Marginalia
⌂  32 entries

Schools & Movements

Traditions of thought, their members, and their quarrels.

Family tree of schools

Indian

800 BCE – 1900 · Indian

Vedānta

वेदान्त

“The end of the Veda” — the schools that interpret the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gītā and Brahma Sūtras to understand Brahman, the Self, and liberation.
c. 600 BCE – c. 1400 · Indian

Cārvāka (Lokāyata)

चार्वाक · लोकायत

India’s materialist school — only perception is knowledge, only matter is real, there is no soul, no rebirth, no karma and no God, and the purpose of life is pleasure. Its own books are lost; we know it through the furious refutations of every other school.
c. 600 BCE – c. 2000 · Indian

Jainism

जैन धर्म · Jaina dharma — the way of the Jinas ("conquerors")

The ancient Indian tradition of the Jinas — radical non-violence toward every living being, a soul weighed down by karmic matter, the “many-sidedness” of truth, and liberation by self-discipline without a creator God. Small in numbers, immense in influence.
500 BCE – 2000 · Indian

Buddhism

बौद्ध धर्म · Buddha-dharma — the teaching of the Awakened One

The tradition founded by the Buddha — suffering, impermanence, no-self, and the path to nirvāṇa — later dividing into Theravāda, Mahāyāna (Madhyamaka, Yogācāra) and Vajrayāna.
c. 500 BCE – c. 1700 · Indian

Sāṃkhya

सांख्य · sāṃkhya — "enumeration"

The oldest of the classical Indian systems — a radical dualism of pure, inactive consciousness (puruṣa) and active, unconscious nature (prakṛti) with its three strands, the guṇas. Liberation is seeing that consciousness was never really entangled in nature.
c. 300 BCE – c. 1800 · Indian

Mīmāṃsā

मीमांसा · mīmāṃsā — "inquiry", "investigation"

The school of Vedic interpretation — the hermeneutics of ritual and duty that treated the Veda as eternal and authorless, defended the self-validity of knowledge, denied a creator God, and developed theories of language, meaning and law that shaped all of Hindu jurisprudence.
250 BCE – 2000 · Indian

Theravāda and the Abhidharma

थेरवाद · Theravāda — "the teaching of the elders"

The oldest surviving school of Buddhism — the Pāli Canon, the arhat ideal, and the Abhidhamma analysis of experience into momentary ultimate realities — living today in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
c. 200 BCE – c. 1900 · Indian

Nyāya

न्याय · nyāya — "method", "rule", "logic"

India’s great school of logic and epistemology — the theory of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), the five-membered syllogism, the catalogue of fallacies, realist metaphysics, and the most famous arguments for God in Indian philosophy. Its later form, Navya-Nyāya, became the technical language of all Indian scholarship.
c. 200 BCE – c. 1700 · Indian

Vaiśeṣika

वैशेषिक · vaiśeṣika — "of particularity"

India’s school of natural philosophy and atomism — reality analysed into six (later seven) categories, the world built from eternal, indivisible atoms of earth, water, fire and air, combined by an unseen moral force. Merged with Nyāya, it gave Indian realism its map of what exists.
c. 200 BCE – c. 1800 · Indian

Yoga (darśana)

योग · yoga — "yoking", "union", "discipline"

The classical school of Patañjali — Sāṃkhya’s dualism of consciousness and nature, plus a God and a practical method — defining yoga as “the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind” and mapping the eight limbs from ethics to absorption.
150 – 2000 · Indian

Madhyamaka

मध्यमक · Madhyamaka — "the Middle Way"

Nāgārjuna’s school of emptiness — nothing has intrinsic existence (svabhāva), all things are empty because they arise in dependence, and even emptiness is empty. Its dialectic dismantles every view, and it became the summit of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.
300 – 1200 · Indian

Yogācāra

योगाचार · Yogācāra — "the practice of yoga"; also Vijñānavāda, "the doctrine of consciousness"

The “mind-only” school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, founded by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu — the world we experience is a construction of consciousness, carried by a “storehouse” of karmic seeds; awakening is the transformation of the basis of consciousness itself.
c. 550 – c. 1750 · Indian

The Bhakti Movement

भक्ति · bhakti — "devotion", "loving participation"

The great devotional revolution of Indian religion — from the Tamil Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs (6th–9th centuries) to Kabīr, Mīrābāī, Tulsīdās and Tukārām — which made passionate, personal love of God, sung in the languages of the people, a path to liberation open to every caste and to women.
700 – 2000 · Indian

Advaita Vedānta

अद्वैत वेदान्त

Non-dualist Vedānta — Brahman alone is real, the world is appearance (māyā), and the self is identical with Brahman.
c. 850 – c. 1200 · Indian

Kashmir Śaivism

त्रिक · Trika; प्रत्यभिज्ञा · Pratyabhijñā — "recognition"

The non-dual Śaiva philosophy of medieval Kashmir — reality is the free, self-aware consciousness of Śiva, who playfully contracts himself into the many selves and the world, and liberation is the recognition that you are Śiva. The world is not illusion but God’s self-expression.
1050 – 2000 · Indian

Viśiṣṭādvaita

विशिष्टाद्वैत

Qualified non-dualism — Brahman is one, but includes real souls and matter as its body; liberation is through devotion and grace.
1250 – 2000 · Indian

Dvaita Vedānta

द्वैत वेदान्त · dvaita — "duality"

Madhva’s realist, theistic Vedānta — God (Viṣṇu) alone is independent; souls and matter are real, eternally distinct from God and from each other, and wholly dependent on him. The most uncompromising rejection of Advaita in Indian thought.

Chinese

500 BCE – 2000 · Chinese

Confucianism

儒家 Rújiā · "the school of the scholars"

The ethical and political tradition founded on Confucius’s teaching — humaneness, ritual, filial piety, learning and government by virtue — the backbone of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese civilization.
400 BCE – 2000 · Chinese

Daoism

道家 Dàojiā · "the school of the Way"

The Chinese tradition of the Dao — the nameless Way of nature — teaching spontaneity, simplicity, effortless action and harmony with the flow of things.

Ancient Greek

600–400 BCE · Ancient Greek

The Pre-Socratics

The first Greek philosophers — from Thales to Democritus — who asked what everything is made of and replaced myth with argument.
387 BCE – 529 · Ancient Greek

Platonism

The tradition descending from Plato — eternal Forms, an immortal soul, and a reality higher than the senses — from the Academy through Neoplatonism to Christian theology.
307 BCE – 300 · Ancient Greek

Epicureanism

The school of the Garden — a materialist philosophy aiming at tranquillity through friendship, simple pleasures and freedom from the fear of gods and death.
300 BCE – 200 · Ancient Greek

Stoicism

Στωϊκή · from the Stoa Poikilē, the "Painted Porch"

The Hellenistic and Roman philosophy of virtue, reason and acceptance — happiness lies in what is up to us, our judgments and choices, not in external things.

Patristic & Medieval

1050 – 1500 · Patristic & Medieval

Scholasticism

The method and philosophy of the medieval universities — rigorous disputation, the reconciliation of faith and reason, and the absorption of Aristotle into Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought.

British & Irish

1690 – 1776 · British & Irish

British Empiricism

The view that all knowledge comes from experience — the mind begins as a blank slate on which the senses write.

French

1942 – 1960 · French

Absurdism

Camus’s position — the conflict between our longing for meaning and the world’s silence cannot be resolved, only lived with in lucid revolt.

German-language

1781 – 1831 · German-language

German Idealism

The extraordinary philosophical movement after Kant — Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — that tried to complete his revolution by showing reality itself to be the work of mind or Spirit.
1900 – 1970 · German-language

Phenomenology

Husserl’s method of describing experience exactly as it appears — “to the things themselves!” — which Heidegger and Sartre turned toward existence.

Russian

1860 – 1881 · Russian

Russian Nihilism

нигилизм

The 1860s movement of young Russian radicals who rejected tradition, religion, art and authority in the name of science, utility and the people.

Across traditions

1637 – 1720

Continental Rationalism

The seventeenth-century conviction that reason alone, unaided by the senses, can reach certain knowledge of the deepest truths.
1680 – 1800

The Enlightenment

The eighteenth-century movement that put reason, science, tolerance and individual liberty at the centre of human affairs — “Sapere aude!”
1843 – 1970

Existentialism

The philosophy of the existing individual — freedom, anxiety, authenticity, the absurd — running from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus.