{
    "api": "YAML JSON TOON Database",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "format": "json",
    "dataset": {
        "slug": "major-philosophers",
        "title": "Major Philosophers",
        "description": "Influential philosophers and their primary contributions.",
        "summary": "Major philosophers across traditions with a one-line description of their best-known contribution, from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and Mill to Confucius, Aquinas, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, Beauvoir and Rawls.",
        "use_when": [
            "You need to identify a philosopher by their central idea or find who is associated with a concept.",
            "You are building a timeline or reading list."
        ],
        "caveats": [
            "A one-line contribution is a pointer, not a summary; many thinkers wrote about several areas.",
            "The list is a selection. Its Western weighting reflects common curricula, not a ranking of importance."
        ],
        "related": [
            "philosophical-traditions",
            "ethics-moral-philosophy",
            "epistemology-terms",
            "metaphysics-concepts"
        ],
        "category": "Philosophy",
        "category_slug": "philosophy",
        "tags": "philosophy,philosophers,history",
        "view_count": 0,
        "entry_count": 27,
        "fields": [
            {
                "section": "data",
                "field": "philosopher",
                "type": "string",
                "example": "Socrates"
            },
            {
                "section": "data",
                "field": "contribution",
                "type": "string",
                "example": "Socratic method and ethical inquiry."
            }
        ]
    },
    "data": [
        {
            "philosopher": "Socrates",
            "contribution": "Socratic method and ethical inquiry."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Plato",
            "contribution": "Theory of Forms and ideal state."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Aristotle",
            "contribution": "Logic, ethics, and natural philosophy."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Descartes",
            "contribution": "Methodological doubt and mind-body dualism."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Kant",
            "contribution": "Categorical imperative and transcendental idealism."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Nietzsche",
            "contribution": "Will to power and critique of morality."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Mill",
            "contribution": "Utilitarianism and liberalism."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Confucius",
            "contribution": "Ethics of virtue, ritual and social harmony; foundation of Confucian thought."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Avicenna (Ibn Sina)",
            "contribution": "Synthesized Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought in the Islamic world; the 'floating man' argument and The Canon of Medicine."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Thomas Aquinas",
            "contribution": "Reconciled Aristotle with Christian theology; five ways to argue for God's existence."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Thomas Hobbes",
            "contribution": "Social contract theory in Leviathan, arguing for strong sovereign authority to escape the state of nature."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "John Locke",
            "contribution": "Empiricism, natural rights and limited government; influenced liberal political thought."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Baruch Spinoza",
            "contribution": "Rationalist monism in the Ethics: God or Nature as the one substance."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Gottfried Leibniz",
            "contribution": "Monads, the principle of sufficient reason and the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "David Hume",
            "contribution": "Empiricist skepticism about causation and induction; the is-ought problem."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau",
            "contribution": "The general will and the social contract; critique of inequality."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "G. W. F. Hegel",
            "contribution": "Dialectical idealism and a philosophy of history as the development of freedom."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Karl Marx",
            "contribution": "Historical materialism and the critique of capitalism."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Soren Kierkegaard",
            "contribution": "Founding figure of existentialism: individual choice, anxiety and the leap of faith."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Arthur Schopenhauer",
            "contribution": "The world as will and representation; a pessimistic account of desire."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Ludwig Wittgenstein",
            "contribution": "Analyzed the limits of language, from the Tractatus to the later view of meaning as use."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Martin Heidegger",
            "contribution": "Fundamental ontology in Being and Time: the question of the meaning of being."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Jean-Paul Sartre",
            "contribution": "Existentialism: existence precedes essence and humans are condemned to be free."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Simone de Beauvoir",
            "contribution": "Existentialist ethics and feminist theory in The Second Sex."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Hannah Arendt",
            "contribution": "Analysis of totalitarianism, political action and the banality of evil."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "John Rawls",
            "contribution": "A theory of justice as fairness using the original position and the veil of ignorance."
        },
        {
            "philosopher": "Nagarjuna",
            "contribution": "Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy of emptiness (sunyata)."
        }
    ]
}