🏷️ Schools of thought
A school is not a dictionary entry; it is a side taken. Every page here answers three questions: who belongs to it, whom it opposed, and what the fight was actually about.
🏛️Stoicismc. 300 BC – AD 180Separate what you control from what you don’t, and answer only for the former — a four-century discipline that traveled from an Athenian porch to a Roman emperor’s desk.🌿Epicureanismfrom c. 307 BCPleasure is the highest good — but real pleasure is absence of pain, fear and turmoil: a quiet garden shared with friends.🏺Cynicismc. 4th century BCLiving in a jar and telling Alexander to step out of the sunlight — a philosophy argued by way of life itself.📖Confucianismfrom the 6th century BCBenevolence at the core, ritual as its form, the family as society’s prototype — the operating system of East Asian politics and education for two millennia.☯️Daoism6th – 3rd century BCThe dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao — suspicious of all man-made order, learning strength from water and infants.⚖️Legalism4th – 3rd century BCExpect nothing of human goodness; design institutions in which even the wicked cannot do harm — the operating manual of the Qin empire.🛠️Mohism5th – 3rd century BCImpartial care, anti-aggression, promotion by merit — the engineers’ guild and pacifist militia of pre-imperial China.❔Skepticismfrom c. 360 BCEvery claim meets an equally strong counter-claim — so suspend judgment, and receive tranquility in exchange.⛪Scholasticismc. 500 – 1400Foundation engineering for faith using Aristotle’s logic — a millennium-long negotiation between reason and revelation inside the medieval university.📐Rationalism17th centuryTrue knowledge starts from reason’s own clear ideas, deducing the world from axioms like geometry.🔬Empiricism17th – 18th centuryThe mind is born a blank slate and all knowledge arrives through experience — moving philosophy’s foundation from innate ideas to sensory evidence.🌀German Idealism1781 – 1831From Kant’s Copernican revolution to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit — philosophy driven to its systematic summit inside fifty years.⚗️Utilitarianism18th – 19th centuryThe greatest happiness of the greatest number — morality turned into arithmetic you can actually compute.🚬Existentialism19th – 20th centuryExistence precedes essence: there is no script — every choice you make is writing the definition of what a human being is.