Philosophy
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100 free Philosophy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free philosophy trivia questions with answers. Dive into the world of philosophical thought with our engaging trivia quiz. Whether you're a student of philosophy or simply curious about life's big questions, this quiz will test your knowledge of ethics, metaphysics, logic, and the greatest minds in Western and Eastern philosophy. See how well you understand the fundamental concepts that have shaped human thinking.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Greek philosopher is associated with a question-and-answer method of inquiry?
Socrates
In Plato's Theaetetus, Socrates compares his questioning to midwifery, drawing understanding out of his partners rather than putting it in.
Q 02In which of Plato's works does he present the Allegory of the Cave?
Republic
Republic sets the cave in Book VII: prisoners chained since childhood take shadows on a wall for reality, and would kill anyone who tried to drag them up into the daylight.
Q 03What Kantian concept says an action is moral if its maxim can be universalised without contradiction?
Categorical Imperative
The Categorical Imperative rules out a false promise to repay a loan, in Kant's own example: if everyone made such promises, nobody would believe them and lending would stop.
Q 04Which 20th-century philosopher built his 1927 book Being and Time around the term 'Dasein'?
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger took Dasein, the ordinary German word for 'existence' that earlier philosophers had also used, and made it his name for the kind of being that humans alone have.
Q 05Which branch of philosophy is concerned with the nature of knowledge, its acquisition, and its limits?
Epistemology
Epistemology takes its name from the Greek episteme, 'knowledge'. Its questions go back to Plato, but the word itself is young: it was coined only in the mid-19th century.
Q 06'Cogito, ergo sum' ('I think, therefore I am') is a cornerstone of whose philosophy?
René Descartes
René Descartes first wrote it in French, 'je pense, donc je suis', in his 1637 Discourse on the Method; the famous Latin wording came later, in his Principles of Philosophy.
Q 07Which philosopher is best known for 'tabula rasa', the idea that we are born without innate mental content?
John Locke
John Locke opened his Essay Concerning Human Understanding by attacking the belief in innate ideas, then pictured the newborn mind as 'white paper, void of all characters' for experience to write on.
Q 08Which Greek philosopher lived in a large jar and carried a lit lantern by day, 'looking for a man'?
Diogenes
Diogenes also mocked Plato's definition of man as a 'featherless biped': he plucked a chicken, carried it into the lecture room and announced, 'Here is Plato's man.'
Q 09Which ethical framework is often summarized by the phrase 'the greatest good for the greatest number'?
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism counts every creature's pain and pleasure, which led its founder to argue that animals matter too: the question, he wrote, is not whether they can reason or talk but 'Can they suffer?'
Q 10Which philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium emphasises virtue, reason and harmony with nature?
Stoicism
Stoicism is named after a building: Zeno taught at the Stoa Poikile, the 'Painted Porch' in Athens, and his followers became known as the people of the porch.
Q 11Which thought experiment did English philosopher Philippa Foot introduce in a 1967 paper?
Trolley problem
The trolley problem began as Foot's driver of a runaway tram who must choose between killing five people and killing one; the name came later, from the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson.
Q 12Aristotle's view that each virtue lies between two extremes, like courage between cowardice and rashness, goes by what name?
Golden Mean
The Golden Mean is no fixed midpoint for Aristotle: the food ration that suits a champion wrestler, he noted, is too much for a beginner, so the right amount depends on the person.
Q 13Which philosophical school is traditionally set against empiricism over where knowledge comes from?
Rationalism
Q 21The 'Will to Power' is a central idea in the philosophy of which German thinker?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche only considered writing a book called The Will to Power; the volume published under that title in 1901, after his death, was assembled from his notes by his sister Elisabeth.
Q 22Which French existentialist wrote Being and Nothingness?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre later turned down the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, explaining that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.
Q 23Which 17th-century thinker described reality as made of simple substances called 'monads'?
Gottfried Leibniz
Rationalism trusts reason over the senses and took mathematics as its model: one of its champions even wrote out his ethics as a chain of geometric proofs, with definitions, axioms and propositions.
Q 14Whose ship, repaired plank by plank in Athens, gave its name to a puzzle about identity?
Theseus
Theseus's ship had its rotting timbers replaced until philosophers disputed whether it was the same vessel, Plutarch reports; a later twist asks about a second ship built from the discarded planks.
Q 15Which English philosopher set out social contract theory in his 1651 book Leviathan?
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan for a strong sovereign to escape the 'state of nature', a 'war of all against all'.
Q 16The ancient Greek school of philosophy founded by Plato was known by what name?
The Academy
The Academy met in an olive grove outside the walls of Athens that was linked to a legendary hero, Akademos; the grove's name has meant a place of learning ever since.
Q 17Which ancient Greek philosopher is considered the founder of Skepticism, advocating suspension of judgment?
Pyrrho of Elis
Pyrrho of Elis wrote nothing himself. He is said to have travelled as far as India with a Greek army and met ascetics the Greeks called 'naked wise men', a meeting one ancient biographer credits for his philosophy.
Q 18Which English jurist and 'greatest happiness' theorist devised the 'felicific calculus'?
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham applied his test of usefulness even to his own corpse: his will had his body dissected, then preserved and dressed as an 'auto-icon', which went to University College London in 1850.
Q 19Which philosopher developed historical materialism, the theory that economic conditions shape a society's laws, politics and ideas?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx summed it up by turning a common assumption upside down: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.'
Q 20Which Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician was killed by an Alexandrian mob in 415 AD?
Hypatia
Hypatia advised the Roman prefect Orestes, and a rumour blamed her for his feud with Bishop Cyril; a mob led by a church reader named Peter dragged her from her carriage and killed her.
Gottfried Leibniz set out his monads in the Monadology of 1714. He also developed calculus independently of Newton, and it was his notation that became the standard.
Q 24Which philosopher wrote 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' in his Tractatus?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus as a soldier in the First World War; convinced it had solved every problem of philosophy, he gave away his fortune and went off to teach in a village school.
Q 25Which French philosopher wrote The Second Sex and explored the concept of 'the Other'?
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir's most quoted line comes from this book: 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', a sentence credited with separating gender from biological sex.
Q 26'Power-knowledge' and 'discourse' are central ideas of which French philosopher?
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault argued that power and knowledge feed each other: Discipline and Punish traces how prisons, schools and hospitals watch and examine people, then use what they learn to control them.
Q 27Which philosopher explored "the absurd" in his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus"?
Albert Camus
Albert Camus's 1942 essay locates the absurd in the clash between our need for meaning and the 'unreasonable silence' of the universe, and concludes that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Q 28Which 19th-century philosopher, called the 'Father of Existentialism', emphasised individual choice and the 'leap of faith'?
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard published much of his work under pseudonyms such as Johannes Climacus and Victor Eremita, and spent his last years in a public feud with the Danish state church.
Q 29Which ancient Chinese philosopher is traditionally credited with founding Taoism?
Laozi
Laozi, the legend goes, saw the Zhou dynasty in decline and was on his way out when the keeper of a pass asked him to write down his teachings first; the result was the Tao Te Ching.
Q 30Which collection of sayings, compiled by his followers, is the main record of the teachings of Confucius?
The Analects
The Analects show Confucius claiming to invent nothing: he calls himself someone who 'transmits, but does not innovate', handing on the ways of earlier sages.