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,
#14251
William Vorilong
1390 - 1463 (73 years)
William Vorilong, also known as Guillermus Vorrilong, Willem of Verolon, William of Vaurouillon, Guilelmus de Valle Rouillonis, etc. was a French philosopher and theologian. He wrote a biography of Duns Scotus. From 1457 onwards he was a regent master in Lyon, becoming licentiate and master of theology at Lyon in 1458.
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Ronald B. Levinson
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Ronald Bartlett Levinson was an American philosopher who focused in his work on Plato. Life He was born October 18, 1896, in Chicago, Illinois, and died November 21, 1980, in Bangor, Maine.1920 A.B. from Harvard University.1924 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.1926 University of Maine.1927 Professor and Head of the department of philosophy.
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Mary Somerville
1780 - 1872 (92 years)
Mary Somerville was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Ishida Baigan
1685 - 1744 (59 years)
Ishida Baigan was a Japanese lecturer and philosopher, born in Tanba Province, who founded the Shingaku movement based on Neo-Confucianism, the study of the doctrines of Zhu Xi, incorporating Shinto, Buddhism and so on, which advocated all education include teachings in ethics and morality.
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Crito of Alopece
469 BC - 500 BC (-31 years)
Crito of Alopece was an ancient Athenian agriculturist depicted in the Socratic literature of Plato and Xenophon, where he appears as a faithful and lifelong companion of the philosopher Socrates. Although the later tradition of ancient scholarship attributed philosophical works to Crito, modern scholars do not consider him to have been an active philosopher, but rather a member of Socrates' inner circle through childhood friendship.
Go to Profile#14256
Hara Tanzan
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Hara Tanzan was a Japanese philosopher and Sōtō Buddhist monk. He served as abbot of Saijoji temple in Odawara and as professor at the University of Tokyo during the Bakumatsu and Meiji era. He was a forerunner of the modernization of Japanese Buddhism and the first to attempt to incorporate concepts from the natural sciences into Zen Buddhism.
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Lyubov Axelrod
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Lyubov Isaakovna Axelrod was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist philosopher and an art theoretician. Early life Axelrod was born in the family of a rabbi in Vilenkovichi, a village in the Vilna gubernia of the Russian Empire, now in Pastavy Raion, Belarus. She became involved with the narodnik organization at age 16. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1887, with the assistance of Leo Jogiches when the Vitebsk organisation collapsed in the wake of an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III of Russia organised by Aleksandr Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Lenin.
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Eudorus of Alexandria
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Eudorus of Alexandria was an ancient Greek philosopher, and a representative of Middle Platonism. He attempted to reconstruct Plato's philosophy in terms of Pythagoreanism. Life Little is known about Eudorus' life. Chronologically, he lived in the 1st century BC, and did his work prior to Strabo and Arius Didymus, both of whom quote him. He was involved in a plagiarism controversy with Aristo of Alexandria, one of Antiochus of Ascalon's students, as they had both written a work on the Nile. but he is not mentioned by Antiochus' contemporary Cicero, implying he was not one of Antiochus' students.
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Germaine de Staël
1766 - 1817 (51 years)
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël , was a prominent woman of letters and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan intellectual circles. She was the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a respected salonhostess. Throughout her life, she held a moderate stance during the tumultuous periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, persisting until the time of the French Restoration.
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Heinrich Ahrens
1808 - 1874 (66 years)
Julius Heinrich Ahrens was a German philosopher, jurist, and professor in Brussels, Graz, and Leipzig. Life Born in Salzgitter, Ahrens studied in Wolfenbüttel and the University of Göttingen. Ahrens, whose main interest was the philosophy of law and the state, was a disciple of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, with whom he defended his habilitation De confoederatione germanica in 1830.
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Aroj Ali Matubbar
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Aroj Ali Matubbar was a self-taught philosopher and rationalist from Bangladesh. Early life and education Matubbar was born in the village of Charbaria Lamchari, about from the city of Barisal in British India, now Bangladesh, to a poor peasant family. His original name was Aroj Ali; he later adopted the name Matubbar . He studied for only a few months at the village maqtab, where he focused on the Qur'an and Islamic studies.
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Julius Caesar Scaliger
1484 - 1558 (74 years)
Julius Caesar Scaliger , or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the New Learning. In spite of his contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high. Jacques Auguste de Thou claimed that none of the ancients could be placed above him and that he had no equal in his own time.
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Rupa Goswami
1489 - 1564 (75 years)
Rupa Goswami was a devotional teacher , poet, and philosopher of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. With his brother Sanatana Goswami, he is considered the most senior of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan associated with Caitanya Mahaprabhu, a hidden avatar of Krishna in Kali Yuga.
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Nostradamus
1503 - 1566 (63 years)
Michel de Nostredame , usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties , a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
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Al-Battani
858 - 930 (72 years)
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Raqqī al-Ḥarrānī aṣ-Ṣābiʾ al-Battānī , usually called al-Battānī, a name that was in the past Latinized as Albategnius, was an astronomer, astrologer and mathematician, who lived and worked for most of his life at Raqqa, now in Syria. He is considered to be the greatest and most famous of the astronomers of the medieval Islamic world.
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Carl von Ossietzky
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Carl von Ossietzky was a German journalist and pacifist. He was the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German rearmament. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force and training pilots in the Soviet Union. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was granted amnesty in December 1932.
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Clitomachus
187 BC - 110 BC (77 years)
Clitomachus or Cleitomachus was a Greek philosopher, originally from Carthage, who came to Athens in 163/2BC and studied philosophy under Carneades. He became head of the Academy around 127/6BC. He was an Academic skeptic like his master. Nothing survives of his writings, which were dedicated to making known the views of Carneades, but Cicero made use of them for some of his works.
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Sami Frashëri
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Sami bey Frashëri or Şemseddin Sâmi was an Ottoman Albanian writer, philosopher, playwright and a prominent figure of the Rilindja Kombëtare, the National Renaissance movement of Albania, together with his two brothers Abdyl and Naim. He also supported Turkish nationalism against its Ottoman counterpart, along with secularism against theocracy.
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John Turner
1865 - 1934 (69 years)
John Turner was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent." Turner was the first person to be ordered deported from the United States for violation of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act.
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Max Klinger
1857 - 1920 (63 years)
Max Klinger was a German artist who produced significant work in painting, sculpture, prints and graphics, as well as writing a treatise articulating his ideas on art and the role of graphic arts and printmaking in relation to painting. He is associated with symbolism, the Vienna Secession, and Jugendstil the German manifestation of Art Nouveau. He is best known today for his many prints, particularly a series entitled Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove and his monumental sculptural installation in homage to Beethoven at the Vienna Secession in 1902.
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Henry K. Beecher
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Henry Knowles Beecher was a pioneering American anesthesiologist, medical ethicist, and investigator of the placebo effect at Harvard Medical School. An article by Beecher's in 1966 on unethical medical experimentation in the New England Journal of Medicine — "Ethics and Clinical Research" — was instrumental in the implementation of federal rules on human experimentation and informed consent. A 1999 biography—written by Vincent J. Kopp, M.D. of UNC Chapel Hill and published in an American Society of Anesthesiologists newsletter—describes Beecher as an influential figure in the development of medical ethics and research techniques, though he has not been without controversy.
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Valentin Feldman
1909 - 1942 (33 years)
Valentin Feldman was a French philosopher and Marxist of Jewish-Russian origin. In 1942, he was murdered by the Nazis during the Occupation of France. Born in Saint Petersburg, he left the USSR in 1922 at the end of the Civil War. He settled in Paris and studied at the Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne University. A pupil of French philosopher Victor Basch, he worked on aesthetics and wrote an essay, L'Esthétique française contemporaine , Félix Alcan, 1936.
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Ninomiya Sontoku
1787 - 1856 (69 years)
, also known as Ninomiya Kinjirō , was a Japanese agriculturalist. He lost his parents when he was a boy, but through hard work and diligence, he rebuilt his fallen family at the age of 20. Later, he rebuilt approximately 600 villages and became a shogunate retainer. His ideas and actions were inherited as the Hōtokusha Movement.
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Gerard Heymans
1857 - 1930 (73 years)
Gerardus Heymans was a Dutch philosopher and psychologist. From 1890 to 1927, he worked as a professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen . He also served as rector magnificus of the UG in the academic year 1908–1909. Heymans is one of the most influential philosophers of the Netherlands and the pioneer of Dutch psychology. The establishment of his psychological laboratory marked the start of experimental psychology in the Netherlands.
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Swami Karpatri
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Swami Karpatri , was born as Har Narayan Ojha into a Saryupareen Brahmin family of a village called Bhatni in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India. He was a sannyasi in the Hindu Dashanami monastic tradition.
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Félix Vallotton
1865 - 1925 (60 years)
Félix Édouard Vallotton was a Swiss and French painter and printmaker associated with the group of artists known as . He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He painted portraits, landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and other subjects in an unemotional, realistic style.
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Lorenzo Valla
1407 - 1457 (50 years)
Lorenzo Valla was an Italian Renaissance humanist, rhetorician, educator and scholar. He is best known for his historical-critical textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, therefore attacking and undermining the presumption of temporal power claimed by the papacy. Lorenzo is sometimes seen as a precursor of the Reformation.
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Henri-Frédéric Amiel
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
Henri Frédéric Amiel was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic. Biography Born in Geneva in 1821, Amiel was descended from a Huguenot family that moved to Switzerland following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
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Régis Jolivet
1891 - 1966 (75 years)
Régis Jolivet was a French philosopher and Roman Catholic priest. In 1932, he founded the school of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lyon, and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1961.
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Zeno of Sidon
150 BC - 75 BC (75 years)
Zeno of Sidon was a Greek Epicurean philosopher from the Seleucid city of Sidon. His writings have not survived, but there are some epitomes of his lectures preserved among the writings of his pupil Philodemus.
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Remigius of Auxerre
841 - 908 (67 years)
Remigius of Auxerre was a Benedictine monk during the Carolingian period, a teacher of Latin grammar, and a prolific author of commentaries on classical Greek and Latin texts. He is also accredited with collecting and compiling other early medieval thinkers' commentaries on these works.
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François Poullain de la Barre
1647 - 1723 (76 years)
François Poullain de la Barre was an author, Catholic priest, and a Cartesian philosopher. Life François Poullain de la Barre was born during July 1647 in Paris, France, to a family with judicial nobility. He added "de la Barre" to his name later in life. After graduation in 1663 with a master of arts, he spent three years at the College of Sorbonne where he studied theology. In 1679, he became an ordained Catholic priest. From 1679 to 1688, he led two modest parishes, Versigny and La Flamengrie, in Picardy in northern France.
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Polyaenus of Lampsacus
340 BC - 278 BC (62 years)
Polyaenus of Lampsacus , also spelled Polyenus, was an ancient Greek mathematician and a friend of Epicurus. Life He was the son of Athenodorus. His friendship with Epicurus started after the latter's escape from Mytilene in 307 or 306 BC when he opened a philosophical school at Lampsacus associating himself with other citizens of the town, like Pythocles, Colotes, and Idomeneus. With these fellow citizens he moved to Athens, where they founded a school of philosophy with Epicurus as head, or hegemon, while Polyaenus, Hermarchus and Metrodorus were kathegemones.
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Michael Landmann
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
Michael Landmann was a Swiss-Jewish philosopher. Life Landmann was the son of economist Julius Landmann and philosopher Edith Landmann. Philologist Georg Peter Landmann is his brother. His parents were friends of Stefan George and were connected to the Georgekreis, a circle of writers inspired by George.
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Osip Gelfond
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Osip Isaakovich Gelfond was a Russian physician and Marxist philosopher. Osip studied at the University of Paris, gaining a medical degree in 1896. He married Musia Gershevna in 1899, who had also recently graduated with a medical degree from the Sorbonne. Gelfond was friends with Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lazar Lagin and Lev Tumarkin.
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Hippolyte Bernheim
1840 - 1919 (79 years)
Hippolyte Bernheim was a French physician and neurologist. He is chiefly known for his theory of suggestibility in relation to hypnotism. Life Born into a Jewish family, Bernheim received his education in his native town and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was graduated as doctor of medicine in 1867. The same year he became a lecturer at the university and established himself as a physician in the city.
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Jun Tosaka
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
was a Shōwa era Kyoto-trained Japanese intellectual, and teacher. Some identify strands of Marxism in his later philosophy. His criticisms of governments and their war policies caused him to end up in prison on various occasions.
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Bartholomew Des Bosses
1668 - 1738 (70 years)
Bartholomew Des Bosses was a Jesuit theologian and philosopher, known mainly for his voluminous correspondence with Leibniz. Biography Des Bosses joined the Society of Jesus in 1686. In 1700, he taught at the Jesuit college in Emmerich, later moving to Hildesheim. He remained there until moving in 1710 to Cologne, taking up an appointment as professor of mathematics at the Jesuit college there. Apart from a stay in Paderborn in 1712 and 1713, he remained in Cologne for the rest of his life.
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Martin Honecker
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
Martin Honecker was a German philosopher and psychologist. Biography The son of a businessman, he studied at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn and the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, with, among others, Adolf Dyroff. In 1914 Honecker graduated with a doctorate in the legal philosophy of Alessandro Turamini. He fought in World War I, but was captured by the French and interned in Switzerland.
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Pantaleo Carabellese
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Pantaleo Carabellese was an Italian philosopher. Biography Graduated from the University of Naples with a "laurea" in history and again from the University of Rome in philosophy , Carabellese taught philosophy in Palermo, Sicily and in Rome , marrying in 1936. Having carried out a rigorous critique of Cartesianism , Carabellese completed critical studies of authors including Immanuel Kant and Antonio Rosmini . Carabellese is further known for his "critical ontology" , where Being is not the mere abstract object but the inherent and irreducible foundation of consciousness, and thus the "bei...
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Feliks Koneczny
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
Feliks Karol Koneczny was a Polish historian, theatrical critic, librarian, journalist and social philosopher. He founded the original system of the comparative science of civilizations. Biography Koneczny was born in Kraków on 1 November 1862. His father was of Moravian origin. Koneczny's mother abandoned him at a young age while his father studied, although he had to work at a train station due to being expelled from the Jagiellonian University for partaking in the Kraków uprising.
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Antoni Lange
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Antoni Lange was a Polish poet, philosopher, polyglot , writer, novelist, science-writer, reporter and translator. A representative of Polish Parnassianism and symbolism, he is also regarded as belonging to the Decadent movement. He was an expert on Romanticism, French literature and a popularizer of Eastern cultures. His most popular novel is Miranda.
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Ernst Bergmann
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Ernst Bergmann was a German philosopher. In the early 1930s, he was known as the most famous German opponent of patriarchy, and after 1933, Bergmann became a leading proponent of a new pagan German religion .
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Hendrik G. Stoker
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Hendrik Gerhardus Stoker , born in Johannesburg, South Africa, was a leading Calvinist philosopher who taught at Potchefstroom. He studied there and the University of Cologne, and he completed his doctoral dissertation on "Nature and the forms of conscience" under Max Scheler.
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Célestin Bouglé
1870 - 1940 (70 years)
Célestin Charles Alfred Bouglé was a French philosopher known for his role as one of Émile Durkheim's collaborators and a member of the L'Année Sociologique. Life Bouglé was born in Saint-Brieuc, Côtes-du-Nord. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1890 and aggregated in philosophy in 1893. He was, along with Xavier Léon, Élie Halévy, Léon Brunschvicg and Dominique Parodi, one of the founding members of the journal Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. In 1896 he joined with Durkheim and became one of the first editors of the Année Sociologique. He received his doctorate in 1899.
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Hans Scholl
1918 - 1943 (25 years)
Hans Fritz Scholl was, along with Alexander Schmorell, one of the two founding members of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany. The principal author of the resistance movement's literature, he was found guilty of high treason for distributing anti-Nazi material and was executed by the Nazi regime in 1943 during World War II.
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Elli Lambridi
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Elli Lambridi , also spelled Helle Lampride or Helle Lambridis, was a Greek philosopher who wrote extensively in the fields of ancient and modern philosophy. She also wrote on archaeology, wrote fiction and produced translations. She was also an educator and was active in Greek left-wing politics and feminism from an early age. It has been claimed that her prominence in twentieth-century Greek philosophy has "only recently become widely known". Her life and work was celebrated on 8 March 2017 at a talks event in the old Senate chamber of the Parliament of Greece in Athens.
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Edward Jenner
1749 - 1823 (74 years)
Edward Jenner was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae , the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
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William S. Sahakian
1922 - 1986 (64 years)
William S. Sahakian was an Armenian-American philosopher. Receiving his BS at Northeastern University with a major in psychology and sociology in 1944, Sahakian later completed his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University and at Boston University. In 1951, Sahakian received his Ph.D. degree from Boston University. Sahakian's dissertation was entitled, The emotive ethic in contemporary British and American philosophy. Sahakian also received a Master of Divinity degree at Boston University in 1947.
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Harriet Taylor Mill
1807 - 1858 (51 years)
Harriet Taylor Mill was an English philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her extant corpus of writing can be found in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Several pieces can also be found in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, especially volume XXI.
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