Athens

  15. Hellenistic and late antique philosophy

    ≈ 850 years

  16. Mencius at the court of King Hui of Liang

    Daliang (Kaifeng), capital of Wei

  17. Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly

  18. Epicurus opens the Garden

    Athens, outside the Dipylon (site unknown)

  19. The oldest Daodejing, buried at Guodian

    Guodian Tomb 1, near Jingmen, Hubei

  20. Zeno teaches in the Painted Stoa

    Stoa Poikile, north side of the Agora

  21. Xunzi: human nature is bad

  22. The Qin burns the books

    Xianyang, the Qin capital

  23. The classical Indian schools

    ≈ 1,599 years

  24. Marcus Aurelius writes to himself

    Carnuntum, on the Danube

  25. Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way

  26. Augustine’s Confessions

    Hippo Regius (Annaba, Algeria)

  27. Hypatia murdered

    Alexandria, near the Caesareum

  28. Nalanda

    750 years · Nalanda Mahavihara, Bihar

  29. Boethius in prison

    Pavia

  30. Xuanzang returns to Chang’an

    Great Wild Goose Pagoda, Xi’an (Chang’an)

  31. Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta

  32. Philosophy in the Islamic world

    ≈ 824 years

  33. Al-Fārābī, the Second Teacher, dies in Damascus

    Damascus

  34. Avicenna writes The Healing

    ≈ 7 years · Hamadan

  35. Neo-Confucianism

    ≈ 593 years

  36. Scholasticism

    ≈ 270 years

  37. Anselm’s Proslogion

    Abbey of Le Bec, Normandy

  38. Al-Ghazālī’s Incoherence of the Philosophers

    Baghdad

  39. Averroes answers al-Ghazālī

  40. Zhu Xi restores the White Deer Grotto Academy

    White Deer Grotto Academy, Mount Lu

  41. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed

    Fustat (Old Cairo)

  42. Suhrawardī executed at Aleppo

    Citadel of Aleppo

  43. Dōgen founds Eihei-ji

    Eihei-ji, Echizen (Fukui)

  44. Aquinas lays down the Summa unfinished

    San Domenico Maggiore, Naples

  45. The Condemnation of 1277

    Paris, the bishop’s see on the Île de la Cité

  46. Ockham summoned to Avignon

    Avignon, the papal court

  47. Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah

    Qalʿat Ibn Salāma, near Frenda

  48. Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies

  49. Nezahualcóyotl rules Texcoco

    ≈ 41 years · Texcoco

  50. Wang Yangming’s awakening at Longchang

    Longchang (Xiuwen, Guizhou)

  51. Machiavelli writes The Prince

    The Albergaccio, Sant’Andrea in Percussina

  52. The Four–Seven Debate begins

    Dosan, Andong

  53. Montaigne’s Essays

    Montaigne’s tower, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne

  54. Mullā Ṣadrā comes home to teach in Shiraz

    Madrasa-yi Khan, Shiraz

  55. The age of reason: Descartes to Leibniz

    ≈ 79 years

  56. Descartes’s Meditations

  57. Elisabeth of Bohemia questions Descartes

    The Hague

  58. Hobbes’s Leviathan

  59. Zera Yacob’s Hatata

  60. Spinoza’s Ethics

  61. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  62. The Enlightenment

    ≈ 114 years

  63. Sor Juana’s Reply to Sor Filotea

    Convent of San Jerónimo, Mexico City

  64. Anton Wilhelm Amo’s doctorate at Wittenberg

    University of Wittenberg

  65. Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature

    La Flèche, Anjou

  66. Rousseau’s Social Contract

  67. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

  68. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman

  69. After Kant: the nineteenth century

    ≈ 94 years

  70. Hegel sees Napoleon at Jena

    Jena

  71. Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation

  72. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or

  73. The Communist Manifesto

    46 Liverpool Street, London

  74. Mill’s On Liberty

  75. Analytic philosophy

  76. Frege’s Begriffsschrift

  77. Nietzsche: “God is dead”

  78. Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions

    Art Institute of Chicago

  79. Continental philosophy

  80. Russell writes to Frege

    Friday’s Hill, Fernhurst

  81. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

  82. Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good

  83. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

  84. Heidegger’s Being and Time

  85. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste

  86. Sartre: existentialism is a humanism

    Salle des Centraux, rue Jean-Goujon, Paris

  87. De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

  88. A manifesto for Chinese culture

  89. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

  90. Gettier’s three pages

  91. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem

  92. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice

  93. Hountondji against ethnophilosophy