Thinkers who shaped our world
Great Minds
Architects of thought · Masters of the inner world
Explore the lives, works, and ideas of philosophers, writers, scientists, and political thinkers who shaped human civilization.
Samuel Moyn
American legal historian who argued in The Last Utopia (2010) that human rights as a transnational movement began not with the Enlightenment or the Holocaust, b…
Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) fundamentally reoriented comparative politics by insisting that political order—not democracy, economic development, or cultura…
Saul Aaron Kripke
Saul Kripke (1940–2022) was an American philosopher and logician who revolutionized metaphysics, philosophy of language, and logic. He is celebrated for his gro…
Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus was a Greek philosopher and physician who lived during the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. He is the most important and comprehensive source for the …
Seymour Bernard Sarason
Seymour Bernard Sarason was a pioneering American psychologist and a foundational figure in the field of community psychology. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he ea…
Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006) established the social requisites of democracy as the central problematic of comparative politics, arguing that democratic sta…
Shantideva
Shantideva was an 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk, philosopher, and poet, renowned as one of the most profound figures in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition[refer…
Shelley E. Taylor
Shelley E. Taylor is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a pioneering founder of health psychology…
Shinobu Kitayama
Shinobu Kitayama is a Japanese social psychologist and the Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he also dire…
Siddhartha Gautama
Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, was an Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher whose teachings founded Buddhism, one of the world's major religions. B…
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue. His la…
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, feminist theorist, and writer whose groundbreaking work revolutionized feminist philosop…
Socrates
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who is widely considered the founder of Western philosophy. He developed the Socratic method—a dialectical approach of…
Solomon Asch
Solomon Asch (1907–1996) was a pioneering Polish-American social psychologist whose experiments on conformity fundamentally reshaped the field. He is best known…
Sonja Lyubomirsky
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Russian-born American psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside[reference:0]. She…