Quiz
Put your knowledge to the test
Ten levels from first steps to mastery: the collection’s sixty thinkers, their ideas, works and movements, what brings them together and what sets them apart. Every answer comes with an explanation and a link back to their pages.
The quiz needs JavaScript. Here is its programme: ten levels, then the movements and thinkers it covers.
How it works
Each level offers practice rounds of ten questions, then a checkpoint: pass it to open the next level. The questions come from the collection’s pages, and what you miss comes back at growing intervals until it stays.
Ten levels
Level 1
First steps
Ten great figures from the Buddha to Beauvoir: their portraits, central questions, first concepts and dates.
15 questions · 12 right answers to pass
Level 2
Landmarks
The schools of antiquity and of Asia: Stoics, Epicureans, Daoists and Confucians, their works and their chronology.
15 questions · 12 right answers to pass
Level 3
Traditions
Faith and reason in the Middle Ages, falsafa and Renaissance humanism: ideas in full and the great movements.
- Boethius
- Hildegard
- Avicenna
- Averroes
- Maimonides
- Thomas Aquinas
- Ibn Khaldun
- Christine de Pizan
- Machiavelli
- Montaigne
15 questions · 12 right answers to pass
Level 4
Reason and experience
The early modern age and the Enlightenment: rationalists, empiricists, social contract theorists, and the order of births.
20 questions · 17 right answers to pass
Level 5
The age of revolutions
From the French Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century: idealism, emancipation, existence. And the first documented readings between thinkers.
20 questions · 17 right answers to pass
Level 6
Panorama
The twentieth century joins the whole: all sixty thinkers, their movements and their concepts put into practice.
20 questions · 17 right answers to pass
Level 7
Lineages
Who read whom, who was in dialogue with whom: the documented links between the sixty, and who shares a movement.
All sixty thinkers
20 questions · 17 right answers to pass
Level 8
Distinctions
Telling neighbouring ideas apart: explanations, exercises and reading lessons, set against close thinkers.
All sixty thinkers
20 questions · 17 right answers to pass
Level 9
Dialogues
Debates and gaps: odd ones out, direct exchanges, tight chronologies and crossed readings.
All sixty thinkers
20 questions · 17 right answers to pass
Level 10
Mastery
The final examination: forty questions from every level on all sixty thinkers. 34 right answers for mastery, 38 for distinction.
All sixty thinkers
40 questions · 34 right answers to pass
By thinker or by movement
By thinker
Choose one figure and revise everything about them: questions, concepts, works, dates, readings and dialogues.
- Pythagoras
- Buddha
- Confucius
- Heraclitus
- Laozi
- Socrates
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Mencius
- Zhuangzi
- Epicurus
- Lucretius
- Seneca
- Epictetus
- Marcus Aurelius
- Augustine of Hippo
- Boethius
- Avicenna
- Hildegard of Bingen
- Averroes
- Maimonides
- Thomas Aquinas
- Ibn Khaldun
- Christine de Pizan
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Michel de Montaigne
- Thomas Hobbes
- René Descartes
- Blaise Pascal
- John Locke
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Voltaire
- Émilie du Châtelet
- David Hume
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Denis Diderot
- Immanuel Kant
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- John Stuart Mill
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Henry David Thoreau
- Frederick Douglass
- Karl Marx
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Leo Tolstoy
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Sigmund Freud
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Virginia Woolf
- Franz Kafka
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Hannah Arendt
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Simone Weil
- Albert Camus
- Michel Foucault
By movement
From Stoicism to analytic philosophy, revise one movement: who belongs to it, what defines it and what sets it apart from its neighbours.
Archaic and classical Greek philosophy
From the Presocratics, who sought the principles of nature and change, to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who turned inquiry to ethics, knowledge and the city.
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Stoicism
A school founded in Athens around 300 BCE and continued in Rome: virtue, living in agreement with rational nature, is the only good and enough for happiness.
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Epicureanism
The school of the Garden, founded by Epicurus around 306 BCE: a physics of atoms and an ethics of pleasure understood as freedom from disturbance.
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Classical Chinese philosophy
Chinese thought of the sixth to third centuries BCE, divided between Confucianism (humaneness, ritual, self-cultivation) and Daoism (the Dao, spontaneity, non-coercive action).
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Indian philosophy
The traditions of the Indian subcontinent, from the Upanishads and Buddhism to their modern rereadings in the Bengal Renaissance.
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Christian thought
Philosophy and theology that think about reason, morals and existence in the light of Christian revelation, from the Church Fathers to modern writers.
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Medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy
Thought written mostly in Arabic from the ninth to the fourteenth century, in which Muslim and Jewish thinkers took up Greek philosophy and set it against revelation, law and history.
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Renaissance humanism
A movement of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries that sought to renew learning, morals and politics by recovering Greek and Latin texts.
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Rationalism
An early modern current for which reason, through innate ideas and deduction, is the first source of knowledge.
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Empiricism
A current for which all ideas and all knowledge come from experience, with no innate ideas.
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Social contract theory
A modern political theory that grounds legitimate authority in an agreement among free and equal individuals, often pictured as leaving a state of nature.
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The Enlightenment
A European movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that defended reason, science, toleration and reform against dogma and arbitrary power.
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German idealism
A movement that started from Kant’s critical philosophy and was carried on by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, for whom the activity of mind structures reality.
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Existentialism
A current named in the 1940s and prepared by nineteenth-century forerunners, which puts concrete existence at the centre: freedom, choice, anguish, authenticity.
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Feminist philosophy
Thought that analyses and contests the subordination of women, from the first defences of women to twentieth-century feminist theory.
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Nineteenth-century American thought
Two great currents of the nineteenth-century United States: Transcendentalism, a philosophy of nature and moral conscience, and abolitionism, which demanded the end of slavery.
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Twentieth-century continental philosophy
The traditions of mainland Europe in the twentieth century: phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, critical theory, structuralism and post-structuralism.
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