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,
#14951
Camil Petrescu
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Camil Petrescu was a Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet. He marked the end of the traditional novel era and laid the foundation of the modern novel era in Romania. Life Petrescu was born in Bucharest in 1894. He lost both his parents early in life and was raised by a relative, or a nanny from the Moșilor suburb .
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Jean François de Saint-Lambert
1716 - 1803 (87 years)
Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet, philosopher and military officer. Biography Saint-Lambert was born at Nancy and raised on his parents' estate at Affracourt, a village in Lorraine near Haroué, a seat of the Beauvau family, with whom he had close ties. He studied at the university at Pont-à-Mousson, but then spent several years at home recovering from an unidentified illness. He often complained of poor health, but participated in military campaigns, led a strenuous social life, and lived to be 86 years old.
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Johann Jakob Engel
1741 - 1802 (61 years)
Johann Jakob Engel was a German author. Life Engel was born and died in Parchim, in the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He studied theology at Rostock and Bützow, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he took his doctors' degree. In 1776 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy and belles-lettres in the Joachimstal gymnasium at Berlin, and a few years later he became tutor to the crown prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William III.
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Anaxarchus
380 BC - 320 BC (60 years)
Anaxarchus was a Greek philosopher of the school of Democritus. Together with Pyrrho, he accompanied Alexander the Great into Asia. The reports of his philosophical views suggest that he was a forerunner of the Greek skeptics.
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Yahya ibn Adi
893 - 974 (81 years)
Abū Zakarīyā’ Yaḥyá ibn ʿAdī known as Yahya ibn Adi was a Syriac Jacobite Christian philosopher, theologian and translator working in Arabic. Biography Yahya ibn Adi was born in Tikrit to a family of Syriac Jacobite Christians in 893.
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Aristocles of Messene
200 - Present (1826 years)
Aristocles of Messene , in Sicily, was a Peripatetic philosopher, who probably lived in the 1st century AD. Life Little is known about the life of Aristocles. He came from Messene in Sicily , not from the then far better known city of Messene in the Peloponnese. There are some indications that he stayed in Alexandria. In earlier research he was wrongly considered to be the teacher of the famous Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias. It was erroneously believed that the philosopher Aristotle of Mytilene whom Alexander mentions as his teacher was actually Aristocles and that the name "Aristotle" was a misspelling.
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Émile Boirac
1851 - 1917 (66 years)
Émile Boirac was a French philosopher, parapsychologist, promoter of Esperanto and writer. Biography Boirac was born in Guelma, Algeria. He became president of the University of Grenoble in 1898, and in 1902 president of Dijon University. A notable advocate for the universal language, Esperanto, he presided over its 1st Universal Congress and directed the Academy of Esperanto.
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Ferdinand Foch
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Ferdinand Foch was a French general and military theorist who served as the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War. An aggressive, even reckless commander at the First Marne, Flanders and Artois campaigns of 1914–1916, Foch became the Allied Commander-in-Chief in late March 1918 in the face of the all-out German spring offensive, which pushed the Allies back using fresh soldiers and new tactics that trenches could not withstand. He successfully coordinated the French, British and American efforts into a coherent whole, deftly handling his strategic reserves. He stopped the German offensive and launched a war-winning counterattack.
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Hermias
401 - 450 (49 years)
Hermias was a Neoplatonist philosopher who was born in Alexandria c. 410 AD. He went to Athens and studied philosophy under Syrianus. He married Aedesia, who was a relative of Syrianus, and who had originally been betrothed to Proclus, but Proclus broke the engagement off after receiving a divine warning. Hermias brought Syrianus' teachings back to Alexandria, where he lectured in the school of Horapollo, receiving an income from the state. He died c. 450 AD , at a time when his children, Ammonius and Heliodorus, were still small. Aedesia, however, continued to receive an income from the sta...
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Alfred Henry Lloyd
1864 - 1927 (63 years)
Alfred Henry Lloyd was an American philosopher. Life Lloyd received both his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Harvard. He studied philosophy at Göttingen University and Heidelberg University, before returning to Harvard for his Ph.D., which he received in 1893. Upon returning from Europe in 1891, Lloyd was recruited by John Dewey as an instructor in philosophy at the University of Michigan. He remained there his entire career, becoming full professor in 1906. He was named dean of the Graduate School in 1915.
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Vladimir Dvorniković
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Vladimir Dvorniković was an ethnic Croat and politically Yugoslav philosopher, ethno-psychologist, and a strong proponent of a Yugoslav ethnicity. He was a professor at the University of Zagreb during the 1920s. Dvorniković was also an advocate of psychologism and animal philosophy. He is best known for authoring the book "Characterology of the Yugoslavs."
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Leonid Andreyev
1871 - 1919 (48 years)
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age literary period. Andreyev's style combines the elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. Of his 25 plays, his 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped is regarded as his finest achievement.
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Moriz Carrière
1817 - 1895 (78 years)
Moriz Carrière was a German philosopher and historian. Carrière was born in Griedel near Darmstadt, Germany. After studying at Giessen, Göttingen and Berlin, he spent a few years in Italy studying the fine arts, and established himself in 1842 at Giessen as a teacher of philosophy. In 1853 he was appointed professor at the University of Munich, where he lectured mainly on aesthetics. In the academy in Munich, he lectured on art history.
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Mondino de Luzzi
1275 - 1326 (51 years)
Mondino de Luzzi, or de Liuzzi or de Lucci, , also known as Mundinus, was an Italian physician, anatomist and professor of surgery, who lived and worked in Bologna. He is often credited as the restorer of anatomy because he made seminal contributions to the field by reintroducing the practice of public dissection of human cadavers and writing the first modern anatomical text.
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James Ensor
1860 - 1949 (89 years)
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.
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Samuel George Morton
1799 - 1851 (52 years)
Samuel George Morton was an American physician, natural scientist, and writer. As one of the early figures of scientific racism, he argued against monogenism, the single creation story of the Bible, instead supporting polygenism, a theory of multiple racial creations.
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Wincenty Lutosławski
1863 - 1954 (91 years)
Wincenty Lutosławski was a Polish philosopher, author, and member of the Polish National League. Life and career Early life Wincenty was the eldest son of Franciszek Dionizy Lutosławski, a landowner from Drozdowo and Maria Lutosławska, nee Szczygielska. He was half-brother to Józef Lutosławski, who was the father of composer Witold Lutosławski. In his youth he was home schooled. In 1880, after suffering a breakdown, he became an atheist and materialist. A year later he graduated from secondary school in Mitawa and commenced his studies at the Riga Polytechnic, where he lasted only for three semesters.
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Helen Knight
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Helen Knight was a British philosopher. She was one of few women active in the early days of analytic aesthetics. Life and education Knight was born in Swiss Cottage, London and attended Fremarch School, Hampstead. She began her BA at Bedford College, London, before coming to Cambridge University in 1921 where she took Part II Moral Sciences in 1923 and obtained a first class degree. From 1923 to 1925 she was a Research Student at Newnham College. She married psychologist Rex Knight on 30 January 1926 , and then appears to have taken a break from academic philosophy until 1932 when she returned to Newnham as Sarah Smithson Research Fellow.
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Robert FitzRoy
1805 - 1865 (60 years)
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, FitzRoy's second expedition to Tierra del Fuego and the Southern Cone.
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Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire
1805 - 1895 (90 years)
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire was a French philosopher, journalist, statesman, and possible illegitimate son of Napoleon I of France. Biography Jules was born in Paris. Marie Belloc Lowndes, in the second volume of her autobiography Where Love and Friendship Dwelt , made claims regarding his paternity. He was reportedly ashamed of and did not talk about it. Lowndes did not say who his mother was.
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Thomas Wharton Jones
1808 - 1891 (83 years)
Thomas Wharton Jones was an eminent ophthalmologist and physiologist of the 19th century. Biography Jones's father was Richard Jones, a native of London. Richard Jones had moved north to St. Andrews and was working with Her Majesty's Customs for Scotland when Thomas Wharton Jones was born in January 1808. Jones grew up in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. From 1827 to 1829, he was an assistant to Robert Knox, a lecturer on anatomy at Edinburgh. Around Christmas of 1827, while working for Knox, he purchased a body from William Hare on Knox's behalf, paying £7 10s to Hare.
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Marian Massonius
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Piotr Marian Massonius was a Polish philosopher and teacher who was born into in the Russian Empire. Life Massonius studied law at the Warsaw University and then abroad, where he took up philosophical and pedagogical studies at various German universities, mainly in Leipzig. He became one of the representatives of the Warsaw school of Positivism who formed a common front against Messianism together with the Polish Neo-Kantians.
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Louis Arnaud Reid
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Louis Arnaud Reid was a British philosopher who held the foundation chair in Philosophy of Education at the London University Institute of Education. He was a founding contributor to the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is best known for his writings on epistemology and aesthetics. He influenced figures as diverse as Susanne Langer, Lionel Trilling and Harold Osborne. Jacques Barzun said that Reid's book A Study in Aesthetics was "the best discussion of art yet produced in our century."
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Thomas Abbt
1738 - 1766 (28 years)
Thomas Abbt was a German mathematician and writer. Biography Born in Ulm as the son of a wig-maker, Abbt visited a secondary school in Ulm, then moved in 1756 to study theology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Halle, receiving a Magister degree in 1758. In 1760 he was appointed as an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt , where he wrote his most well-known work Vom Tode für's Vaterland .
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Oskar Kraus
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Oskar Kraus was a Czech philosopher and jurist. Life Oskar Kraus, who converted from the Jewish to the Protestant faith, was born in Prague, the son of Hermann Kraus and Clara Reitler-Eidlitz. In 1899 he married Bertha Chitz.
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Zhang Shenfu
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Zhang Shenfu , born Zhang Songnian , courtesy name Shenfu , was a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, a philosopher, and a political activist. Zhang was born on June 15, 1893, in Xiaoduo village, Zhili . His father, Zhang Liangong, was a senior official. In 1912, Zhang enrolled at Middle School Affiliated to Senior Normal School in Beiping . He later enrolled at Peking University to study philosophy and math in 1914. After graduating, Zhang started to lecture at Peking University, as well as assisting the work of university librarian Li Dazhao. When the Chinese Communist Party was founded...
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Louis Mink
1921 - 1983 (62 years)
Louis O. Mink Jr. was a philosopher of history whose works challenged early philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood and were part of a postmodern dialogue on history and historical narrative with other philosophers of history, like Hayden White and Georg Lukács. Mink and White were responsible for what would later be called the "linguistic turn" in philosophy of history.
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Henri Grenier
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Henri Grenier was a French Canadian priest, theologian, and philosopher. He was the author of a manual of Thomistic philosophy, once widely used in Roman Catholic seminaries. Life Grenier was born in Gaspé, Quebec, and ordained for the diocese of Gaspé in 1924. He studied philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome , and at the major seminary in Gaspé . From 1927-1930 he studied theology at the Angelicum and Canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University. He held doctorates in philosophy, theology, and canon law. From 1930 to 1947 he was professor of theology at the seminary of Québec. In 1938 he was incardinated in the diocese of Québec.
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Nemesius
350 - 420 (70 years)
Nemesius of Emesa was a Christian philosopher, and the author of a treatise Περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου or De natura hominis . According to the title of his book, he was the Bishop of Emesa . His book is an attempt to compile a system of anthropology from the standpoint of Christian philosophy; it was very influential in later Greek, Arabic and Christian thought.
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Quintus Sextius
50 BC - 100 BC (-50 years)
Quintus Sextius the Elder was a Roman philosopher, whose philosophy combined Pythagoreanism with Stoicism. Seneca frequently praised him. Life Sextius was born no later than 70 BC. He founded a school of philosophy combining some features of the Pythagoreans with others of the Stoics; and which was consequently classed sometimes with one, and sometimes with the other of those sects. Seneca describes Sextius as a Stoic but mentions that Sextius himself denied it. From the Epistles of Seneca we learn that Sextius, though born of an illustrious family, had declined the office of Senator when offered him by Julius Caesar.
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Nestor Makhno
1888 - 1934 (46 years)
Nestor Ivanovych Makhno , also known as Bat'ko Makhno , was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian Civil War. He established the Makhnovshchina , a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown, Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine.
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Erich Neumann
1905 - 1960 (55 years)
Erich Neumann was a German psychologist, philosopher, writer, and student of Carl Jung. Life and career Neumann was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1927 and then continued to study medicine at the University of Berlin, where he acquired his first degree in medicine in 1933. In 1934 Neumann and his wife Julie, who had been Zionists since they were teenagers, spurred on by fear of persecution of Jews by the Nazi government, moved to Tel Aviv. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C.
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Victor Babeș
1854 - 1926 (72 years)
Victor Babeș was a Romanian physician, bacteriologist, academician and professor. One of the founders of modern microbiology, Victor Babeș is author of one of the first treatises of bacteriology in the world – Bacteria and their role in pathological anatomy and histology of infectious diseases, written in collaboration with French scientist Victor André Cornil in 1885. In 1888, Babeș underlies the principle of passive immunity, and a few years later enunciates the principle of antibiosis. He made early and significant contributions to the study of rabies, leprosy, diphtheria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.
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Antoine Louis
1723 - 1792 (69 years)
Antoine Louis was an 18th-century French surgeon and physiologist. He was originally trained in medicine by his father, a sergeant major at a local military hospital. As a young man he moved to Paris, where he served as gagnant-maîtrise at the Salpêtrière. In 1750 he was appointed professor of physiology, a position he held for 40 years. In 1764 he was appointed lifetime secretary to the Académie Royale de Chirurgie.
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Robert S. Hartman
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Robert Schirokauer Hartman was a German-American logician and philosopher. His primary field of study was scientific axiology and he is known as its original theorist. His axiology is the basis of the Hartman Value Inventory
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Friedrich Jodl
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Friedrich Jodl was a German philosopher and psychologist. Biography Friedrich Jodl grew up in a Munich family association which, due to its proximity to the royal court, had provided numerous senior civil servants in Bavaria. The painter Heinrich Bürkel, a family friend, introduced him to the fine arts at an early age.
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Constantin Brunner
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Constantin Brunner was the pen-name of the German Jewish philosopher Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer . He was born in Altona on 27 August 1862. He came from a prominent Jewish family that had lived in the vicinity of Hamburg for generations; his grandfather, Akiba Wertheimer, was chief Rabbi of Altona and Schleswig-Holstein. Brunner studied philosophy under a number of prominent scholars, but never completed his doctorate. He established himself as a literary critic, and enjoyed a wide celebrity. In the 1890s, he withdrew from public life to devote himself to writing. He lived in Germany until 1933...
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Chauncey D. Leake
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Chauncey Depew Leake was an American pharmacologist, medical historian and ethicist. Leake received a bachelor's degree with majors in biology, chemistry, and philosophy from Princeton University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in pharmacology and physiology.
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Lie Yukou
449 BC - 500 BC (-51 years)
Lie Yukou was a Chinese philosopher who is considered the author of the Daoist book Liezi, which uses his honorific name Liezi . Early life Lie Yukou was born in the State of Zheng, near today's Zhengzhou, Henan Province.
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Jacob Taubes
1923 - 1987 (64 years)
Jacob Taubes was a sociologist of religion, philosopher, and scholar of Judaism. Taubes was born into an old rabbinical family. He was married to the writer Susan Taubes. He obtained his doctorate in 1947 for a thesis on "Occidental Eschatology" and initially taught religious studies and Jewish studies in the United States at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton University.
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David of Dinant
1160 - 1217 (57 years)
David of Dinant was a pantheistic philosopher. He may have been a member of, or at least been influenced by, a pantheistic sect known as the Amalricians. David was condemned by the Church in 1210 for his writing of the "Quaternuli" , which forced him to flee Paris. When and where he died is unknown; all that can be ascertained is that he died after the year 1215, as he was condemned again in the council of 1215.
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Francesc Pujols
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Francesc Pujols i Morgades was a Catalan writer and philosopher. Biography Pujols began to write poetry during his studies in secondary school, influenced by the work of Jacint Verdaguer and Joan Maragall. He took part in the literary competition Jocs Florals of Barcelona in 1902, and won the Natural Flower with the poem “Idil·li”.
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Vydūnas
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Wilhelm Storost, artistic name Vilius Storostas-Vydūnas , mostly known as Vydūnas, was a Prussian-Lithuanian teacher, poet, humanist, philosopher and Lithuanian writer, a leader of the Prussian Lithuanian national movement in Lithuania Minor, and one of leaders of the theosophical movement in East Prussia.
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Aloys Fischer
1880 - 1937 (57 years)
Aloys Fischer was a German educationalist and worked on the foundations of a modern theory of education. Life Fischer was born in Furth im Wald, Bavaria on 10 April 1880. He attended the local elementary school. In 1891 he was awarded a scholarship to the grammar school based at the Benedictine Metten Abbey. He finished there 1899 and then attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich studying Classical Philology, German and history. After passing the First State Exam in 1902 he studied for a doctorate under Theodor Lipps. From 1903 to 1906 Fischer tutored the children of Adolf von Hildebrand.
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Philipp Albert Stapfer
1766 - 1840 (74 years)
Philipp Albert Stapfer was a Swiss politician and philosopher. He was the plenipotentiary envoi of the Helvetic Republic to the French consulate in Paris from 1801 till 1803. He married and settled in France, at the Chateau de Talcy and in Paris where he became the friend of Maine de Biran in 1805 at informal gatherings of Cabanis circle at Auteuil. He was also vice-president of the Paris Protestant society.
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Samuel Adams
1722 - 1803 (81 years)
Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father of the United States. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States. He was a second cousin to his fellow Founding Father, President John Adams.
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Walter Raleigh
1554 - 1618 (64 years)
Sir Walter Raleigh was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I.
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Franciscus Donders
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
Franciscus Cornelius Donders FRS FRSE was a Dutch ophthalmologist. During his career, he was a professor of physiology in Utrecht, and was internationally regarded as an authority on eye diseases, directing the Netherlands Hospital for Eye Patients. Along with Graefe and Helmholtz, he was one of the primary founders of scientific ophthalmology.
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Pasquale Galluppi
1770 - 1846 (76 years)
Pasquale Galluppi was an Italian philosopher. Biography and philosophy Galluppi was born at Tropea, Calabria, into the patrician Galluppi family. From 1831 he was a professor at the University of Naples, where he died in 1846.
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Aristippus the Younger
400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Aristippus the Younger , of Cyrene, was a Cyrenaic philosopher in the second half of the 4th century BC. He was the grandson of Aristippus of Cyrene, the founder of the school. According to Diogenes Laërtius, he received the nickname "Mother-taught" . because he learned philosophy from his mother, Arete of Cyrene, who was the daughter of the elder Aristippus. Diogenes lists Theodorus the Atheist as one of his students. According to Aristocles of Messene, as quoted by Eusebius, he may have formalized the principles of Cyrenaic philosophy.: He quite plainly defined the end to be the life of pleasure, ranking as pleasure that which lies in motion.
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