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Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher,
poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden,
draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the
concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He
sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life,
not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau's
work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was
well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging
from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and
was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom
literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with
modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the
Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the
German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau's
philosophy. He discussed his own scientific findings with
leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of
Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration. His
philosophical explorations of self and world led him to
develop an epistemology of embodied perception and a
non-dualistic account of mental and material life. In addition
to his focus on ethics in an existential spirit, Thoreau also
makes unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of
science, and radical political thought. Although his political
essays have become justly famous, his works on natural science
were not even published until the late twentieth century, and
they help to give us a more complete picture of him as a
thinker. Among the texts he left unfinished was a set of
manuscript volumes filled with information on Native American
religion and culture. Thoreau's work anticipates certain later
developments in pragmatism, phenomenology, and environmental
philosophy, and poses a perennially valuable challenge to our
conception of the methods and intentions of philosophy itself.
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