Philosopher · 1588 – 1679
Thomas Hobbes
If you're interested in Thomas Hobbes, these historical figures share a similar impact, discipline, philosophy, or era. Each recommendation explains why the connection exists.
Similar Impact & Significance
John Locke
93John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as the father of liberalism, whose theories of empiricism, natural rights, and government by consent shaped the Enlightenment and the founding of modern democracies.
Why Locke developed his own social contract theory partly in response to Hobbes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
90Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan-French philosopher, writer, and composer whose ideas on the social contract, the general will, and natural human goodness shaped modern political thought, education, and the Romantic movement.
Why Rousseau engaged and contested Hobbes's account of human nature and the contract.
Baruch Spinoza
87Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of the early modern era whose rationalist masterpiece, the Ethics, advanced a radical monism identifying God with Nature and made him a foundational figure of modern thought.
Why A contemporary whose naturalistic and political philosophy parallels Hobbes's materialism.
Niccolò Machiavelli
88Niccolò Machiavelli was a Renaissance Italian diplomat, political philosopher and writer whose treatise The Prince founded modern political science and gave his name to ruthless statecraft.
Why An earlier theorist of power whose realism about politics anticipated Hobbes.
Cicero
88Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator and philosopher whose speeches and writings defined Latin prose, transmitted Greek philosophy to Rome, and championed the values of the Roman Republic.
Why Also a philosopher · Comparable historical impact
Adam Smith
90Adam Smith was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and economist, the father of modern economics, whose work The Wealth of Nations laid the foundations of free-market thought.
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Aldous Huxley
80Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher whose dystopian novel Brave New World became one of the most influential warnings of the 20th century, imagining a future enslaved not by terror but by pleasure and conditioning.
Why Also a philosopher · Comparable historical impact
Augustine of Hippo
92Augustine of Hippo was a Roman North African theologian and philosopher whose works, including Confessions and City of God, shaped Western Christianity and laid intellectual foundations for medieval and modern thought.
Why Also a philosopher · Comparable historical impact
Averroes
87Averroes was a philosopher and polymath of Al-Andalus whose commentaries on Aristotle profoundly shaped medieval European philosophy and the relationship between reason and faith.
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Avicenna
90Avicenna was a Persian polymath of the Islamic Golden Age, one of the greatest physicians and philosophers of the medieval world, whose Canon of Medicine was a standard text for six centuries.
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David Hume
89David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist of the Enlightenment whose rigorous empiricism and skepticism—especially his analysis of causation and the problem of induction—made him one of the most important philosophers in the English language.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
92Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose radical critiques of morality, religion, and truth—including the proclamation that "God is dead" and the ideal of the Übermensch—made him one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the modern era.
Why Also a philosopher · Comparable historical impact
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
88Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and the leading figure of German idealism, whose dialectical method and grand vision of history as the self-development of Spirit profoundly shaped modern philosophy.
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Henry David Thoreau
80Henry David Thoreau was an American writer, naturalist and philosopher whose book Walden and essay "Civil Disobedience" became foundational texts of environmental thought and nonviolent resistance, influencing reformers around the world.
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Hypatia
84Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist philosopher of late-antique Alexandria, the most prominent woman scholar of the ancient world, whose brutal murder came to symbolize the end of classical learning.
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Immanuel Kant
94Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher of the Enlightenment, one of the most influential thinkers in history, who reconciled rationalism and empiricism and transformed ethics, metaphysics and epistemology.
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John Stuart Mill
87John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher and economist, the leading liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, whose works on utilitarianism, liberty, and the rights of women shaped modern political and ethical thought.
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Karl Marx
95Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary whose theories of historical materialism and class struggle, set out in The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, became among the most influential and contested ideas in modern history.
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Marcus Aurelius
90Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, the last of the "Five Good Emperors", whose private journal, the Meditations, is the most cherished work of Stoic thought.
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Michel de Montaigne
80Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance thinker and nobleman who invented the essay as a literary form, using candid self-examination to explore the human condition with unmatched honesty and wit.
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Pythagoras
90Pythagoras was an ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher who founded the Pythagorean school and is remembered for the Pythagorean theorem and the idea that number underlies the cosmos.
Why Also a philosopher · Comparable historical impact
Same Field or Discipline
Francis Bacon
82Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, statesman and writer who served as Lord Chancellor and, in works such as the Novum Organum and his Essays, founded the modern scientific method of reasoning from evidence and experiment.
Why Also a philosopher · Active in the same era
Mary Wollstonecraft
85Mary Wollstonecraft was an English Enlightenment writer and philosopher, a pioneer of feminist thought whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued for the education and equality of women.
Why Also a philosopher · From the same civilization
René Descartes
92René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist, the "father of modern philosophy", famous for "I think, therefore I am" and for founding analytic geometry.
Why Also a philosopher · Active in the same era