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,
#14201
J. M. E. McTaggart
1866 - 1925 (59 years)
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was an English idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists. McTaggart is known for "The Unreality of Time" , in which he argues that time is unreal. The work has been widely discussed through the 20th century and into the 21st.
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Xenophanes
560 BC - 478 BC (82 years)
Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer from Ionia who travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early Classical Antiquity. As a poet, Xenophanes was known for his critical style, writing poems that are considered among the first satires. He also composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories. He also criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak. His poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his w...
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Zoroaster
628 BC - 551 BC (77 years)
Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, is regarded as the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. He is said to have been an Iranian prophet who founded a religious movement that challenged the existing traditions of ancient Iranian religion, and inaugurated a movement that eventually became a staple religion in ancient Iran. He was a native speaker of Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain. He founded the first documented monotheistic religion in the world and also had an impact on Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions – Judais...
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Augustus De Morgan
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. Biography Childhood Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, in the Carnatic region of India in 1806. His father was Lieut.-Colonel John De Morgan , who held various appointments in the service of the East India Company, and his mother, Elizabeth , was the daughter of John Dodson and granddaughter of James Dodson, who computed a table of anti-logarithms . Augustus De Morgan became blind in one eye a month or two after he was born.
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William Whewell
1794 - 1866 (72 years)
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master at Trinity College, Cambridge. In his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics.
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Gabriel Marcel
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist. The author of over a dozen books and at least thirty plays, Marcel's work focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society. Though often regarded as the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, preferring the term philosophy of existence or neo-Socrateanism to define his own thought. The Mystery of Being is a well-known two-volume work authored by Marcel.
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
1729 - 1781 (52 years)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. He is widely considered by theatre historians to be the first dramaturg in his role at Abel Seyler's Hamburg National Theatre.
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Gershom Scholem
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Gershom Scholem , was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Bruno Bauer
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and theologian. As a student of G. W. F. Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and, beginning with Hegel's analysis of Christianity's Hellenic as well as Jewish roots, concluded that early Christianity owed more to ancient Greek philosophy than to Judaism.
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Peter Abelard
1079 - 1142 (63 years)
Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, poet, composer and musician. In philosophy, he is celebrated for his logical solution to the problem of universals via nominalism and conceptualism and his pioneering of intent in ethics. Often referred to as the "Descartes of the twelfth century", he is considered a forerunner of Rousseau, Kant, and Spinoza. He is sometimes credited as a chief forerunner of modern empiricism.
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Alexandre Kojève
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into twentieth-century continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the formation of the European Union.
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Ibn Arabi
1165 - 1240 (75 years)
Ibn ʿArabī was an Andalusi Muslim scholar, mystic, poet, and philosopher, extremely influential within Islamic thought. Out of the 850 works attributed to him, some 700 are authentic while over 400 are still extant. His cosmological teachings became the dominant worldview in many parts of the Muslim world.
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Carl Stumpf
1848 - 1936 (88 years)
Carl Stumpf was a German philosopher, psychologist and musicologist. He is noted for founding the Berlin School of experimental psychology. He studied with Franz Brentano at the University of Würzburg before receiving his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1868. He also tutored the modernist literature writer Robert Musil at the University of Berlin, and worked with Hermann Lotze, who is famous for his work in perception, at Göttingen. Stumpf is known for his work on the psychology of tones. He had an important influence on his students Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka who were instru...
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John the Baptist
4 BC - 32 (36 years)
John the Baptist was a Judaean preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early 1st century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, John the Immerser in some Baptist Christian traditions, Saint John by certain Catholic churches, and Prophet Yahya in Islam. He is sometimes alternatively referred to as John the Baptiser.
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Zeno of Citium
334 BC - 263 BC (71 years)
Zeno of Citium was a Hellenistic philosopher from Citium , Cyprus. He was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in accordance with nature. It proved very popular, and flourished as one of the major schools of philosophy from the Hellenistic period through to the Roman era, and enjoyed revivals in the Renaissance as Neostoicism and in the current era as Modern Stoicism.
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Alexius Meinong
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Alexius Meinong Ritter von Handschuchsheim was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology. He also made contributions to philosophy of mind and theory of value. Life Alexius Meinong's father was officer Anton von Meinong , who was granted the hereditary title of Ritter in 1851 and reached the rank of Major General in 1858 before retiring in 1859.
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Ferdinand Tönnies
1855 - 1936 (81 years)
Ferdinand Tönnies was a German sociologist, economist, and philosopher. He was a significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best known for distinguishing between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft . He co-founded the German Society for Sociology together with Max Weber and Georg Simmel and many other founders. He was president of the society from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was regarded as the first proper German sociologist and published over 900 works, contributing to many areas of sociology and philosophy.
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Marsilio Ficino
1433 - 1499 (66 years)
Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.
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Arcesilaus
315 BC - 240 BC (75 years)
Arcesilaus was a Greek Hellenistic philosopher. He was the founder of Academic Skepticism and what is variously called the Second or Middle or New Academy – the phase of the Platonic Academy in which it embraced philosophical skepticism.
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Madhvacharya
1199 - 1278 (79 years)
Madhvāchārya , and also known as Purna Prajna and Ānanda Tīrtha, was an Indian philosopher, theologian and the chief proponent of the Dvaita school of Vedanta. Madhva called his philosophy Tattvavāda meaning "arguments from a realist viewpoint".
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Francisco Suárez
1548 - 1617 (69 years)
Francisco Suárez, was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement. His work is considered a turning point in the history of second scholasticism, marking the transition from its Renaissance to its Baroque phases. According to Christopher Shields and Daniel Schwartz, "figures as distinct from one another in place, time, and philosophical orientation as Leibniz, Grotius, Pufendorf, Schopenhauer and Heidegger, all found reason to cite him as a source of inspiration and influence."
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Denis Diderot
1713 - 1784 (71 years)
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.
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Pierre Bayle
1647 - 1706 (59 years)
Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher, author, and lexicographer. He is best known for his Historical and Critical Dictionary, whose publication began in 1697. Many of the more controversial ideas in the book were hidden away in the voluminous footnotes, or they were slipped into articles on seemingly uncontroversial topics. Bayle is commonly regarded as a forerunner of the Encyclopédistes of the mid-18th century.
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Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
1714 - 1762 (48 years)
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was a German philosopher. He was a brother to theologian Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten . Biography Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven sons of the pietist pastor of the garrison, Jacob Baumgarten, and of his wife Rosina Elisabeth. Both his parents died early, and he was taught by Martin Georg Christgau where he learned Hebrew and became interested in Latin poetry.
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Josiah Royce
1855 - 1916 (61 years)
Josiah Royce was an American Pragmatist and objective idealist philosopher and the founder of American idealism. His philosophical ideas included his joining of pragmatism and idealism, his philosophy of loyalty, and his defense of absolutism.
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Wilhelm von Humboldt
1767 - 1835 (68 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was a German philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949 .
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Francis Hutcheson
1694 - 1746 (52 years)
Francis Hutcheson LLD was an Irish philosopher born in Ulster to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became known as one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University and is remembered as author of A System of Moral Philosophy.
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Karl Leonhard Reinhold
1757 - 1823 (66 years)
Karl Leonhard Reinhold was an Austrian philosopher who helped to popularise the work of Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century. His "elementary philosophy" also influenced German idealism, notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as a critical system grounded in a fundamental first principle.
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Mazdak
450 - 529 (79 years)
Mazdak was a Zoroastrian mobad , Iranian reformer, prophet and religious reformer who gained influence during the reign of the Sasanian emperor Kavadh I. He claimed to be a prophet of Ahura Mazda and instituted social welfare programs.
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Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
1743 - 1819 (76 years)
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was an influential German philosopher, literary figure, and socialite. He is notable for popularizing nihilism, a term coined by Obereit in 1787, and promoting it as the prime fault of Enlightenment thought particularly in the philosophical systems of Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schelling.
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Roman Ingarden
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Roman Witold Ingarden was a Polish philosopher who worked in aesthetics, ontology, and phenomenology. Before World War II, Ingarden published his works mainly in the German language and in books and newspapers. During the war, he switched to Polish out of solidarity with his homeland after the German invasion, and as a result, his major works in ontology went largely unnoticed and undetected by the wider world and philosophical community. Nevertheless, Ingarden's writings have made some indirect cultural impact through the writings of his student and eventual Pope, Karol Wojtyla. Even though ...
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Ernst Haeckel
1834 - 1919 (85 years)
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its s...
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Friedrich Waismann
1896 - 1959 (63 years)
Friedrich Waismann was an Austrian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle and one of the key theorists in logical positivism. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Waismann was educated in mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. In 1922, he began to study philosophy under the tutelage of Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938 due to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
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Hermann Cohen
1842 - 1918 (76 years)
Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".
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Alexander Bogdanov
1873 - 1928 (55 years)
Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov , born Alexander Malinovsky, was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was a polymath who pioneered blood transfusion and general systems theory and made important contributions to cybernetics.
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Thales of Miletus
650 BC - 548 BC (102 years)
Thales of Miletus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece, and credited with the saying "know thyself" which was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
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Charles Fourier
1772 - 1837 (65 years)
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker, and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of his views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.
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Julius Evola
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola was an Italian far-right philosopher. Evola regarded his values as aristocratic, monarchist, masculine, traditionalist, heroic, and defiantly reactionary. An eccentric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany; in the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant Right.
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Hermann Lotze
1817 - 1881 (64 years)
Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and logician. He also had a medical degree and was well versed in biology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws and relations, then developments in the universe could be explained as the functioning of a world mind. His medical studies were pioneering works in scientific psychology.
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Numenius of Apamea
200 - 200 (0 years)
Numenius of Apamea was a Greek philosopher, who lived in Rome, and flourished during the latter half of the 2nd century AD. He was a Neopythagorean and forerunner of the Neoplatonists. Philosophy Statements and fragments of his apparently very numerous works have been preserved by Origen, Theodoret, and especially by Eusebius, and from them we may learn the nature of his Platonist-Pythagorean philosophy, and its approximation to the doctrines of Plato.
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John Henry Newman
1801 - 1890 (89 years)
John Henry Newman was an English theologian, academic, intellectual, philosopher, polymath, historian, writer, scholar and poet, first as an Anglican priest and later as a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s, and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.
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Philolaus
470 BC - 390 BC (80 years)
Philolaus was a Greek Pythagorean and pre-Socratic philosopher. He was born in a Greek colony in Italy and migrated to Greece. Philolaus has been called one of three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition and the most outstanding figure in the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras developed a school of philosophy that was dominated by both mathematics and mysticism. Most of what is known today about the Pythagorean astronomical system is derived from Philolaus's views. He may have been the first to write about Pythagorean doctrine. According to August Böckh , who cites Nicomachus, Philo...
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Dignāga
480 - 540 (60 years)
Dignāga was an Indian Buddhist scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic . Dignāga's work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology .
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Simplicius of Cilicia
490 - 560 (70 years)
Simplicius of Cilicia was a disciple of Ammonius Hermiae and Damascius, and was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He was among the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being allowed back into the empire. He wrote extensively on the works of Aristotle. Although his writings are all commentaries on Aristotle and other authors, rather than original compositions, his intelligent and prodigious learning makes him the last great philosopher of pagan antiquity. His works have preserved much info...
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Frantz Fanon
1925 - 1961 (36 years)
Frantz Omar Fanon was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique . His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
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Moses Mendelssohn
1729 - 1786 (57 years)
Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau, Principality of Anhalt, and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature. Through his writings on philosophy and religion he came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Christian and Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe and beyond.
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Cratylus
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Cratylus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from the mid-late 5th century BC, known mostly through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue Cratylus. He was a radical proponent of Heraclitean philosophy and influenced the young Plato.
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Kuno Fischer
1824 - 1907 (83 years)
Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic. Biography After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle, became a privatdocent at Heidelberg in 1850. The Baden government in 1853 laid an embargo on his teaching owing to his liberal ideas, but the effect of this was to rouse considerable sympathy for his views, and in 1856 he obtained a professorship at Jena, where he soon acquired great influence by the dignity of his personal character. In 1872, on Eduard Zeller's move to Berlin, Fischer succeeded him as professor of philosophy and the history ...
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Eugen Dühring
1833 - 1921 (88 years)
Eugen Karl Dühring was a German philosopher, positivist, antisemite, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism. Life and works Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised at Berlin as a lawyer until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, occasioned his taking up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.
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Harald Høffding
1843 - 1931 (88 years)
Harald Høffding was a Danish philosopher and theologian. Life Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen. He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school. The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding. The philosopher and author Ágúst H. Bjarnason was a student of Høffding.
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