Schools of Philosophy
A school of philosophy is a tradition of thinkers who share a set of answers to philosophy's big questions, along with a way of arriving at them. There is no official count of schools. This page covers 21 of the most influential in the Western tradition, from Plato's Academy to postmodernism.
Looking for fields of study like ethics or logic instead? See the branches of philosophy.
Ancient
Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and his followers, built on the view that the most real things are eternal, unchanging Forms that the physical world only imperfectly copies.
Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism is the tradition that follows Aristotle in grounding knowledge in observation and logic and in treating the good life as the full development of human nature.
Skepticism
Skepticism is the philosophical position that certain knowledge is hard or impossible to reach and, in its ancient form, the practice of suspending judgment to find peace of mind.
Epicureanism
Epicureanism is a school founded by Epicurus around 307 BCE that teaches that the goal of life is pleasure understood as tranquility: freedom from pain in the body and from fear in the mind.
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in Athens around 300 BCE that teaches that virtue is the only true good and that peace of mind comes from accepting what we cannot control.
Medieval and Renaissance
Scholasticism
Scholasticism is the method of the medieval European universities, which used logic and structured debate, built largely on Aristotle, to work through questions of philosophy and theology.
Humanism
Renaissance humanism is the intellectual movement that recovered classical Greek and Latin learning and placed human life, dignity and achievement at the center of study.
17th and 18th centuries
Rationalism
Rationalism is the view that reason, rather than sense experience, is the main source of knowledge, and that some truths can be known independently of experience.
Empiricism
Empiricism is the view that all knowledge comes from sense experience, so the mind starts out with no built-in ideas.
Social Contract
Social contract theory is the view that political authority is legitimate because it rests on an agreement, real or hypothetical, among the people it governs.
Classical Liberalism
Classical liberalism is the political philosophy that defends individual liberty, the rule of law, private property and free markets, with government limited to protecting rights.
Idealism
Idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental, so that what exists is either made of mind or shaped by it.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is the ethical theory that the right action is the one that produces the most overall happiness or well-being.
Conservatism
Conservatism is the political philosophy that values tradition, inherited institutions and gradual change, and distrusts plans to remake society from abstract principles.
19th century
Marxism
Marxism is the body of thought begun by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that explains history through economic forces and class struggle and predicts that capitalism will give way to communism.
Existentialism
Existentialism is a 19th- and 20th-century philosophy that starts from the individual's lived experience and holds that people must create meaning through their own free choices.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is an American philosophy, founded in the 1870s, which holds that the meaning and truth of an idea lie in its practical consequences.
20th century
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a philosophical method, founded by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, that describes the structures of conscious experience as it is lived, before any theory about it.
Analytic
Analytic philosophy is the tradition, dominant in English-speaking universities since the early 20th century, that works on philosophical problems through logic, careful argument and the analysis of language.
Objectivism
Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which holds that reality exists independently of the mind, that reason is our only means of knowing it, that rational self-interest is the proper moral purpose of life, and that laissez-faire capitalism is the only just social system.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a late 20th-century movement in philosophy and culture marked by skepticism toward grand narratives, universal truths and stable meanings.
Common Questions
What are the main schools of philosophy?
There is no official list, but the most influential schools in the Western tradition include Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism in the ancient world; Scholasticism in the Middle Ages; Rationalism and Empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries; and Idealism, Utilitarianism, Existentialism, Pragmatism, Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy in the last two centuries.
How many schools of philosophy are there?
There is no fixed number. Schools split, merge and fade, and many of their names were given by historians after the fact. This site covers 21 of the most influential schools in the Western tradition, and each one links to the philosophers who shaped it.
What are the 5 major schools of philosophy?
There is no single agreed list of five. Lists like this often come from education courses, which commonly name idealism, realism, pragmatism and existentialism, sometimes adding others such as perennialism or progressivism. Historians of philosophy are more likely to point to the five great schools of the ancient world: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism.
What is the difference between a branch and a school of philosophy?
A branch is a field of questions, such as ethics, epistemology or metaphysics. A school is a tradition that gives its own answers to those questions, usually across several branches at once. The Stoics, for example, divided their philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and had distinctive views in each.
Follow the schools in order
The Companion Guide · $19.99
The Companion Guide tells philosophy's story era by era, so you can see each school arise from the arguments that came before it.