| Alkmaion | fifth century BCE | Body | The brain is the centre of the senses; sensory pathways lead to it. 122 |
| Hippocratic school | fifth century BCE | Body | Joy, sorrow and thought are attributed to the brain in On the Sacred Disease. 123 |
| Aristotle | fourth century BCE | Meaning · Processes | Investigates language, thought and things, syllogism, perception and memory. The physiological role attributed to the heart must not reduce the whole account of intellect to a claim about one organ. 31 |
| Galen | second century | Body | Describes functions of nerves and brain ventricles through experiment. 124 |
| Heraclitus | sixth century BCE | Meaning | Logos as a common measure to which people should attend. 125 |
| Parmenides | fifth century BCE | Meaning | Connects thinking and being, and challenges thinking what is not. The interpretation of the fragments remains disputed. 24 |
| Plato | fourth century BCE | Meaning · Life | Discusses the correctness of names, warns about writing and memory, and develops accounts of forms. 29 |
| Pāṇini | fourth century BCE | Meaning | Sanskrit grammar demonstrates a rule-governed formal analysis of language. 126 |
| Stoics | third century BCE | Processes · Meaning | Assenting to an impression is an act; lekton concerns what is said or meant. 127 |
| Socrates | fifth century BCE | Life | Examines life through reciprocal questioning. 128 |
| Confucius | sixth century BCE | Life | Connects learning and reflection, warning against either without the other. 100 |
| Buddha and Abhidharma | fifth century BCE | Life · Processes | Early Buddhist teachings question a permanent self. Later Abhidharma traditions classify mental processes; the periods should not be collapsed into one date. 65 |
| Nyāya tradition | second century BCE | Processes | Accounts of sources of knowledge, including perception, inference and testimony, and the structure of inference. 73 |
| Cicero and Quintilianus | first century BCE | Life · Processes | Cultivates thinking for public speech through rhetoric and the art of memory. 129 |
| Stoic practice (Epictetus, Seneca) | first century | Life | Treats judgement as something to practise in daily life and distinguishes what lies within our control. 130 |
| Plotinus | third century | Meaning | Intellect proceeds from the One; thought turns towards itself. 79 |
| Augustine | fourth century | Life · Processes | Narrates inner life, explores memory and examines signs and learning. 99 |
| Halîl bin Ahmed | eighth century | Meaning | Organises Arabic roots through a phonetic arrangement in an early dictionary. 107 |
| Sîbeveyhi | eighth century | Meaning | Foundational Arabic grammar connecting structure and meaning. 131 |
| Râzî | ninth century | Body · Processes | Clinical observation and case records, including questions directed at Galen. 132 |
| Hakîm et-Tirmizî | ninth century | Meaning · Life | Sadr, qalb, fuʾād and lubb as four rings connected with degrees of knowing. 40 |
| Fârâbî | tenth century | Meaning · Processes | Examines philosophical terms developing from ordinary language and distinguishes degrees of intellect. 133 |
| İbnü'l-Heysem | eleventh century | Body · Processes | Accounts of vision include mental inference and habit, beyond the eye’s reception alone. 134 |
| İbn Sînâ | eleventh century | Processes · Body | Common sense, imagination, estimation and memory; apprehension and assent; the flying person argument. 39 |
| Bîrûnî | eleventh century | Processes · Life | Observation, measurement and comparison across cultures as questions of method. 135 |
| Gazzâlî | eleventh century | Processes · Life | The route from doubt to certainty; the heart as mirror; logic as an instrument of assessment. 98 |
| İbn Cinnî and İbn Fâris | tenth century | Meaning | Examines the origin of language and shared meanings within word families. 108 |
| Kâşgarlı Mahmud | eleventh century | Meaning | Early witnesses for Turkish vocabulary of thinking in Dīwān Lughat al-Turk. 136 |
| İbn Rüşd | twelfth century | Processes · Meaning | Debates the unity of intellect and the relation between philosophy and religion. 137 |
| İbnü'l-Arabî | thirteenth century | Meaning | Imagination and unveiling within relations between knowing and being; neither mere subjective perception nor undifferentiated irrationality. 61 |
| Mevlânâ | thirteenth century | Life · Meaning | Explores relations between intellect, love and what exceeds expression. 138 |
| Yunus Emre | thirteenth century | Life · Meaning | A major Turkish voice connecting knowledge with knowing oneself; the historical priority claim requires its own evidence. 139 |
| İbnü'n-Nefîs | thirteenth century | Body | An account of pulmonary circulation challenging Galen’s model of the heart. 140 |
| Thomas Aquinas | thirteenth century | Meaning · Processes | Apprehension and discursive reasoning are related activities, not separate human powers; knowing is considered with sensory experience. 101 |
| Ockham | fourteenth century | Meaning | Mental language and restraint in multiplying entities unnecessarily. 141 |
| İbn Haldun | fourteenth century | Life | Forms of thought considered in relation to social life. 142 |
| Montaigne | 1580 | Life | The essay as written self-examination and the question of what we know. 143 |
| Galileo | 1623 | Life | Mathematical description of nature and measurement as a standard. 144 |
| Bacon | 1620 | Processes | Examines induction, experiment and sources of error; not presented here as history’s first list of biases. 145 |
| Descartes | 1637 | Processes · Meaning | Method, clear and distinct ideas, thinking and the relation between soul and body. 43 |
| Hobbes | 1651 | Processes | Reasoning described through addition and subtraction. 146 |
| Pascal | 1670 | Life · Processes | Relations between heart and reason, probability and the calculating machine. 147 |
| Spinoza | 1677 | Life · Meaning | The geometrical treatment of affects; mind as the idea of the body. 148 |
| Locke | 1690 | Meaning · Processes | Ideas derived from experience and words as signs of ideas. 149 |
| Leibniz | 1684 | Meaning · Life | Symbolic reasoning and the calculating machine. 150 |
| Newton | 1687 | Life | Mathematical reasoning about natural laws and method as a model. 151 |
| Vico | 1725 | Life · Meaning | Knowing what humans make, with history as a route to understanding thought. 152 |
| Hume | 1739 | Processes | Association, passions and habitual expectations of causality. 153 |
| Rousseau | 1762 | Life | An account of education and the order of developing thought. 154 |
| Adam Smith | 1759 / 1776 | Life | Moral sentiments, the impartial spectator and the effects of divided labour on thought. 155 The Theory of Moral Sentiments: 1759; The Wealth of Nations: 1776. Matched to the existing bibliography; full passages were not reread. |
| Kant | 1781 | Meaning · Processes | Sensibility, understanding and reason; categories; phenomena and noumena; thinking for oneself. 3 |
| Bayes and Laplace | 1763 | Life · Processes | Inference under uncertainty and updating belief through probability. 156 |
| Hegel | 1807 | Meaning · Life | The historical development of concepts and spirit’s self-understanding. 114 |
| Humboldt | 1836 | Meaning | Language as activity rather than a finished product, related to a way of viewing the world. 157 |
| Bopp and Grimm | 1822 | Meaning | Comparative linguistics and regularities in relationships among languages. 158 |
| Kierkegaard | 1846 | Life | Existence, subjective truth and a person’s relation to their life; not a rejection of thinking altogether. 159 |
| Mill | 1843 | Processes · Life | A system of logic and freedom of expression as a condition for testing truth claims. 160 |
| Boole | 1854 | Processes · Meaning | An algebraic treatment of logic. 161 |
| Babbage and Lovelace | 1843 | Life · Processes | The mechanisation of calculation and Lovelace’s qualification concerning origination. 162 |
| Helmholtz | 1867 | Body · Processes | Unconscious inference in perception and the speed of nerve conduction. 163 |
| Broca and Wernicke | 1861 | Body | Lesion evidence concerning localisation of language functions. 164 |
| Marx | 1859 | Life | Social existence and consciousness; praxis. 165 |
| Darwin | 1872 | Body · Life | The evolutionary history of mental capacities and the expression of emotion. 115 |
| Wundt and Ebbinghaus | 1885 | Processes | Experimental psychology and the measurement of memory and forgetting. 166 |
| Nietzsche | 1887 | Life · Meaning | Genealogy of concepts, perspectives and embodied thought. 116 |
| Peirce | 1878 | Meaning · Processes | Signs, inference to a possible explanation and the pragmatic maxim. 167 |
| Frege | 1892 | Meaning · Processes | Sense, reference and quantificational logic. 168 |
| Dilthey | 1883 | Life | Lived experience, understanding and the human sciences. 169 |
| William James | 1890 | Processes · Life | Attention, habit, the stream of consciousness and pragmatism. 67 |
| Ramón y Cajal | 1888 | Body | Nervous tissue understood through individual nerve cells and their connections. 66 |
| Sherrington and Pavlov | 1906 | Body · Processes | Synapses, reflex integration and conditioning, as distinct contributions. 170 |
| Saussure | 1916 | Meaning | Signifier and signified; meaning through differences. 15 |
| Bergson | 1896 | Processes · Life | Duration, memory and the distinction between intuition and intelligence. 171 |
| Husserl | 1900 | Processes · Life | Intentionality, the lifeworld and phenomenological method. 60 |
| Dewey | 1910 | Life · Processes | Reflective inquiry, problems and learning through activity. 172 |
| Weber and Durkheim | 1905 | Life | Rationalisation and collective representations, as distinct contributions. 173 |
| Russell and Whitehead | 1910 | Meaning · Processes | The logicist programme and the theory of descriptions, with their distinct authorship and scope. 174 |
| Vygotsky and Piaget | 1934 | Processes · Life | Social speech and inner speech; developmental stages, as distinct programmes. 175 |
| Bartlett | 1932 | Processes | Remembering as reconstruction through schemas. 176 |
| Gestalt school | 1912 | Processes | The organisation of wholes and insight in problem-solving. 177 |
| Heidegger | 1954 | Life · Meaning | Denken, Danken and Gedanc; the question concerning technology. 8 |
| Wittgenstein | 1953 | Meaning · Life | Meaning, forms of life and the criticism of private language. 2 |
| Gödel | 1931 | Processes | Limits of consistent, effectively axiomatised systems capable of expressing arithmetic under specified conditions; not an unconditional result about every system or the human mind. 178 |
| Turing | 1936 | Processes · Body | Computability and the imitation game; the works and dates remain distinct. 59 |
| Shannon and Wiener | 1948 | Life · Processes | Information theory, communication, feedback and control. 117 |
| von Neumann | 1945 | Body · Processes | Stored-program architecture and comparisons between computer and brain. 179 |
| Hebb | 1949 | Body | Proposes changes in connections and cell assemblies through experience; a co-activation slogan is not the entire learning theory. 27 |
| Arendt | 1963 / 1978 | Life | The Life of the Mind, thoughtlessness and the banality of evil, in distinct works. 180 Eichmann in Jerusalem: 1963; The Life of the Mind: 1978. The works retain separate dates, based on the existing bibliography. |
| Merleau-Ponty | 1945 | Life · Body | Perception and thought through a body situated in the world. 71 |
| Hodgkin and Huxley | 1952 | Body | A mathematical model of the action potential. 181 |
| Miller | 1956 | Processes | Capacity limits in specified short-term memory and absolute-judgement tasks; not a universal constant for every form of memory. 118 |
| Chomsky | 1957 / 1959 | Meaning · Processes | Universal grammar and the criticism of behaviourism, in works with separate dates. 119 Syntactic Structures: 1957; the review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior: 1959. Bibliographic comparison is not a complete reading. |
| Newell and Simon | 1972 | Processes · Life | Physical symbol systems and bounded rationality, as distinct contributions. 57 |
| Polanyi | 1958 | Life | Knowing more than we can explicitly tell. 182 |
| Kuhn | 1962 | Life | Paradigms and scientific revolutions. 183 |
| Licklider and Engelbart | 1962 | Life · Processes | Human–computer symbiosis and augmenting intelligence through tools. 184 |
| Hubel and Wiesel | 1959 | Body | Feature-selective responses in the visual cortex. 185 |
| Sperry and Gazzaniga | 1967 | Body · Life | Split-brain research and accounts of an interpreting left hemisphere. 186 |
| Quine | 1960 | Meaning | Indeterminacy of translation and semantic holism. 187 |
| Foucault | 1966 | Life · Meaning | The historical conditions of discourse and what can be thought. 188 |
| Gadamer and Ricoeur | 1960 | Life · Meaning | The fusion of horizons and narrative identity, as distinct contributions. 189 |
| Habermas | 1981 | Life | Testing validity claims through discussion. 190 |
| McLuhan and Ong | multiple works/periods (1982 applies only to Ong’s Orality and Literacy) | Life · Meaning | McLuhan considers media’s social roles; Ong examines oral and literate cultures. One year and work cannot represent both contributions. 46 |
| Weizenbaum and Dreyfus | 1976 | Life · Processes | ELIZA, the limits of computational explanations and embodied skill, with distinct works and dates. 191 |
| Baddeley and Hitch | 1974 | Processes | A temporary system with multiple components. 26 |
| Tulving | 1972 | Processes | The distinction between episodic and semantic memory. 192 |
| Kahneman and Tversky | 1974 | Processes · Life | Heuristics, biases and distinctions among forms of processing. 33 |
| Nagel | 1974 | Life | The subjective character of experience and the limits of reduction. 11 |
| Flavell | 1979 | Processes | Monitoring and regulating one’s cognition. 193 |
| Marr | 1982 | Processes · Body | Computational, algorithmic and implementation levels. 194 |
| Searle | 1980 | Life · Processes | The argument that syntax alone does not establish semantics. 18 |
| Fodor | 1975 (language of thought) and 1983 (modularity) | Meaning · Processes | The 1975 account of a language of thought and the 1983 modularity account belong to different works; contribution and date must be matched. 195 |
| Rosch; Lakoff and Johnson | 1975 | Meaning · Body | Prototype theory and conceptual metaphor are distinct contributions, not one joint experiment. 32 |
| Libet | 1983 | Body · Life | Relations between readiness potentials and reported awareness of willing. 196 |
| Rumelhart, McClelland, Hinton | 1986 | Processes · Body | Learning through distributed connection weights. 121 |
| Dennett and Paul M. Churchland | 1991 | Life · Body | Dennett’s multiple drafts and Paul M. Churchland’s criticism of folk psychology, not one shared position. 6419 Multiple drafts: Dennett 1991; eliminative materialism: Paul M. Churchland 1981. Patricia Churchland is not represented by this entry. |
| Kandel | 2001 | Body | Molecular accounts of memory and synaptic change. 197 |
| Damasio | 1994 | Body · Processes | Investigates contributions of emotion and bodily states to decision-making and self; not a claim that every rational decision fails without emotion. 37 |
| LeDoux | 1996 | Body | Neural pathways associated with defensive responses and emotion. 198 |
| Crick and Koch | 1990 | Body | A research programme seeking neural correlates of consciousness. 199 |
| Varela, Thompson, Rosch | 1991 | Life · Body | Cognition considered through action in a world. 58 |
| Hutchins | 1995 | Life · Processes | Thinking distributed across people and tools. 200 |
| Chalmers | 1995 | Life | The hard problem and, in separate work with Clark, the extended mind. 12 |
| Clark | 1998 | Life · Processes | Extended and predictive accounts of mind. 4 |
| Sweller and Bjork | 1988 | Processes · Life | Cognitive load and desirable difficulties, as distinct contributions. 35 |
| Tomasello | 1999 | Life · Processes | Joint attention and cultural learning in accounts of human development. 36 |
| Tononi | 2004 | Body | Integrated information theory. 88 |
| Dehaene | 2010 | Body · Processes | Global workspace accounts and research concerning literacy and brain organisation. 42 |
| Friston | 2010 | Body · Processes | Develops the free energy principle, related to predictive processing; not a definition of all thinking as minimising prediction error. 6 |
| Mercier and Sperber | 2011 | Processes · Life | The proposal that reasoning evolved for argumentation. 201 |
| Izutsu | 1964 | Meaning | Semantic fields in Qur’anic relations between God and human beings. 202 |
| Clauson | 1972 | Meaning | An etymological dictionary of Turkish before the thirteenth century. 44 |
| Meriç, Topçu, Duralı | 1974 | Life · Meaning | Essays on thought, culture and philosophy of science in Turkish. 203 |
| Fedorenko | 2024 | Body · Processes | The 2024 review examines dissociations between language networks and thinking tasks; language is not thereby irrelevant to every thinking practice. 1 |
| Vaswani and colleagues | 2017 | Body · Processes | An attention-based transformer architecture. 25 |
| Bender and colleagues | 2021 | Meaning · Life | The stochastic parrot critique distinguishing linguistic form from meaning. 41 |
| COGITATE Consortium | 2025 | Body | Preregistered adversarial testing of consciousness theories. 7 |
| Floridi | 2019 | Life | Philosophy of information, artificial intelligence ethics and distributed agency. 204 |
| Malone; Sharot | multiple works/periods | Life · Processes | Malone examines collaborative arrangements; Sharot studies human–system interaction and judgement. Works and dates must remain separate; 2018 does not date the entire entry. 87 |
| Wang and colleagues | 2026 | Life · Processes | An unreviewed preprint reports more frequent manuscript revision among authors receiving language-model feedback. 205 |
| Zhao and colleagues | 2026 | Life · Processes | Nursing students using an artificial tutor obtained higher anatomy scores; the contribution of artificial intelligence was not isolated. 206 |
| Jain and colleagues | 2026 | Life · Processes | Assisted participants gave more correct answers and reported less mental effort; long-term learning was not measured. 207 |
| Zhu and colleagues | 2026 | Life · Processes | A three-wave survey links dependent offloading with agency transfer and lower intrinsic motivation; it does not establish causality. 208 |