Western canon

A classic

A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas. A related word is masterpiece or chef d'œuvre, which in modern use refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill, or workmanship. Historically, the word refers to a work of a very high standard produced in order to obtain membership of a Guild or Academy.

The first writer to use the term "classic" was Aulus Gellius, a 2nd-century Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon ("carpenter’s rule"). Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction, thus, being comprehended in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes ("the admitted", "the included") to identify the writers in the canon.

Debate

There has been an ongoing debate over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s, much of which is rooted in critical theory, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism. In particular postmodern studies has argued that the body of scholarship is biased, because the main focus traditionally of the academic studies of history and Western culture, has only been on Europe and men. English professor Jay Stevenson argues:

[In] the postmodern period […] [t]raditional literature has been found to have been written by "dead white males" to serve the ideological aims of a conservative and repressive Anglo hegemony […] In an array of reactions against the race, gender, and class biases found to be woven into the tradition of Anglo lit, multicultural writers and political literary theorists have sought to expose, resist, and redress injustices and prejudices.

Classicist Bernard Knox made direct reference to this topic when he delivered his 1992 Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities). Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males", as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical culture to modern society.

Some intellectuals have championed a "high conservative modernism" that insists that universal truths exist, and have opposed approaches that deny the existence of universal truths. Many argued that "natural law" was the repository of timeless truths. Allan Bloom, in his highly influential Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987) argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture. Bloom further comments: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied." His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored by cultural relativists. Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom (no relation) has also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1995 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions, though its implications continue to be debated.

Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle has written:

There is a certain irony in this [i.e., politicized objections to the canon] in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority; who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading? Searle's rebuttal suggests that "one obvious difficulty with it [i.e., arguments against hierarchical ranking of books] is that if it were valid, it would argue against any set of required readings whatever; indeed, any list you care to make about anything automatically creates two categories, those that are on the list and those that are not."

Charles Altieri states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society.

Classical music

The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to distinctly canonize the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Ludwig van Beethoven as a golden age. In addition to Bach and Beethoven, the other major figures from this period were Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.

In classical music, during the nineteenth century a "canon" developed which focussed on what was felt to be the most important works written since 1600, with a great concentration on the later part of this period, termed the Classical period, which is generally taken to begin around 1730. After Beethoven the major nineteenth century composers include Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Modest Mussorgsky.

In the 2000s, the standard concert repertoire of professional orchestras, chamber music groups and choirs tends to focus on works by a relatively small number of mainly 18th and 19th century male composers. Many of the works deemed to be part of the musical canon are from genres regarded as the most serious, such as the symphony, concerto, string quartet, and opera. Folk music was already giving art music melodies, and from the late 19th century, in an atmosphere of increasing nationalism, began to influence composers in formal and other ways, before being admitted to some sort of status in the canon itself.

Since the early twentieth century non-Western music has begun to influence Western composers. In particular, direct homages to Javanese gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by Claude Debussy, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Debussy was immensely interested in non-Western music and its unorthodox approaches to composition. Specifically, he was drawn to the Javanese Gamelan, which he first heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition. He was not interested in directly quoting his non-Western influences, but instead allowed this non-Western aesthetic to generally influence his own musical work, for example, by frequently using quiet, unresolved dissonances, coupled with the damper pedal, to emulate the "shimmering" effect created by a gamelan ensemble. American composer Philip Glass was not only influenced by the eminent French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, but also by the Indian musicians Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive.

In the latter half of the 20th century the canon expanded to cover the so-called Early music of the pre-classical period, and Baroque music by other composers than Bach and George Frideric Handel. including Antonio Vivaldi, Claudio Monteverdi, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Arcangelo Corelli, François Couperin, Heinrich Schütz, Dieterich Buxtehude. Earlier composers, such as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlande de Lassus and William Byrd, have also received more attention in the last hundred years.

The absence of women composers from the canon has been debated in the twentieth century, even though there has been women composers throughout the classical music period: Marcia J Citron, for example, has examined "the practices and attitudes that have led to the exclusion of women composers from the received 'canon' of performed musical works." More recently the music of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), a German Benedictine abbess, has been rediscovered and both the Russian Sofia Gubaidulina (1931 – ) and Finnish Kaija Saariaho (1952– ) have achieved international reputations. Saariaho's opera L’amour de loin has been staged in some of the worlds major opera houses, including The English National Opera (2009), and in 2016 the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Visual arts

The backbone of traditional Western art history is a celebratory chronology of artworks, mostly of a luxury nature, commissioned by elite groups in western Europe for private or public enjoyment, as well as works in drawing and printmaking. Much of this was religious, mostly Roman Catholic art. The classical art of Greece and Rome has been regarded since the Renaissance as the fount of the Western tradition, and was long regarded as superior to modern creations in the equivalent fields, in particular sculpture.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) is the great originator of the artistic canon, and the originator of many of the concepts it embodies. His Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects covers only artists working in Italy, with a strong pro-Florentine prejudice, and has cast a long shadow over succeeding centuries. Northern European art has arguably never quite caught up to Italy in terms of prestige, and Vasari's placing of Giotto as the founding father of "modern" painting has largely been retained. In painting the rather vague term of Old master covers painters up to about the time of Goya.

Such a "canon" remains prominent, as indicated by the selection of objects present in art history textbooks, as well as the prices obtained in the art trade. But there have been considerable swings of fortune in what is valued. In the 19th century the Baroque fell into great disfavour, to be revived from about the 1920s, by which time the Academic art of the 18th and 19th century was largely disregarded, and Victorian painting generally, with its equivalents in other countries. The High Renaissance Vasari regarded as the greatest period has always retained its prestige, including works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, but the succeeding period of Mannerism has fallen in and out of favour.

In the 19th century the beginnings of academic art history, led by German universities, led to much better understanding and appreciation of medieval art, and a more nuanced understanding of classical art, including the realization that many if not most treasured masterpieces of sculpture were late Roman copies rather than Greek originals. The European tradition of art was expanded to include Byzantine art and the new discoveries of archaeology, notably Etruscan art, Celtic art and Upper Paleolithic art.

Since the 20th century there has been an effort to re-define the discipline to be more inclusive of art made by women, and vernacular creativity, especially in printed media, and an expansion to include works in the Western tradition produced outside Europe. At the same time there has been much greater appreciation of non-Western traditions, to some extent including their place with Western art in wider global or Eurasian traditions. The decorative arts have traditionally had a much lower critical status than fine art, although often highly valued by collectors, and still tend to be given little prominence in undergraduate studies as well as popular coverage on television and in print.

Women and the artistic canon

Women were discriminated against in terms of obtaining the training necessary to be an artist in the mainstream Western traditions, and running a workshop. In addition, since the Renaissance the nude, more often than not female, has had a special position as subject matter. In her 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", Linda Nochlin analyzes what she sees as the embedded privilege in the predominantly male, Western art world and argued that women's outsider status allowed them a unique viewpoint to not only critique women's position in art, but to additionally examine the discipline's underlying assumptions about gender and ability. Nochlin's essay develops the argument that both formal and social education restricted artistic development to men, preventing women (with rare exception) from honing their talents and gaining entry into the art world.

In the 1970s, feminist art criticism continued this critique of the institutionalized sexism of art history, art museums, and galleries, as well as questioning which genres of art were deemed museum-worthy. This position is articulated by artist Judy Chicago:

English artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth DBE (1903 – 1975), whose work exemplifies Modernism, and in particular modern sculpture, is one of the few female artists to achieve international prominence. In 2016-17 the art of American modernist Georgia O'Keefe has been staged at the Tate Modern, in London, is then moving in December 2016 to Vienna, Austria, before visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada in 2017.

Classic book

With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras, including Calvino, T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound.

The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but they are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" refers to a list of books considered to be "essential" and is presented in a variety of ways. It can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic’s imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's) or be the official reading list of an institution of higher learning.

Some of the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, and Samuel Beckett.

Origins of the literary canon

The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopher John Searle has said, "In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised." One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Maynard Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public. An earlier attempt, had been made in 1909 by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, with the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books". ("The Hero as Man of Letters", 1840)

British renaissance poetry

While the canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century, has always been in some form of flux, it is only towards the late 20th century that concerted efforts were made to challenge the canon. The central figures of the British renaissance canon are Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. There have been few attempts to change this long established list because the cultural importance of these six is so great that even re-evaluations on grounds of literary merit has not dared to dislodge them from the curriculum.

John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poet John Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute, while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period, with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature in the 20th century. T. S. Eliot, for example, championed poet Sir John Davies, in an article in The Times Literary Supplement, in 1926 (republished in On Poetry and Poets, 1957).

The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939, an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry. In this canon he excludes the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and instead turns his eye to a Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement, which he claims has been overlooked and undervalued. The most underrated member of this movement he deems to have been George Gascoigne (1525–1577), who "deserves to be ranked […] among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".

Both Eliot and Winters were very much in favour of the established canon, but towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was increasingly under fire.

The expansion of the literary canon in the 20th century

In the twentieth century there was a general reassessment of the literary canon, including women's writing, post-colonial literatures, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary", such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest.

The Western literary canon has also expanded to include the literature of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America, and writers from countries like Turkey, China, Egypt, Peru, and Colombia, Japan, etc, have received Nobel prizes since the late 1960s.

Feminism and the literary canon

The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction, and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest.

However, In Britain and America at least women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century, and many major nineteenth century British novelists were women, including Jane Austen, The Brontë family, Mrs Gaskell, and George Eliot. There were also two major women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the American Emily Dickinson. In the twentieth century there were also many major women writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Marianne Moore. And in France, Colette and Simone de Beauvoir; and in Russia, Anna Akhmatova.

Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation.

Black authors

In the twentieth century, the Western literary canon started to include black writers not only from black American writers, but also from the wider black diaspora of writers in Britain, France, Latin America, and Africa. This is largely due to the shift in social and political views during the civil rights movement in the United States. The first global recognition came in 1950 when Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart helped draw attention to African literature. Nigerian Wole Soyinka was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and American Toni Morrison was the first black woman to win in 1993.

In the United States

Throughout American history, African Americans have been discriminated against, and this experience inspired some Black writers, at least during the early years, to prove they were the equals white American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr, has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture."

African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity." This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora, African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power." In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the white intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for Black political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades; most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Asia, Africa, Middle East, and South America

Since the 1960s the Western literary canon has been expanded to include writers from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. This is reflected in the Nobel prizes awarded in literature.

Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972 was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.

Naguib Mahfouz 1911 – 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.

Kenzaburō Ōe (b. 1935}} is a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".

Guan Moye (b. 1955), better known by the pen name "Mo Yan" , is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

Octavio Paz Lozano (1914 – 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the author of novels including The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red, Snow, The Museum of Innocence, and A Strangeness in My Mind. He is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature. Born in Istanbul, Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour and 2003 International Dublin Literary Award.

Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of the best in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude. On his death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, described him as "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."

Mario Vargas Llosa, (b. 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".

Canon of Western philosophers

Ancient Greek philosophy has consistently held a prominent place in the canon. Only a relatively small number of works of Greek philosophy have survived, essentially those thought most worth copying in the Middle Ages. Plato, Aristotle and, indirectly, Socrates are the primary figures. Roman philosophy is included, but regarded as less significant (as it tended to be even by the Romans themselves). The ancient philosophy of other cultures now receives more attention than before the 20th century. The vast body of Christian philosophy is typically represented on reading lists mainly by Saints Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, and the 12th-century Jewish scholar Maimonides is now usually represented, mostly by The Guide for the Perplexed. The academic canon of early modern philosophy generally includes Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, though influential contributions to philosophy were made by many thinkers in this period.

Women have engaged in philosophy throughout the field's history. There were women philosophers since ancient times, notably Hipparchia of Maroneia (active ca. 325 BC) and Arete of Cyrene (active 5th–4th century BC), and some were accepted as philosophers during the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary eras, almost no woman philosophers have entered the philosophical Western canon. In the early 1990s, the Canadian Philosophical Association claimed that there is gender imbalance and gender bias in the academic field of philosophy. In June 2013, a US sociology professor stated that "out of all recent citations in four prestigious philosophy journals, female authors comprise just 3.6 percent of the total." While other areas of the humanities are at or near gender parity, philosophy is actually more overwhelmingly male than even mathematics."

The ancient Greeks

Many philosophers today agree that Greek philosophy has influenced much of Western culture since its inception. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Clear, unbroken lines of influence lead from ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers to Early Islamic philosophy, the European Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Some claim that Greek philosophy, in turn, was influenced by the older wisdom literature and mythological cosmogonies of the ancient Near East, but philosophy as we understand it is a Greek creation."

Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition. Unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries.

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, His writings cover many subjects – including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government – and constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy.

Aristotle's views on physical science had a profound influence on medieval scholarship. Their influence extended from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism profoundly influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophical and theological thought during the Middle Ages and continues to influence Christian theology, especially the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as "The First Teacher" (Arabic: المعلم الأول‎‎). His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.

Seventeenth-century philosophers

The seventeenth century was important for philosophy, and the major figures were Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), René Descartes (1596 – 1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), John Locke (1632 – 1704), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716), and Isaac Newton (1642 – c.1726)).

Eighteenth-century philosophers

Major philophers of the eighteenth century include George Berkeley (1685 – 1753). David Hume (1711-1776), Adam Smith (1723–90), Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), Voltaire (1694 – 1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), and Edmund Burke (1729–1797).

Nineteenth-century philosophers

Important nineteenth century philosophers include Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900),

Twentieth-century philosophers

Major twentieth century figures are Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951).

Women philosophers have begun to gain prominence in the last hundred years. Notable women philosophers from the contemporary period include Susanne Langer (1895–1985), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), and Martha Nussbaum (1947 – ).