Everyone on this timeline
One hundred and thirty-three thinkers, and for each of them a study: the world they were born into, how the books actually came to be written, what each book argues, and what survived them. The plates are sized by consequence — the six largest ran the argument for everyone after, and their studies are correspondingly long.
Eight arguments that never finished
Philosophy does not really proceed by subject. It proceeds by a small number of questions that get handed down, reformulated, and handed on again. Each row below follows one of them through time. The same thinker appears in several rows, which is the point. Aristotle is not doing metaphysics on Tuesday and ethics on Thursday; the answers are load-bearing for one another.
Read them in pairs
Almost every major philosopher is answering someone. Read alone, a thinker is a list of positions to memorise. Read second, as a reply, the same positions become moves in an argument you can follow. These seven pairs are the fastest way in.
Start with these
Pivotal, and readable without an apparatus. Any of them can be a first primary text.
Save these for later
Genuinely difficult, and not because of bad writing. Worth a companion volume and a second pass.
Where this page is uncertain
Dates before about 400 BCE are reconstructions, and bars with faded ends mark them. Even the order of Heraclitus and Parmenides is disputed. The Buddha's traditional dates (563–483 BCE) and the revised ones (c. 480–400) differ by most of a century, and Laozi may not have existed. Two popular formulas are wrong as usually stated: the familiar wording of Ockham's razor is not in Ockham, and Hegel never wrote “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Lines of influence are simplifications, and the dashed ones are explicitly parallels rather than transmissions. The studies carry a Taken on trust note wherever a work is lost, an attribution disputed or a life mostly legend — which, for the Presocratics, the Cynics and the founders of the parallel traditions, is most of what there is. Check anything load-bearing against the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Formal tab is a reconstruction throughout: nobody on this timeline wrote in that notation, several of the regimentations are contested readings rather than settled ones, and the note at the foot of that tab names the thinkers whose central work is left out of it on purpose.