Traditions

pre-socratic

The Greek thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE who replaced mythic explanation with natural philosophy and gave Western thought its starting categories — matter, principle, change, being.

critical-theory

The twentieth-century tradition founded by the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research that integrates Marxist analysis, Hegelian dialectic, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Weberian sociology into a critical theory of contemporary society.

utilitarianism

The substantial moral and political tradition founded by Bentham and developed by Mill that takes the maximization of aggregate well-being or happiness as the substantial foundation of moral and political evaluation.

marxism

The substantial philosophical and political tradition founded by Marx and Engels that takes the analysis of historical material conditions, class structure, and economic production as the foundation of social theory and political practice.

islamic-philosophy

The tradition of rational philosophical inquiry within the Islamic world that preserved and substantially developed the Greek inheritance, produced its own major synthesis through al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes, and transmitted Aristotle to medieval Europe.

phenomenology

The twentieth-century tradition that takes the rigorous description of the structures of conscious experience — not its empirical psychology but its essential structures — as the foundation of philosophy.

pragmatism

The American tradition holding that the meaning of a concept lies in its practical consequences, and the truth of a belief in its capacity to work — to help us cope, predict, and act.

christian-theology

The systematic intellectual tradition built around Christian revelation, integrating Scripture, the Church Fathers, and inherited Greek philosophy into a coherent account of God, world, and the human person.

analytic

The 20th-century tradition characterized by formal precision, linguistic clarity, piecemeal problem-solving, and close engagement with logic and the sciences.

rationalism

The early modern tradition (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) holding that substantive knowledge of the world is available through reason alone, independently of experience.

scholasticism

The medieval method of philosophical and theological inquiry through structured disputation — stating a thesis, marshaling objections, giving a determination, responding to each objection.

german-idealism

The post-Kantian movement (~1781–1840) that took the mind's role in constituting experience to its limit — making consciousness, spirit, or absolute reason the fundamental reality.

neoplatonism

The late-antique revival of Plato that built a hierarchical metaphysics from the One down through Intellect and Soul, profoundly shaping Christian, Islamic, and Jewish theology.

existentialism

The mid-20th century philosophy that insists existence precedes essence — we are not what we are because of some fixed nature, but because of what we choose to make of ourselves.

empiricism

The tradition holding that all genuine knowledge originates in sense experience; the mind starts as a blank slate that experience writes on.

aristotelianism

The tradition founded by Aristotle: forms are immanent in things, knowledge starts with observation, ethics aims at virtuous activity, and reality is best studied through its causes and ends.

platonism

The tradition holding that reality is grounded in abstract, eternal Forms grasped by reason — with the visible world as a participating shadow of the real.

stoicism

The Greek-then-Roman tradition holding that virtue is the only good, the cosmos is rationally ordered, and human flourishing comes from aligning your will with what is.