History of Western Philosophy

From asking what water has to do with everything to arguing about what justice would look like behind a veil of ignorance

Western philosophy begins with a claim that sounds almost too simple: a Greek trader in Miletus decided that everything is, at bottom, water. From that opening bid, thinkers built rival methods for finding the truth, arguing through Socrates' relentless questions, Plato's eternal Forms, and Aristotle's logic and categories, before Rome's Stoics and Epicureans turned philosophy into a guide for living. Christian scholars folded Greek logic into theology, then Renaissance humanists broke from that synthesis to recover the classical texts directly. Descartes and Bacon staked out rival routes to certain knowledge, Hobbes and Locke argued about what government owes the people who consent to it, and Kant tried to reconcile the two camps in one difficult book. The 19th century turned philosophy toward history, economics, and psychology, and the 20th century split it again, between philosophers who treated language and logic as the discipline's proper subject and others who asked what it means to exist as a free, mortal, and social being. This timeline traces the arguments, the texts, and the honest disputes over what a Presocratic fragment or a Socratic dialogue can actually prove.