#14501
Agrippa the Skeptic
100 - 100 (0 years)
Agrippa was a Pyrrhonist philosopher who probably lived towards the end of the 1st century CE. He is regarded as the author of "The Five Tropes of Agrippa", which are purported to establish the necessity of suspending judgment . Agrippa's arguments form the basis of the Agrippan trilemma.
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Ernst Mally
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Ernst Mally was an Austrian analytic philosopher, initially affiliated with Alexius Meinong's Graz School of object theory. Mally was one of the founders of deontic logic and is mainly known for his contributions in that field of research. In metaphysics, he is known for introducing a distinction between two kinds of predication, better known as the dual predication approach.
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Bodhidharma
483 - 540 (57 years)
Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary Buddhist monk who lived during the 5th or 6th century CE. He is traditionally credited as the transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, and is regarded as its first Chinese patriarch. According to a 17th-century apocryphal story found in a manual called Yijin Jing, he began the physical training of the monks of Shaolin Monastery that led to the creation of Shaolin kungfu. He is known as Dámó in China and as Daruma in Japan. His name means "dharma of awakening " in Sanskrit.
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Ivan Ilyin
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin or Il'in was a Russian jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and conservative monarchist. He perceived the February Revolution as a "temporary disorder" and the October Revolution as a "national catastrophe", and actively joined the struggle against the Bolshevik regime. He became a white émigré journalist, a Slavophile, and an ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union, which believed that force was the only means by which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
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Alfred Edward Taylor
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Alfred Edward Taylor , usually cited as A. E. Taylor, was a British idealist philosopher most famous for his contributions to the philosophy of idealism in his writings on metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and the scholarship of Plato. He was a fellow of the British Academy and president of the Aristotelian Society from 1928 to 1929. At Oxford he was made an honorary fellow of New College in 1931. In an age of universal upheaval and strife, he was a notable defender of Idealism in the Anglophone world.
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Adolf Reinach
1883 - 1917 (34 years)
Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach was a German philosopher, phenomenologist and law theorist. Life and work Adolf Reinach was born into a prominent Jewish family in Mainz, Germany, on 23 December 1883.
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Jonathan Edwards
1703 - 1758 (55 years)
Jonathan Edwards was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian. A leading figure of the American Enlightenment, Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians. Edwards' theological work is broad in scope but rooted in the paedobaptist Puritan heritage as exemplified in the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central the Age of Enlightenment was to his mindset.
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Léon Robin
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Léon Robin was a French philosopher and scholar of Greek philosophy, professor of history of ancient philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1924 to 1936. Robin, the son of a merchant, began teaching in the Faculty of Letters at Paris in 1913. In 1924 he took up the chair of history of ancient philosophy, which had lapsed after the death of Louis Rodier in 1913. In 1927 he was visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. On his retirement from the Paris chair, his successor was Pierre-Maxime Schuhl. Robin subsequently served as Director of the International Institute of Philosophy.
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Vallabha
1479 - 1531 (52 years)
Vallabhacharya Mahaprabhu , also known as Vallabha, Mahaprabhuji and Vishnuswami, or Vallabha Acharya, was an Indian saint and philosopher. He founded the Krishna-centered Pushtimarg sect of Vaishnavism in the Braj region of India, and propounded the philosophy of Śuddhādvaita.
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Hasdai Crescas
1340 - 1410 (70 years)
Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas was a Spanish-Jewish philosopher and a renowned halakhist . Along with Maimonides , Gersonides , and Joseph Albo, he is known as one of the major practitioners of the rationalist approach to Jewish philosophy.
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Samuel von Pufendorf
1632 - 1694 (62 years)
Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist and historian. He was born Samuel Pufendorf and ennobled in 1694; he was made a baron by Charles XI of Sweden a few months before his death at age 62. Among his achievements are his commentaries and revisions of the natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.
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John Lemmon
1930 - 1966 (36 years)
Edward John Lemmon was a British logician and philosopher born in Sheffield, England. He is most well known for his work on modal logic, particularly his joint text with Dana Scott published posthumously .
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Michael Psellos
1018 - 1078 (60 years)
Michael Psellos or Psellus was a Byzantine Greek monk, savant, writer, philosopher, imperial courtier, historian and music theorist. He was born in 1017 or 1018, and is believed to have died in 1078, although it has also been maintained that he remained alive until 1096. He served as a high ranking advisor to several Byzantine emperors and was instrumental in the re-positioning of power of those emperors.
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Herophilos
335 BC - 280 BC (55 years)
Herophilos , sometimes Latinised Herophilus, was a Greek physician regarded as one of the earliest anatomists. Born in Chalcedon, he spent the majority of his life in Alexandria. He was the first scientist to systematically perform scientific dissections of human cadavers. He recorded his findings in over nine works, which are now all lost. The early Christian author Tertullian states that Herophilos vivisected at least 600 live prisoners; however, this account has been disputed by many historians. He is often seen as the father of anatomy.
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Walter Terence Stace
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Walter Terence Stace was a British civil servant, educator, public philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, mysticism, and moral relativism. He worked with the Ceylon Civil Service from 1910 to 1932, and from 1932 to 1955 he was employed by Princeton University in the Department of Philosophy. He is most renowned for his work in the philosophy of mysticism, and for books like Mysticism and Philosophy and Teachings of the Mystics . These works have been influential in the study of mysticism, but they have also been severely criticised for their lack of methodological rigor and thei...
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Carl Gustav Carus
1789 - 1869 (80 years)
Carl Gustav Carus was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played various roles during the Romantic era. A friend of the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist, a psychologist, and a landscape painter who studied under Caspar David Friedrich.
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Émile Boutroux
1845 - 1921 (76 years)
Étienne Émile Marie Boutroux was an eminent 19th-century French philosopher of science and religion, and a historian of philosophy. He was a firm opponent of materialism in science. He was a spiritual philosopher who defended the idea that religion and science are compatible at a time when the power of science was rising inexorably. His work is overshadowed in the English-speaking world by that of the more celebrated Henri Bergson. He was elected membership of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1898 and in 1912 to the Académie française.
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James Burnham
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis . Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics.
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Ernst Laas
1837 - 1885 (48 years)
Ernst Laas was a German positivist philosopher. Biography Laas was born in Fürstenwalde, Brandenburg, Prussia. He studied theology and philosophy under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg at the University of Berlin. In 1859, he completed a doctorate at Berlin with a thesis titled Das Moral-Prinzip des Aristoteles.
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Georges Braque
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
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Peter Wessel Zapffe
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Peter Wessel Zapffe was a Norwegian philosopher, author, artist, lawyer and mountaineer. He is often noted for his philosophically pessimistic and fatalistic view of human existence. His system of philosophy was inspired by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as his firm advocacy of antinatalism. His thoughts regarding the error of human life are presented in the essay "The Last Messiah" . This essay is a shorter version of his best-known and untranslated work, the philosophical treatise On the Tragic .
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Jacob Klein
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Jacob Klein was a Russian-American philosopher and interpreter of Plato, who worked extensively on the nature and historical origin of modern symbolic mathematics. Biography Klein was born in Libava, Russian Empire. He studied at Berlin and Marburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1922. A student of Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, he later taught at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland from 1938 until his death. He served as dean from 1949 to 1958.
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Arnold Geulincx
1624 - 1669 (45 years)
Arnold Geulincx , also known by his pseudonym Philaretus, was a Flemish philosopher, metaphysician, and logician. He was one of the followers of René Descartes who tried to work out more detailed versions of a generally Cartesian philosophy. Samuel Beckett cited Geulincx as a key influence and interlocutor because of Geulincx's emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition.
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Carlos Astrada
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Carlos Astrada was an Argentine philosopher. Astrada was born in Córdoba. He completed his secondary school studies at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat in Córdoba, and his university studies in law at the National University of Córdoba. His 1926 essay "The Epistemological Problem in Philosophy", earned an Astrada scholarship to Germany. He studied at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Freiburg, under Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Oskar Becker during his four years there.
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Martial Gueroult
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Martial Gueroult was a French philosopher. His primary areas of research were in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy as well as the history of philosophy. Biography Gueroult was born on 15 December 1891 in the city of Le Havre in northwestern France. A veteran of both the First and Second World Wars, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur [Legion of Honour] and twice with the Croix de Guerre [Cross of War]. It was during his time as a prisoner of war in Germany that Gueroult began drafting his first philosophical work on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, later to become L’Évolution et la structure de la doc...
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Dietrich Tiedemann
1748 - 1803 (55 years)
Dietrich Tiedemann was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy born in Bremervörde. He was father to physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann . Biography He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, and later was a professor at Collegium Carolinum in Kassel and at the University of Marburg .
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Adam Weishaupt
1748 - 1830 (82 years)
Johann Adam Weishaupt was a German philosopher, professor of civil law and later canon law, and founder of the Illuminati. Early life Adam Weishaupt was born on 6 February 1748 in Ingolstadt in the Electorate of Bavaria. Weishaupt's father Johann Georg Weishaupt died when Adam was five years old. After his father's death he came under the tutelage of his godfather Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt who, like his father, was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Ickstatt was a proponent of the philosophy of Christian Wolff and of the Enlightenment, and he influenced the young Weishaupt with his rationalism.
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Anton Wilhelm Amo
1703 - 1759 (56 years)
Anton Wilhelm Amo or Anthony William Amo was a Nzema philosopher from Axim, Dutch Gold Coast . Amo was a professor at the universities of Halle and Jena in Germany after studying there. He was brought to Germany by the Dutch West India Company in 1707 and was presented as a gift to Dukes Augustus William and Ludwig Rudolf of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, being treated as a member of the family by their father Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In 2020, Oxford University Press published a translation of his Latin works from the early 1730s.
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Vasily Rozanov
1856 - 1919 (63 years)
Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov was one of the most controversial Russian writers and important philosophers in the symbolists' of the pre-revolutionaryary epoch. Views Rozanov tried to reconcile Christian teachings with ideas of healthy sex and family life, but as his adversary Nikolai Berdyaev put it, he "set up sex in opposition to the Word". His interest in these matters, as in matters of religion, brought Rozanov close to Russian Symbolism. Because of references to the phallus in Rozanov's writings, Klaus von Beyme called him the Rasputin of the Russian intelligentsia.
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Jean Beaufret
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Jean Beaufret was a French philosopher and Germanist tremendously influential in the reception of Martin Heidegger's work in France. Life After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure and completing military service Beaufret passed his agrégation de philosophie in 1933 and undertook a career teaching as a lycée philosophy instructor. His early philosophical interests were in 19th century German philosophy, particularly GWF Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Karl Marx. In the period before the Second World War, he came to know Paul Éluard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, and Paul Valéry.
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Ammonius Hermiae
440 - 523 (83 years)
Ammonius Hermiae was a Greek philosopher from Alexandria in the eastern Roman empire during Late Antiquity. A Neoplatonist, he was the son of the philosophers Hermias and Aedesia, the brother of Heliodorus of Alexandria and the grandson of Syrianus. Ammonius was a pupil of Proclus in Roman Athens, and taught at Alexandria for most of his life, having obtained a public chair in the 470s.
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Gerolamo Cardano
1501 - 1576 (75 years)
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian polymath whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler. He became one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance and one of the key figures in the foundation of probability; he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the Western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.
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François de La Mothe Le Vayer
1588 - 1672 (84 years)
François de La Mothe Le Vayer , was a French writer who was known to use the pseudonym Orosius Tubero. He was admitted to the Académie française in 1639, and was the tutor of Louis XIV. Early years Le Vayer was born and died in Paris, a member of a noble family of Maine. His father was an avocat at the parlement of Paris and author of a curious treatise on the functions of ambassadors, entitled Legatus, seu De legatorum privilegiis, officio et munere libellus and illustrated mainly from ancient history. Francois succeeded his father at the parlement, but gave up his post about 1647 and devote...
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Liang Shuming
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Liang Shuming , born Liang Huanding , courtesy name Shouming , was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer in the Rural Reconstruction Movement during the late Qing dynasty and early Republican eras of Chinese history.
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Pope Pius X
1835 - 1914 (79 years)
Pope Pius X was head of the Catholic Church from 4 August 1903 to his death in August 1914. Pius X is known for vigorously opposing modernist interpretations of Catholic doctrine, and for promoting liturgical reforms and scholastic theology. He initiated the preparation of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the first comprehensive and systemic work of its kind. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. The Society of Saint Pius X, a traditionalist Catholic fraternity, is named after him.
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Helmuth Plessner
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Helmuth Plessner was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology". Life and career Plessner had an itinerant education in Germany between 1910 and 1920. He began studying medicine in Friedburg before moving on to zoology and philosophy in Heidelberg. In Göttingen, he studied phenomenology with Husserl, and finally wrote his "Habititationsschrift" under the guidance of Max Scheler. Plessner then held a professorship in Cologne from 1926 to 1933, when he was forced to resign his position because of Jewish ancestry on his father's side. Living in isolation, Plessner initially fled Germany to Istanbul.
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José Martí
1853 - 1895 (42 years)
José Julián Martí Pérez was a Cuban nationalist, poet, philosopher, essayist, journalist, translator, professor, and publisher, who is considered a Cuban national hero because of his role in the liberation of his country from Spain. He was also an important figure in Latin American literature. He was very politically active and is considered an important philosopher and political theorist. Through his writings and political activity, he became a symbol of Cuba's bid for independence from the Spanish Empire in the 19th century, and is referred to as the "Apostle of Cuban Independence". From ad...
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Bruno Bauch
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Bruno Bauch was a German neo-Kantian philosopher. Life and career Bauch was born in Groß-Nossen, Münsterberg District, Silesia, Prussia and studied philosophy at Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. In 1901, he received his doctorate under Heinrich Rickert at Freiburg, which entitled him to teach some courses . Bauch completed his habilitation, entitling him to a professorship, at the University of Halle in 1903. He taught as a "titular professor" at Halle from 1903 to 1910, and from 1911 onward as an "ordinary professor" at the University of Jena.
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Narayana Guru
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Sree Narayana Guru was a philosopher, spiritual leader and social reformer in India. He led a reform movement against the injustice in the caste-ridden society of Kerala in order to promote spiritual enlightenment and social equality. His famous quote was "one caste one religion and one god for all men".
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Hippasus
600 BC - 500 BC (100 years)
Hippasus of Metapontum was a Greek philosopher and early follower of Pythagoras. Little is known about his life or his beliefs, but he is sometimes credited with the discovery of the existence of irrational numbers. The discovery of irrational numbers is said to have been shocking to the Pythagoreans, and Hippasus is supposed to have drowned at sea, apparently as a punishment from the gods for divulging this and crediting it to himself instead of Pythagoras which was the norm in Pythagorean society. However, the few ancient sources who describe this story either do not mention Hippasus by nam...
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Carl Grünberg
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Carl Grünberg was a German-Austrian Marxist philosopher of law and history. Biography Born in Focșani, Romania, into a Jewish-Bessarabia German family, Grünberg studied law in Strasbourg and worked as an advocate. Later he studied and taught political economy in Vienna. Among his academic teachers were Gustav Schmoller in Strasbourg and Lorenz von Stein and Anton Menger in Vienna. In 1894, he became academic reader for political law and economy at the University of Vienna.
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Seneca the Elder
54 BC - 39 (93 years)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder , also known as Seneca the Rhetorician, was a Roman writer, born of a wealthy equestrian family of Corduba, Hispania. He wrote a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric, six books of which are extant in a more or less complete state and five others in epitome only. His principal work, a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life, is almost entirely lost to posterity. Seneca lived through the reigns of three significant emperors; Augustus , Tiberius and Caligula . He was the father of Lu...
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Nikolay Chernyshevsky
1828 - 1889 (61 years)
Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian literary and social critic, journalist, novelist, democrat, and socialist philosopher, often identified as a utopian socialist and leading theoretician of Russian nihilism and Narodniks. He was the dominant intellectual figure of the 1860s revolutionary democratic movement in Russia, despite spending much of his later life in exile to Siberia, and was later highly praised by Karl Marx, Georgi Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin.
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Paul Carus
1852 - 1919 (67 years)
Paul Carus was a German-American author, editor, a student of comparative religion and philosopher. Life and education Carus was born in Ilsenburg, Germany, and educated at the universities of Strassburg and Tübingen, Germany. After obtaining his PhD from Tübingen in 1876 he served in the army and then taught school. He had been raised in a pious and orthodox Protestant home, but gradually moved away from this tradition.
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Edgar Zilsel
1891 - 1944 (53 years)
Edgar Zilsel was an Austrian-American historian and philosopher of science. He is best known for the Zilsel Thesis, a scientific proposal which traces the origins of western science to the interactions between scholars and skilled artisans. The proposal melded practical experimentation with analytical thought. As part of the left wing of the Vienna Circle he endorsed historical materialism, and sought to establish empirical laws in history and in society.
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Martin Knutzen
1713 - 1751 (38 years)
Martin Knutzen was a German philosopher, a follower of Christian Wolff and teacher of Immanuel Kant, to whom he introduced the physics of Isaac Newton. Biography Martin Knutzen was born in Königsberg in 1713.
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Lon L. Fuller
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Lon Luvois Fuller was an American legal philosopher best known as a proponent of a secular and procedural form of natural law theory. Fuller was a professor of law at Harvard Law School for many years, and is noted in American law for his contributions to both jurisprudence and the law of contracts. His debate in 1958 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and natural law theory. In his widely discussed 1964 book The Morality of Law, Fuller argues that all systems of law contain an "internal morality" that imposes on individuals a presumptive obligation of obedience.
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H. H. Price
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Henry Habberley Price , usually cited as H. H. Price, was a Welsh philosopher, known for his work on the philosophy of perception. He also wrote on parapsychology. Biography Born in Neath, Glamorganshire, Wales, Price was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He obtained first-class honours in Literae Humaniores in 1921. He was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1922–4, Assistant Lecturer in philosophy at the university of Liverpool , Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford , Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford and Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College . Price was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1943 to 1944.
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Samuel Gompers
1850 - 1924 (74 years)
Samuel Gompers was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.
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Theodorus the Atheist
340 BC - 250 BC (90 years)
Theodorus the Atheist , of Cyrene, was a Greek philosopher of the Cyrenaic school. He lived in both Greece and Alexandria, before ending his days in his native city of Cyrene. As a Cyrenaic philosopher, he taught that the goal of life was to obtain joy and avoid grief, and that the former resulted from knowledge, and the latter from ignorance. However, his principal claim to fame was his alleged atheism. He was usually designated by ancient writers ho atheos , "the atheist."
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