Ideas travel through people. Choose a name to see who taught them, who inspired them, who they argued with, and how we know.
Everyone is listed in order of birth, so each arc runs from the earlier person down to the later one. Arcs that span many rows cross centuries: Plato reaching Schopenhauer, or the Buddha reaching Ambedkar. Only people on our Thinkers page are shown, so many links through others (Hegel, Tolstoy, Plotinus) are left out.
In order of the earlier person. We started from the “influenced by” and “student of” records in Wikidata, removed the ones we could not support, and added others from the thinkers’ own writings. Links marked “by tradition” rest on ancient stories that historians treat with caution.
By tradition Confucius visited Laozi and came away comparing him to a dragon (Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, ch. 63). Historians doubt the meeting.
The Zhuangzi tells stories of Lao Dan and quotes his teaching; the two books together became the core of Taoism.
Schopenhauer wrote that judged by his own philosophy, Buddhism would rank first among religions (The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, ch. 17).
Ambedkar called the Buddha, Kabir and Jotiba Phule his three gurus (speech, 1954), and became a Buddhist in 1956.
Plato followed Socrates as a young man and made him the speaker of almost all his dialogues.
By tradition Diogenes became a follower of Antisthenes, a student of Socrates (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives 6.21).
Kierkegaard’s dissertation was On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841).
Nietzsche attacked Socrates as a symptom of decline in “The Problem of Socrates” (Twilight of the Idols, 1888).
When Plato defined man as a featherless biped, Diogenes is said to have plucked a chicken and brought it to the Academy (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives 6.40).
Aristotle studied and taught at Plato’s Academy for about twenty years, then rejected his theory of Forms (Nicomachean Ethics 1.6).
Augustine says “certain books of the Platonists”, read in Latin translation, prepared his way to Christianity (Confessions 7.9).
The historian Socrates Scholasticus says she succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus (Ecclesiastical History 7.15).
Schopenhauer named Plato, with Kant and the Upanishads, as the foundations of his philosophy (The World as Will and Representation, preface).
Popper called the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) “The Spell of Plato”.
Weil read Plato as a mystic; see her essay “God in Plato” (Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks).
Asked by Alexander what he wanted, Diogenes is said to have replied: stand out of my light (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives 6.38).
Philip II of Macedon hired Aristotle to tutor the thirteen-year-old Alexander, from about 343 BCE.
In his autobiography Avicenna says he read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times before a commentary by al-Farabi made it clear.
Though a Stoic, Seneca ends many of his early Letters to Lucilius with a saying of Epicurus.
Marx’s doctoral thesis (1841) compared the natural philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus.
Marcus thanks his teacher Rusticus for lending him the discourses of Epictetus (Meditations 1.7).
Eckhart’s sermons and Latin works cite Augustine again and again.
Camus wrote his 1936 university thesis on Plotinus and Augustine (Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism).
Gandhi translated and published Tolstoy’s A Letter to a Hindu (1909), which quotes the Kural on returning good for evil.
Vivekananda carried Shankara’s non-dual Advaita Vedanta to the West in lectures such as Jnana Yoga.
Tagore translated a hundred of Kabir’s poems into English as Songs of Kabir (1915).
Ambedkar’s father followed Kabir’s teaching, and Ambedkar named Kabir among his three gurus (1954).
Spinoza’s first published book was an exposition of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (1663).
Chomsky traced his ideas about language back to Descartes in Cartesian Linguistics (1966).
“I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” Nietzsche wrote of Spinoza (postcard to Franz Overbeck, 30 July 1881).
Kant wrote that the memory of David Hume first interrupted his “dogmatic slumber” (Prolegomena, 1783, preface).
The preface to The World as Will and Representation (1818) asks readers to know Kant first, along with Plato and the Upanishads.
Nietzsche found Schopenhauer in a Leipzig bookshop in 1865 and later wrote Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) before turning against him.
In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus counts Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, with Jaspers and Chestov, as “philosophical suicide”.
The second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) is a critique of Hegel and Marx.
Sartre called Marxism the philosophy of our time, which cannot be gone beyond (Search for a Method, 1957).
Narendranath Datta met Ramakrishna in 1881 and became his leading disciple, later Swami Vivekananda.
Camus devotes a chapter of The Rebel (1951), “Nietzsche and Nihilism”, to him.
Friends who disagreed in public: Tagore’s “The Call of Truth” and Gandhi’s reply “The Great Sentinel” (1921), over burning foreign cloth.
Aurobindo said that in Alipore jail (1908–09) he heard Vivekananda’s voice speaking to him for a fortnight (Sri Aurobindo on Himself).
They clashed over separate electorates for Dalits, settled in the Poona Pact (1932); see Ambedkar’s What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945).
They met in 1929 and read and criticised each other’s work for fifty years; the influence ran both ways.
Friends in the 1940s, they broke publicly in 1952 over Camus’ The Rebel and its criticism of revolutionary violence.
