#13701
Stilpo
359 BC - 279 BC (80 years)
Stilpo was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He was a contemporary of Theophrastus, Diodorus Cronus, and Crates of Thebes. None of his writings survive, but he is described in the writings of others as being interested in logic and dialectic, and he argued that the universal is fundamentally separated from the individual and concrete. His ethical teachings approached that of the Cynics and Stoics. His most important followers were Pyrrho, the founder of Pyrrhonism, and Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Gaius Musonius Rufus
25 - 95 (70 years)
Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD. He taught philosophy in Rome during the reign of Nero and so was sent into exile in 65 AD, returning to Rome only under Galba. He was allowed to stay in Rome when Vespasian banished all other philosophers from the city in 71 AD although he was eventually banished anyway, returning only after Vespasian's death. A collection of extracts from his lectures still survives. He is also remembered for being the teacher of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom.
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Mir Damad
1561 - 1631 (70 years)
Mir Damad , known also as Mir Mohammad Baqer Esterabadi, or Asterabadi, was a Twelver Shia Iranian philosopher in the Neoplatonizing Islamic Peripatetic traditions of Avicenna. He also was a Suhrawardi, a scholar of the traditional Islamic sciences, and foremost figure of the cultural renaissance of Iran undertaken under the Safavid dynasty. He was also the central founder of the School of Isfahan, noted by his students and admirers as the Third Teacher after Aristotle and al-Farabi.
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Ernest Newman
1868 - 1959 (91 years)
Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective approach of other critics, such as Neville Cardus, was reflected in his books on Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and others. He was music critic of The Sunday Times from 1920 until his death nearly forty years later. His other positions included chief music critic of The Birmingham Post from ...
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Syed Zafarul Hasan
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Syed Zafarul Hasan was a prominent twentieth-century Pakistani Muslim philosopher. Biography He was the eldest son of Khan Sahib Syed Diwan Mohammad. Hasan was educated at Aligarh and obtained doctorates from the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg, Germany, and Oxford University. Dr Zafarul Hasan was the first Muslim Scholar of the Indian sub-continent to secure a PhD from Oxford in Philosophy. His doctoral thesis Realism is a classic on the subject. Prominent philosophers and educationists lauded his work, among them, his teacher Prof. John Alaxander Smith , and Allama Mohammad Iqbal.
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Hermann Ulrici
1806 - 1884 (78 years)
Hermann Ulrici was a German philosopher. He was co-editor of the philosophical journal Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. He also wrote under the pseudonym of Ulrich Reimann. Life Ulrici was born at Pförten, in the Niederlausitz region of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was educated at the in Berlin. He initially studied law, but gave up his profession on the death of his father, and devoted four years to the study of literature, philosophy and science. In 1834 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Halle, where he remained till his death.
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Charles Bell
1774 - 1842 (68 years)
Sir Charles Bell was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist, and philosophical theologian. He is noted for discovering the difference between sensory nerves and motor nerves in the spinal cord. He is also noted for describing Bell's palsy.
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Georg Anton Friedrich Ast
1778 - 1841 (63 years)
Georg Anton Friedrich Ast was a German philosopher and philologist. Biography Ast was born in Gotha. Educated there and at the University of Jena, he became a privatdozent at Jena in 1802. In 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the University of Landshut, where he remained until 1826, when it was transferred to Munich. He lived there until his death in 1841.
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François Hemsterhuis
1721 - 1790 (69 years)
François Hemsterhuis was a Dutch writer on aesthetics and moral philosophy. The son of Tiberius Hemsterhuis, he was born at Franeker in the Netherlands. He was educated at the University of Leiden, where he studied Plato. Failing to obtain a professorship, he entered the service of the state, and for many years acted as secretary to the state council of the United Provinces. He died at the Hague on 7 July 1790. Through his philosophical writings he became acquainted with many distinguished persons—Goethe, Herder, Princess Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin, and especially Jacobi, with whom he had much in common.
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Ai Siqi
1910 - 1966 (56 years)
Ài Sīqí is the pen name of Li Shengxuan , a Yunnan Mongol Chinese philosopher and author. He was born in Tengchong, Yunnan, later traveling to Hong Kong, where he studied English and French at a Protestant school and was exposed to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People and Marxism. He read a great deal of Marxism, including the Communist Manifesto, in Japanese translation. This reading is the root of Ai’s most important works, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism and Philosophy for the Masses . He was a delegate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd National People's Congress.
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Franjo Marković
1845 - 1914 (69 years)
Franjo Marković was a Croatian philosopher and writer. He was an academician, the first professor of philosophy at the renovated University of Zagreb in 1874. The defender of the identity of philosophy as a metaphysical discipline, as opposed to scholasticism on one side, and positivism and materialism on the other side.
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Béla Juhos
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Béla Juhos was a Hungarian-Austrian philosopher and member of the Vienna Circle. Life Juhos was born on 22 November 1901 in Vienna into a Hungarian family of low nobility . His father was a Hungarian tradesman and entrepreneur owning an iron wholesale in Vienna and Budapest. Juhos attended primary school in Budapest and spoke Hungarian as a child. In 1909 he moved to Vienna, where he learned German and completed Realgymnasium in 1920.
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John Veitch
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
John Veitch , Scottish philosopher, poet and historian. He was born in Peebles, the only son of Peninsular War veteran James Veitch and his wife Nancy Ritchie, a woman steeped in the folk traditions of the Borders. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh.
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Christian Thomasius
1655 - 1728 (73 years)
Christian Thomasius was a German jurist and philosopher. Biography He was born in Leipzig and was educated by his father, Jakob Thomasius , at that time a junior lecturer in Leipzig University . Through his father's lectures, Christian came under the influence of the political philosophy of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, and continued the study of law at the University of Frankfurt in 1675, completing his doctorate in 1679. In 1680, he married Anna Christine Heyland and started a legal practice in Leipzig; the following year he began teaching at the university’s law school as well. In 1...
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Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, he held the ...
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George Ohsawa
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
George Ohsawa was a Japanese educator who was the founder of the macrobiotic diet. When living in Europe he went by the pen names of Musagendo Sakurazawa, Nyoiti Sakurazawa, and Yukikazu Sakurazawa. He also used the French first name Georges while living in France, and his name is sometimes also given this spelling. He wrote about 300 books in Japanese and 20 in French. He defined health on the basis of seven criteria: lack of fatigue, good appetite, good sleep, good memory, good humour, precision of thought and action, and gratitude.
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Johann Bernhard Basedow
1723 - 1790 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Basedow was a German educational reformer, teacher and writer. He founded the Philanthropinum, a short-lived but influential progressive school in Dessau, and was the author of "Elementarwerk", a popular illustrated textbook for children.
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James Martineau
1805 - 1900 (95 years)
James Martineau was a British religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism. He was the brother of the atheist social theorist, abolitionist Harriet Martineau. James Martineau's children included the Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist Edith Martineau, and painter and woodcarver Gertrude Martineau.
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Linji Yixuan
850 - 866 (16 years)
Linji Yixuan was the founder of the Linji school of Chán Buddhism during Tang dynasty China. Línjì yǔlù Information on Linji is based on the Línjì yǔlù , the Record of Linji. The standard form of these sayings was not completed until two hundred fifty years after Linji's death, and likely reflects the teaching of Chán in the Linji school at the beginning of the Song dynasty rather than that of Linji in particular.
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Gustav Teichmüller
1832 - 1888 (56 years)
Gustav Teichmüller was a German philosopher. His works, particularly his notion of perspectivism, influenced Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. Biography Teichmüller was born in Braunschweig in the Duchy of Brunswick. He was the son of August Teichmüller and Charlotte Georgine Elisabeth Teichmüller, née von Girsewaldt. His father was a lieutenant in the Prussian army. His mother also came from a soldier's family.
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Otto Mencke
1644 - 1707 (63 years)
Otto Mencke was a 17th-century German philosopher and scientist. Work Mencke obtained his doctorate at the University of Leipzig in August 1666 with a thesis entitled: Ex Theologia naturali – De Absoluta Dei Simplicitate, Micropolitiam, id est Rempublicam In Microcosmo Conspicuam.
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Caspar Neher
1897 - 1962 (65 years)
Caspar Neher was an Austrian-German scenographer and librettist, known principally for his career-long working relationship with Bertolt Brecht. Neher was born in Augsburg. He and Brecht were school friends who were separated for a time by the First World War, during which Neher was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class . In 1919, he studied under Angelo Jank at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He was first engaged professionally by the Munich Kammerspiele in 1922, although his designs for its production of Brecht's Drums in the Night were rejected. On 18 August 1923, Neher married Erika Tornquist in Graz.
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Edward Spencer Beesly
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Edward Spencer Beesly was an English positivist, trades union activist, and historian. Life He was born on 23 January 1831 in Feckenham, Worcestershire, the eldest son of the Rev. James Beesly and his wife, Mary Fitzgerald, of Queen's county, Ireland. After reading Latin and Greek with his father, in the autumn of 1846 Beesly was sent to King William's College on the Isle of Man, an evangelical establishment whose inadequate instruction and low moral tone were later depicted in Eric, or, Little by Little, by his school friend F. W. Farrar.
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Arturo Reghini
1878 - 1946 (68 years)
Arturo Reghini was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and esotericist. Biography Arturo Reghini was born in Florence on 12 November 1878. In 1898, he became a member of the Theosophical Society for which he founded a section in Rome. In 1903, he published in Palermo the first books of the editorial series named Biblioteca Teosofica and later Biblioteca filosofica
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Francisco Giner de los Ríos
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Francisco Giner de los Ríos was a philosopher, educator and one of the most influential Spanish intellectuals at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Biography He studied philosophy in Barcelona and Granada and eventually became professor of the philosophy of law and of international law at the University of Madrid. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Kantian German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
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Johann Christoph Gottsched
1700 - 1766 (66 years)
Johann Christoph Gottsched was a German philosopher, author and critic of the Enlightenment. Biography Early life He was born at Juditten near Königsberg , Brandenburg-Prussia, the son of a Lutheran clergyman, and was baptised in St. Mary's Church. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Königsberg, but immediately on taking the degree of Magister in 1723, he fled to Leipzig to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army. In Leipzig, he enjoyed the protection of Johann Burckhardt Mencke, who, under the name of "Philander von der Linde", was a well-known poet and president of the Deutschübende poetische Gesellschaft in Leipzig.
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Vittorino da Feltre
1378 - 1446 (68 years)
Vittorino da Feltre was an Italian humanist and teacher. He was born in Feltre, Belluno, Republic of Venice and died in Mantua. His real name was Vittorino Rambaldoni. It was in Vittorino that the Renaissance idea of the complete man, or l'uomo universale — health of body, strength of character, wealth of mind — reached its first formulation.
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Gemistos Plethon
1355 - 1452 (97 years)
Georgios Gemistos Plethon , commonly known as Gemistos Plethon, was a Greek scholar and one of the most renowned philosophers of the late Byzantine era. He was a chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe. As revealed in his last literary work, the Nomoi or Book of Laws, which he circulated only among close friends, he rejected Christianity in favour of a return to the worship of the classical Hellenic gods, mixed with ancient wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi.
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Ben Nicholson
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM was an English painter of abstract compositions , landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in his country. Background and training Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 in Denham, Buckinghamshire, the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and brother of the artist Nancy Nicholson, the architect Christopher Nicholson and to Anthony Nicholson. His maternal grandmother Barbara Pryde was a niece of the famous artist brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. The family moved to London in 1896. Nic...
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Antonio Aliotta
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Antonio Aliotta was an Italian philosopher. He was born in Palermo and studied philosophy at the University of Florence, graduating in 1903. His initial work was in experimental psychology. In 1912 he won the Paladin prize for his work, La reazione idealistica contro la scienza. He became professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Padua from 1913 to 1919, then served as a professor at the University of Naples until 1951.
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Amelius
200 - 300 (100 years)
Amelius , whose family name was Gentilianus, was a Neoplatonist philosopher and writer of the second half of the 3rd century. Biography Amelius was a native of Tuscany. Originally a student of the works of Numenius of Apamea, he began attending the lectures of Plotinus in the third year after Plotinus came to Rome, and stayed with him for more than twenty years, until 269, when he retired to Apamea in Syria, the native place of Numenius. He is erroneously called Apameos by the Suda.
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Fazlur Rahman Malik
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Fazlur Rahman Malik , commonly known as Fazlur Rahman, was a modernist scholar and Islamic philosopher from today's Pakistan. Fazlur Rahman is renowned as a prominent liberal reformer of Islam, who devoted himself to educational reform and the revival of independent reasoning . His works are subject of widespread interest and criticism in Muslim-majority countries. He was protested by more than a thousand clerics, faqihs, muftis, and teachers in his own country and banished.
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Johannes Nikolaus Tetens
1736 - 1807 (71 years)
Johannes Nikolaus Tetens was a German-Danish philosopher, statistician and scientist. He has been called the "German Locke," on the basis of a comparison of his major work Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung with the work of John Locke. He is considered to have been an influence on Immanuel Kant.
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Rolf Schock
1933 - 1986 (53 years)
Rolf Schock was a Swedish–American philosopher and artist, born in Cap-d'Ail, France of German parents. Biography Schock was born at Cap-d'Ail on the French Riviera. His parents, who had left Germany, would eventually settle in the United States, where Schock would go on to obtain a bachelor's degree in geology at the University of New Mexico. After completing a bachelor of arts in 1955, he pursued studies in philosophy and logic from 1956 to 1960 at the University of California, first in Berkeley and then in Los Angeles , and in 1960 moved to Stockholm, Sweden, to specialize in theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University with a particular interest in free logic.
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Norman Kemp Smith
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Norman Duncan Kemp Smith, FBA, FRSE was a Scottish philosopher who was Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Princeton University and was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh .
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Paul Hensel
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Paul Hugo Wilhelm Hensel was a German philosopher. Biography Hensel was born in Groß-Barten in the Province of Prussia. He was the son of the landowner and entrepreneur Sebastian Hensel, brother of the mathematician Kurt Hensel, grandson of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn and the painter Wilhelm Hensel. Fanny was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, daughter of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and granddaughter of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. Both of Hensel's paternal grandmothers and his mother were from Jewish families that had converted to Christianity...
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Charles Renouvier
1815 - 1903 (88 years)
Charles Bernard Renouvier was a French philosopher. He considered himself a "Swedenborg of history" who sought to update the philosophy of Kantian liberalism and individualism for the socio-economic realities of the late nineteenth century, and influenced the sociological method of Émile Durkheim.
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Govinda Chandra Dev
1907 - 1971 (64 years)
Govinda Chandra Dev , known as Dr. G. C. Dev, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Dhaka. He was assassinated at the onset of Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 by the Pakistan Army. Early life and education Dev was born in the village of Lauta of the Panchakhanda Pargana of Sylhet District, East Bengal on 1 February 1907. His ancestors were high-caste Brahmins who settled in Sylhet from Gujarat. After his father's death at an early age, Dev was raised by the local Christian missionaries. Dev passed the Entrance Examination in first division from Biani Bazar High English School in 1925.
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Ruth L. Saw
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Ruth Lydia Saw was a British philosopher and aesthetician. Education and career Ruth Saw attended the County School for Girls in Wallington, Surrey, followed in 1926 by Bedford College, University of London, where she studied under Susan Stebbing. She accepted a position as lecturer in philosophy at Smith College and remained there for several years. She then returned to England and was appointed to a Lecturership in Philosophy at Bedford College in 1939 and remained there for the rest of her career. She became Reader in Philosophy in 1946 and then Professor of Aesthetics from 1961 to 1964. S...
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Epimenides
700 BC - 600 BC (100 years)
Epimenides of Cnossos was a semi-mythical 7th or 6th century BC Greek seer and philosopher-poet, from Knossos or Phaistos. Life While tending his father's sheep, Epimenides is said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years in a Cretan cave sacred to Zeus, after which he reportedly awoke with the gift of prophecy . Plutarch writes that Epimenides purified Athens after the pollution brought by the Alcmeonidae, and that the seer's expertise in sacrifices and reform of funeral practices were of great help to Solon in his reform of the Athenian state. The only reward he would accept was a branc...
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Shrimad Rajchandra
1867 - 1901 (34 years)
Shrimad Rajchandra was a Jain poet, mystic, philosopher, scholar, and reformer. Born in Vavaniya, a village near Morbi, he claimed to have recollection of his past lives at the age of seven. He performed Avadhāna, a memory retention and recollection test that gained him popularity, but he later discouraged it in favour of his spiritual pursuits. He wrote much philosophical poetry including Atma Siddhi. He also wrote many letters and commentaries and translated some religious texts. He is best known for his teachings on Jainism and his spiritual guidance to Mahatma Gandhi.
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Felix Adler
1851 - 1933 (82 years)
Felix Adler was a German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, influential lecturer on euthanasia, religious leader and social reformer who founded the Ethical Culture movement.
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Gopala Dasa
1722 - 1762 (40 years)
Gopala Dasa was a prominent 18th-century Kannada language poet and saint belonging to the Haridasa tradition. With other contemporary Haridasas such as Vijaya Dasa and Jagannatha Dasa, Gopala Dasa propagated the Dvaita philosophy of Madhvacharya in South India through Kirtans known as Dasara Padagalu with the pen-name "Gopala Vittala".He is Ganesa Amsha.
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John Cowper Powys
1872 - 1963 (91 years)
John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance , Weymouth Sands , and Maiden Castle have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography.
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Ioannis Theodorakopoulos
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Ioannis Theodorakopoulos was a Greek philosopher. In 1920 Theodorakopoulos moved to Vienna to study Classical Philology and Philosophy. Subsequently, he continued his studies of philosophy in Heidelberg and received in 1925 his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg.
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Basava
1134 - 1196 (62 years)
Basava , also called Basaveshwara and Basavanna, was an Indian philosopher, poet, Lingayat social reformer in the Shiva-focused bhakti movement, and a Hindu Shaivite social reformer during the reign of the Kalyani Chalukya/Kalachuri dynasty. Basava was active during the rule of both dynasties but reached the peak of his influence during the rule of King Bijjala II in Karnataka, India.
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Marinus of Neapolis
440 - Present (1586 years)
Marinus was a Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician and rhetorician born in Flavia Neapolis , Palestine. He was a student of Proclus in Athens. His surviving works are an introduction to Euclid's Data; a Life of Proclus, and two astronomical texts. Most of what we know of his life comes from an epitome of a work by Damascius conserved in the Byzantine Suda encyclopaedia.
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Pontus Wikner
1837 - 1888 (51 years)
Carl Pontus Wikner was a famed Swedish lecturer in philosophy and professor of aesthetics in Oslo from 1884. Wikner's contribution to homosexual history consists foremostly of producing the first description of the problematics about homosexual identity and the coming-out process. He deposited for future research at the medical faculty in Uppsala his Psychological Self-Confessions from 1879 and diaries from 1853 to 1871. According to his own wishes, they were not published before his wife and sons - the nearest members of the family - had died.
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José Rizal
1861 - 1896 (35 years)
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is considered a national hero of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.
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