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In the 18th century the philosophies of The Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known as Romanticism sought to combine the formal rationality of the past, with a greater and more immediate emotional and organic sense of the world. Key ideas that sparked this change were evolution, as postulated by Erasmus, Darwin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and what might now be called emergent order, such as the free market of Adam Smith. Pressures for egalitarianism, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.

With the tumultuous years of 1789-1815, European culture was transformed by revolution, war and disruption. By ending many of the social and cultural props of the previous century, the stage was set for dramatic economic and political change. European philosophy participated in, and drove, many of these changes.

The last third of the 18th century produced a host of ideas and works which would both systematize previous philosophy, and present a deep challenge to the basis of how philosophy had been systematized. Immanuel Kant is a name that most would mention as being among the most important of influences, as is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While both of these philosophers were products of the 18th century and its assumptions, they pressed at the boundaries. In trying to explain the nature of the state and government, Rousseau would challenge the basis of government with his declaration that "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Kant, while attempting to preserve axiomic skepticism, was forced to argue that we do not see reality, nor do we speak of it, only how it appears to us.

One of the first philosophers to attempt to synthesize these influence was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose working out of Kantian metaphysics included incorporation of what would become the major movement in European arts and letters for the next 50 years, Romanticism. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, he argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.

• Mikhail Bakunin, 1814 - 1876
• Jeremy Bentham, 1748 - 1832
• Henri Bergson, 1859 - 1941
• Émile Boutroux, 1845 - 1921
• Francis Herbert Bradley, 1846 - 1924
• Bernard Bolzano, 1781 - 1848
• Bernard Bosanquet, 1848 - 1923
• Franz Brentano, 1838 - 1907
• Georg F.L.P. Cantor, 1845 - 1918
• Auguste Comte, 1798 - 1857
• Charles Darwin, 1809 - 1882
• John Dewey, 1859 - 1952
• Wilhelm Dilthey, 1833 - 1911
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821 - 1881
• Frederick Engels, 1820 - 1895
• Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, 1804 - 1872
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762 - 1814
• Gottlob Frege, 1848 - 1925
• Sigmund Freud, 1856 - 1939
• Thomas Hill Green, 1836 - 1882
• Johann Georg Hamann, 1730 - 1788
• Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776 - 1841
• Alexander Herzen, 1812 - 1870
• Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767 - 1835
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 - 1831
• Johann Gottfried von Herder, 1744 - 1803
• Edmund Husserl, 1859 - 1938
• William James, 1842 - 1910
• Thomas Jefferson, 1743 - 1826
• Immanuel Kant, 1724 - 1804
• Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 - 1855
• Karl C.F. Krause, 1781 - 1832
• Peter Kropotkin, 1842 - 1921
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729 - 1781
• Ernst Mach, 1838 - 1916
• Solomon Maimon, 1754 - 1800
• Karl Marx, 1818 - 1883
• John Ellis McTaggart, 1866 - 1925
• Moses Mendelssohn, 1729 - 1786
• John Stuart Mill, 1806 - 1873
• Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 - 1900
• Charles Sanders Peirce, 1839 - 1914
• Josiah Royce, 1855 - 1916
• Bertrand Russell, 1872 - 1970
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, 1775 - 1854
• Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, 1768 - 1834
• Lou Andreas Salomé, 1861 - 1937
• George Santayana, 1863 - 1952
• Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805
• Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860
• Herbert Spencer, 1820 - 1903
• Hans Vaihinger, 1852 - 1933
• Alfred North Whitehead, 1861 - 1947
• Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759 - 1797

• Fichte from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy