The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#13751
Augusto Vera
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
Augusto Vera was an Italian philosopher who followed Hegel's theories and translated many of his works. Life Vera was born in Amelia in the province of Terni. He was educated in Rome and Paris, and, after teaching classics for some years in Geneva, held chairs of philosophy in various colleges in France. He was a philosophy teacher at the Lycée Victor-Duruy and subsequently was professor in Strasbourg and in Paris. He left Paris after the coup d'etat of 1851 and spent nine years in England. Attaching himself with enthusiasm to Hegel's system, Vera became widely influential in spreading a kn...
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Hugo Kükelhaus
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hugo Kükelhaus was a German carpenter, writer, pedagogue, philosopher and artist. Kükelhaus is best known for his infant toys "allbedeut" and the "Erfahrungsfeld zur Entfaltung der Sinne." Throughout his life, he presented his views for a human-scaled living environment in talks and publications. He is also regarded as a harbinger for infant toy designs that fulfil the requirements of pedagogy and developmental psychology. He gained international recognition for his design of 30 "Experience stations" at the German Pavilion of the Expo 1967 in Montreal. His ideas are relevant for contemporary ...
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Konstantin Leontiev
1831 - 1891 (60 years)
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev, monastic name: Clement was a conservative tsarist and imperial monarchist Russian philosopher who advocated closer cultural ties between Russia and the East against what he believed to be the West's catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian and revolutionary influences. He also advocated Russia's cultural and territorial expansion eastward to India, Tibet and China.
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Ishaq ibn Hunayn
830 - 910 (80 years)
Abū Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn was an influential Arab physician and translator, known for writing the first biography of physicians in the Arabic language. He is also known for his translations of Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest. He is the son of the famous translator Hunayn Ibn Ishaq.
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Marcello Malpighi
1628 - 1694 (66 years)
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian biologist and physician, who is referred to as the "Founder of microscopical anatomy, histology & Father of physiology and embryology". Malpighi's name is borne by several physiological features related to the biological excretory system, such as the Malpighian corpuscles and Malpighian pyramids of the kidneys and the Malpighian tubule system of insects. The splenic lymphoid nodules are often called the "Malpighian bodies of the spleen" or Malpighian corpuscles. The botanical family Malpighiaceae is also named after him. He was the first person to see capillar...
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Émile Chartier
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Émile-Auguste Chartier , commonly known as Alain , was a French philosopher, journalist, and pacifist. He adopted his pseudonym as an allusion to the 15th-century Norman poet Alain Chartier. Early life Alain was born in 1868 in Mortagne-au-Perche . He entered Lycée d'Alençon in 1881 and studied there for five years. On 13 June 1956, the lycée was renamed Lycée Alain, after its most famous student.
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S. R. Ranganathan
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Librarian Day in India.
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Anton Günther
1783 - 1863 (80 years)
Anton Günther was an Austrian Roman Catholic philosopher whose work was condemned by the church as heretical tritheism. His work has been described as Liberal Catholicism and Vienna's first Catholic political movement. His writings made him a leader among the generation of German Catholic theologians who emerged from the Romantic movement.
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James Black Baillie
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Sir James Black Baillie, was a British moral philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. He wrote the first significant translation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Mind." He is said to be the model for the character Sir John Evans in the novel The Weight of the Evidence by Michael Innes.
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Joe Orton
1933 - 1967 (34 years)
John Kingsley Orton , known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
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Ibn Zuhr
1091 - 1162 (71 years)
Abū Marwān ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Zuhr , traditionally known by his Latinized name Avenzoar , was an Arab physician, surgeon, and poet. He was born at Seville in medieval Andalusia , was a contemporary of Averroes and Ibn Tufail, and was the most well-regarded physician of his era. He was particularly known for his emphasis on a more rational, empiric basis of medicine. His major work, Al-Taysīr fil-Mudāwāt wal-Tadbīr , was translated into Latin and Hebrew and was influential to the progress of surgery. He also improved surgical and medical knowledge by keying out several diseases and their treatme...
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Alberto Giacometti
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art.
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Jesse Glenn Gray
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Jesse Glenn Gray was an American philosopher, writer, and professor of philosophy at Colorado College. Gray published numerous books and essays. His first major publication, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, is a philosophical memoir of his years as a counter-intelligence officer near the battle lines in Italy during World War II inspired by Gray’s opposition to war. Its reprint in 1967 and subsequent editions included an introduction by Hannah Arendt.
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František Palacký
1798 - 1876 (78 years)
František Palacký was a Czech historian and politician, the most influential person of the Czech National Revival, called "Father of the Nation". Life František Palacký was born on 14 June 1798, at Hodslavice house 108, a northeastern Moravian village now part of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. His ancestors had been members of the community of the Bohemian Brethren, and had clandestinely maintained their Protestant belief throughout the period of religious persecution, eventually giving their adherence to the Augsburg confession as approximate to their original faith. Palacký's father was a schoolmaster and a man of some learning.
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Franz Samuel Karpe
1747 - 1806 (59 years)
Franz Samuel Karpe, , was a Slovenian philosopher and rector of University of Olomouc. Biography Karpe was born in Kranj, Carniola , to a townsman's family. His parents died soon and subsequently Count Lichteberg's family assumed responsibility for his upbringing and education. Karpe entered a Jesuit college in Ljubljana, which he finished in 1768.
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Lucius Annaeus Cornutus
10 - 80 (70 years)
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus , a Stoic philosopher, flourished in the reign of Nero , when his house in Rome was a school of philosophy. Life Cornutus was a native of Leptis Magna in Libya, but resided for the most part in Rome. He is best known as the teacher and friend of Persius, whose fifth satire is addressed to him, as well as other distinguished students, such as Claudius Agathemerus. "Through Cornutus Persius was introduced to Annaeus, as well as to Lucan, who was of his own age, and also a disciple of Cornutus". At Persius's death, Cornutus returned to Persius' sisters a bequest made to him, but accepted Persius' library of some 700 scrolls.
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Nicholas St. John Green
1830 - 1876 (46 years)
Nicholas St. John Green was an American philosopher and lawyer, one of the members of The Metaphysical Club. Green is known for his contributions in the field of law as well as his involvement in the formation of pragmatism. He has been named as the “grandfather of pragmatism” by Charles Peirce.
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Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey was an American professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont. Torrey was a great-grandson of Manasseh Cutler who had been a member of the United States Congress. His father, Augustus Torrey, was a medical doctor. Torrey was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. He moved to the household of his uncle Joseph Torrey to go to Burlington High School. He then studied at the University of Vermont, completing his bachelor's degree in 1858. After teaching school for a time in Beverly, Massachusetts, he went to the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York from which he graduated in 1864.
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Lawrence Joseph Henderson
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Lawrence Joseph Henderson was an American physiologist, chemist, biologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He became one of the leading biochemists of the early 20th century. His work contributed to the Henderson–Hasselbalch equation, used to calculate pH as a measure of acidity.
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Titus Brandsma
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Titus Brandsma, OCarm was a Dutch Carmelite friar, Catholic priest and professor of philosophy. Brandsma was vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology and spoke out against it many times before the Second World War. He was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in November 1985 as a martyr of the faith and canonized as a saint on 15 May 2022 by Pope Francis.
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Hans Lipps
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Hans Lipps was a German phenomenological and existentialist philosopher. Biographical sketch Following his highschool graduation in Dresden in 1909, Lipps began studying art history, architecture, aesthetics and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1910–1911 while doing his military service in Dresden he continued his philosophical studies at Dresden's University of Technology. In the spring of 1911 he moved to Göttingen to study with Edmund Husserl. Together with Theodor Conrad and his wife, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, as well as Roman Ingarden and Fritz Kaufmann, Lipps be...
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George Paxton Young
1819 - 1889 (70 years)
George Paxton Young was a Canadian philosopher and professor of logic, metaphysics and ethics at the University of Toronto. He studied the quintic polynomial equation and in 1888 described how to solve a solvable quintic equation, without providing an explicit formula.
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Robert Vischer
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Robert Vischer was a German philosopher who invented the term Einfühlung , which was to be promoted by Theodor Lipps, Freud's admired philosopher. Vischer’s use of Einfühlung Vischer postulated the as yet undescribed distinction between verstehen and Einfühlung in his 1873 doctoral thesis On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics. It was the first mention of the word Einfühlung in this form in print. His more-famous father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, had used the term Einfühlen in explorations of Idealism relative to architectural form, and related concepts were certainly already in the air.
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Tomonaga Sanjūrō
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
was a Japanese academic and esteemed professor emeritus of medieval, renaissance, early modern, and Kantian philosophy at the University of Kyoto during the early 20th century. He was one of the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School.
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James Mark Baldwin
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Alice Paul
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.
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John Grote
1813 - 1866 (53 years)
John Grote was an English moral philosopher and Anglican clergyman. Life and career The son of a banker, John Grote was younger brother to the historian, philosopher and reformer George Grote. He was educated at Beckenham School, Kent. He then went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1831, graduating with a first-class degree in the Classics Tripos in 1835, and became a fellow of Trinity in 1837. From 1847 until his death, he was vicar of Trumpington, where he was a neighbour of his close friend Robert Leslie Ellis, the paralysed mathematician and Bacon scholar. In 1855, Grote succeeded Will...
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William Ritchie Sorley
1855 - 1935 (80 years)
William Ritchie Sorley, FBA , usually cited as W. R. Sorley, was a Scottish philosopher. A Gifford Lecturer, he was one of the British Idealist school of thinkers, with interests in ethics. He was opposed to women being admitted as students to the University of Cambridge.
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Boris Hessen
1893 - 1936 (43 years)
Boris Mikhailovich Hessen , also Gessen , was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He is most famous for his paper on Newton's Principia which became foundational in historiography of science.
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Hans Larsson
1862 - 1944 (82 years)
Hans Larsson was a Swedish Professor of Philosophy at Lund University, Sweden and a Member of the Swedish Academy , chair no. 15. He was known in Sweden as Kloke-Hans . Prof. Larsson was a humanist and an author. He was also a mentor for several Swedish authors and a prominent essayist.
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Ioane Petritsi
1050 - 1200 (150 years)
Ioane Petritsi also referred as John Petritsi was a Georgian Neoplatonist philosopher of the 11th-12th century, active in the Byzantine Empire and Kingdom of Georgia, best known for his translations of Proclus, along with an extensive commentary. In later sources, he is also referred to as Ioane Chimchimeli . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Petritsi as "the most significant Georgian medieval philosopher" and the "most widely read Georgian philosopher."
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Thierry of Chartres
1100 - 1155 (55 years)
Thierry of Chartres or Theodoric the Breton was a twelfth-century philosopher working at Chartres and Paris, France. The cathedral school at Chartres promoted scholarship before the first university was founded in France. Thierry was a major figure in twelfth-century philosophy and learning, and, like many twelfth-century scholars, is notable for his embrace of Plato's Timaeus and his application of philosophy to theological issues. Some modern scholars believed Thierry to have been a brother of Bernard of Chartres who had founded the school of Chartres, but later research has shown that th...
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Richard Gregg
1885 - 1974 (89 years)
Richard Bartlett Gregg was an American social philosopher said to be "the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance" based on the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and so influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., Aldous Huxley, civil-rights theorist Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and socialist reformer Jessie Wallace Hughan, and the Peace Pledge Union.
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Johan Jakob Borelius
1823 - 1909 (86 years)
Johan Jakob Borelius was an influential professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Lund, Sweden from 1866 to 1898. He has been called "The Last Swedish Hegelian." Borelius was born in Skinnskatteberg. He obtained his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1848, afterward becoming a teacher in Kalmar, while he continued his studies under Christopher Jacob Boström. His overall philosophy is laid out in his work Metafysik , not published in full until after his death.
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Aleksander Świętochowski
1849 - 1938 (89 years)
Aleksander Świętochowski was a Polish writer, educator, and philosopher of the Positivist period that followed the January 1863 Uprising. He was widely regarded as the prophet of Polish Positivism, spreading in the Warsaw press the gospel of scientific inquiry, education, economic development, and equality of rights for all, without regard to sex, class, ethnic origin or beliefs. His was a nuanced vision, however, that took account of the shortcomings of human nature; like H.G. Wells, he advocated that power in society be wielded by the most enlightened among its members.
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Ruth Nanda Anshen
1900 - 2003 (103 years)
Ruth Nanda Anshen was an American philosopher, author and editor. She was the author of several books including The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of An Idea, Morals Equals Manners and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival.
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Gerhard Dorn
1530 - 1584 (54 years)
Gerhard Dorn was a Belgian philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile. Biography The details of Gerhard Dorn's early life, along with those of many other 16th century personalities, are lost to history. It is known that he was born about 1530 in Mechelen, which is part of modern-day Belgium's Antwerp Province. He studied with Adam von Bodenstein, to whom his first book is dedicated and began publishing books from around 1565. He used John Dee's personal glyph from his 1564 book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, on the title page of his Chymisticum artificium.
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Vicente Ferreira da Silva
1916 - 1963 (47 years)
Vicente Ferreira da Silva was a Brazilian logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He was one of first men in Brazil history to write and have published an academic book in logic and Phenomenology.
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Brion Gysin
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin ...
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Louise Michel
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.
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Howard Thurman
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Howard Washington Thurman was an American author, philosopher, theologian, mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
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Jules de Gaultier
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Jules de Gaultier , born Jules Achille de Gaultier de Laguionie, was a French philosopher and essayist. He was a contributor to Mercure de France and one of the chief advocates of "nietzscheism" in vogue in the literary circles of the day. He was known especially for his theory of "bovarysme" , by which he meant the continual need of humans to invent themselves, to lie to themselves. His books include De Kant à Nietzsche and Le Bovarysme, essai sur le pouvoir d'imaginer .
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Matthias Bel
1684 - 1749 (65 years)
Matthias Bel or Matthias Bél was a Lutheran pastor and polymath from the Kingdom of Hungary. Bel was active in the fields of pedagogy, philosophy, philology, history, and theoretical theology; he was the founder of Hungarian geographic science and a pioneer of descriptive ethnography and economy. A leading figure in pietism. He is also known as the Great Ornament of Hungary .
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Abraham de Balmes
1440 - 1523 (83 years)
Abraham de Balmes ben Meir was an Italian Jewish physician and translator of the early 16th century. A short time before his death he was physician in ordinary to the cardinal Dominico Grimani at Padua. See Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." xxi. 7 and 67; "Hebr. Uebers." p. 62; Perles, "Beiträge," pp. 193, 197, etc.
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Priscian of Lydia
500 - Present (1526 years)
Priscian of Lydia , was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. Two works of his have survived. Life A contemporary of Simplicius of Cilicia, Priscian was born in Lydia, probably in the late 5th century. He was one of the last Neoplatonists to study at the Academy when Damascius was at its head. When Justinian I closed the school in 529, Priscian, together with Damascius, Simplicius, and four other colleagues were forced to seek asylum in the court of the Persian king Chosroes. By 533 they were allowed back into the Byzantine Empire after Justinian and Chosroes concluded a peace treaty, in whic...
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Guru Tegh Bahadur
1621 - 1675 (54 years)
Guru Tegh Bahadur was the ninth of ten gurus who founded the Sikh religion and was the leader of Sikhs from 1665 until his beheading in 1675. He was born in Amritsar, Punjab, India in 1621 and was the youngest son of Guru Hargobind, the sixth Sikh guru. Considered a principled and fearless warrior, he was a learned spiritual scholar and a poet whose 115 hymns are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, which is the main text of Sikhism.
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Max Dessoir
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Maximilian Dessoir was a German philosopher, psychologist and theorist of aesthetics. Career Dessoir was born in Berlin, into a German Jewish family, his parents being Ludwig Dessoir , "Germany's most admired Shakespearean actor", and Ludwig's third wife Auguste Grünemeyer . Max earned doctorates from the universities of Berlin and Würzburg . He was a professor at Berlin from 1897 until 1933, when the Nazis forbade him to teach.
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Peter Coffey
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Peter Coffey was an Irish Roman Catholic priest and neo-scholastic philosopher. Life Coffey was educated at the Meath Diocesan Seminary in Navan, and St Patrick's College, Maynooth . He studied for his doctorate at the University of Louvain, and attended the University of Strasbourg. He was ordained in 1900.
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Dickinson S. Miller
1868 - 1963 (95 years)
Dickinson Sargeant Miller was an American philosopher best known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He worked with other philosophers including William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Giorgio Colli
1917 - 1979 (62 years)
Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher, philologist and historian. A native of Turin, he taught ancient philosophy at Pisa's university for thirty years; he edited and translated Aristotle's Organon and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for Einaudi, a major publishing house in Italy. Subsequently, he produced the first complete edition of Nietzsche's work together with his friend Mazzino Montinari. His work culminated in La Sapienza greca, an edition and translation of the "Presocratics" . Interrupted by his death in January 1979, it was supposed to be in eleven volumes.
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