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,
#15501
Bernard of Chartres
1070 - 1130 (60 years)
Bernard of Chartres was a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist philosopher, scholar, and administrator. Life The date and place of his birth are unknown. He was believed to have been the elder brother of Thierry of Chartres and to be of Breton origin, but research has shown that this is unlikely. He is recorded at the cathedral school of Chartres by 1115 and was chancellor until 1124. There is no proof that he was still alive after 1124.
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Ford Madox Brown
1821 - 1893 (72 years)
Ford Madox Brown was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work . Brown spent the latter years of his life painting the twelve works known as The Manchester Murals, depicting Mancunian history, for Manchester Town Hall.
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Ignaz Semmelweis
1818 - 1865 (47 years)
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, and was described as the "saviour of mothers". Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth, and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated...
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Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Max Freedom Long
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Max Freedom Long was an American novelist and New Age author. Early life and career Max Freedom Long was born on October 26, 1890, in Sterling, Colorado to Toby Albert Long and his wife Jessie Diffendaffer. At the time of the 1910 census he was working as a photographer in his hometown, and was living in his grandfather's household with his parents. He attended Los Angeles State Normal School from September 1914 to June 1916, and graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in general education. After graduating, he worked briefly as an auto-mechanic in Los Angeles.
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Julian
331 - 363 (32 years)
Julian was the Caesar of the West from 355 to 360 and Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher and author in Greek. His rejection of Christianity, and his promotion of Neoplatonic Hellenism in its place, caused him to be remembered as Julian the Apostate in Christian tradition. He is sometimes referred to as Julian the Philosopher.
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Edward Dembowski
1822 - 1846 (24 years)
Edward Dembowski was a Polish philosopher, literary critic, journalist, and leftist independence activist. Life Edward Dembowski was the son of Julia, née Kochanowska, and a conservative castellan-voivode of the Congress Poland, Leon Dembowski. On account of Edward's szlachta origins and contrasting radical social views, he was called "the red castellan's-son."
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Charles Andler
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Charles Philippe Théodore Andler was a French Germanist and philosopher. Life Andler was born to a Protestant family in Strasbourg. In 1887 and 1888, Andler failed to achieve his agrégation in philosophy, judged by Jules Lachelier, inspector-general in charge of philosophy, as showing "excessive bias" towards German philosophy. He therefore changed to take the German literature agrégation in 1889, passing out top of his class. Andler became professor of German at the Sorbonne in 1901 and at the Collège de France in 1926. Amongst his works were writings on Nietzsche, a commentary on The Commun...
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Hugo Bergmann
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Hugo Bergmann was an Israeli philosopher, born in Prague. Biography Hugo Samuel Bergmann was born and raised in Prague, Austria-Hungary. He was a member of the Prague intelligentsia visiting the salon group that met at the house of Berta Fanta. Bergmann married her daughter Else Fanta.
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Friedrich Christian Baumeister
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Friedrich Christian Baumeister was a German philosopher. Baumeister studied philosophy in Jena and Wittenberg. He became director of the Görlitz gymnasium in 1736. His textbooks propagated the metaphysics of Christian Wolff.
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Jakob Thomasius
1622 - 1684 (62 years)
Jakob Thomasius was a German academic philosopher and jurist. He is now regarded as an important founding figure in the scholarly study of the history of philosophy. His views were eclectic, and were taken up by his son Christian Thomasius.
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Lev Tikhomirov
1852 - 1923 (71 years)
Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov , originally a Russian revolutionary and one of the members of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya, following his disenchantment with violent revolution became one of the leading conservative thinkers in Russia. He authored several books on monarchism, Orthodoxy, and Russian political philosophy.
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Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
#15514
Erich Rothacker
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Erich Rothacker was a German philosopher, a leading exponent of philosophical anthropology. Rothacker's first major work, Logik und Systematik der Geisteswissenschaften , presents the view that actual historical individuals, whose cognitive equipment is partially created by a specific cultural community while at the same time constantly modifying it, are the elements that constitute the subject of knowledge, rather than a timeless universal entity as it is represented by Descartes or Locke.
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Stanisław Wyspiański
1869 - 1907 (38 years)
Stanisław Mateusz Ignacy Wyspiański was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer. A patriotic writer, he created a series of symbolic, national dramas within the artistic philosophy of the Young Poland Movement.
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Max Jacob
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. Life and career After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend . Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916.
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Shoghi Effendi
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Shoghí Effendi was the grandson and successor of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, appointed to the role of Guardian of the Baháʼí Faith from 1921 until his death in 1957. He created a series of teaching plans that oversaw the expansion of the faith to many new countries, and also translated many of the writings of the Baháʼí central figures. He was succeeded by an interim arrangement of the Hands of the Cause until the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963.
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William Kneale
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
William Calvert Kneale was an English logician best known for his 1962 book The Development of Logic, a history of logic from its beginnings in Ancient Greece written with his wife Martha. Kneale was also known as a philosopher of science and the author of a book on probability and induction. Educated at the Liverpool Institute High School for boys, he later became a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and in 1960 succeeded to the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy previously occupied by the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin. He retired in 1966.
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Arthur Ransome
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.
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Henrik Steffens
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Henrik Steffens , was a Norwegian philosopher, scientist, and poet. Early life, education, and lectures He was born at Stavanger. At the age of fourteen he went with his parents to Copenhagen, where he studied theology and natural science. In 1796 he lectured at the University of Kiel, and two years later went to the University of Jena to study the natural philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. He went to Freiberg in 1800, and there came under the influence of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1801, he published a volume on geology called Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde. which became his most successful and influential work as a scientist.
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Gaius Marius Victorinus
290 - 364 (74 years)
Gaius Marius Victorinus was a Roman grammarian, rhetorician and Neoplatonic philosopher. Victorinus was African by birth and experienced the height of his career during the reign of Constantius II. He is also known for translating two of Aristotle's books from ancient Greek into Latin: the Categories and On Interpretation . Victorinus had a religious conversion, from being a pagan to a Christian, "at an advanced old age" .
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Pierre Laromiguière
1756 - 1837 (81 years)
Pierre Laromiguière was a French philosopher. Life He was born at Livinhac-le-Haut, Rouergue, and died in Paris. As professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse, he was unsuccessful and incurred the displeasure of the French parliament by his thesis on the rights of property in connection with taxation. Subsequently, he came to Paris, where he was appointed professor of logic in the École Normale and lectured in the Prytanée. In 1799 he was made a member of the Tribunate, and in 1833 of the Academy of Moral and Political Science. In 1793 he published Projet d'éléments de métaphysique, a work characterized by lucidity and excellence of style.
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Aurel Kolnai
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Aurel Thomas Kolnai was a 20th-century philosopher and political theorist. Life Kolnai was born Aurel Stein in Budapest, Hungary to Jewish parents but moved to Vienna before his twentieth birthday to enter Vienna University, where he studied under Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Bühler, and Ludwig von Mises. It was also at this time that he became attracted to the thinking of Franz Brentano and the phenomenological thought of Brentano's student Edmund Husserl. Kolnai studied under Husserl briefly in 1928 in Freiburg. During the early 1920s, Kolnai wrote as an independent scholar with little success.
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Johannes Althusius
1557 - 1638 (81 years)
Johannes Althusius was a German-French jurist and Calvinist political philosopher. He is best known for his 1603 work, "Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata". revised editions were published in 1610 and 1614. The ideas expressed therein relate to the early development of federalism in the 16th and 17th centuries and the construction of subsidiarity.
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Georgius Agricola
1494 - 1555 (61 years)
Georgius Agricola was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest in the mining and refining of metals. For his groundbreaking work De Natura Fossilium published in 1546, he is generally referred to as the Father of Mineralogy.
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Peter of Spain
1300 - 1300 (0 years)
Peter of Hispania was the author of the , later known as the , an important medieval university textbook on Aristotelian logic. As the Latin Hispania was considered to include the entire Iberian Peninsula, he is traditionally and usually identified with the medieval Portuguese scholar and ecclesiastic Peter Juliani, who was elected Pope John XXI in 1276. The identification is sometimes disputed, usually by Spanish authors, who claim the author of the was a Castilian Blackfriar. He is also sometimes identified as Petrus Ferrandi Hispanus .
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Hastings Rashdall
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Hastings Rashdall was an English philosopher, theologian, historian, and Anglican priest. He expounded a theory known as ideal utilitarianism, and he was a major historian of the universities of the Middle Ages.
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John Cook Wilson
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
John Cook Wilson was an English philosopher, Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College. Early life and career John Cook Wilson was born in Nottingham, England, in 1849. He was the son of James Wilson, a Methodist minister. After studying at Derby Grammar School, 1862–67, Cook Wilson went up with a scholarship to Balliol College in 1868, where he read both Classics under H. W. Chandler and Mathematics under H. J. S. Smith. He graduated with a double 'double-first', gaining both firsts in Mathematical and Classical Moderations , and then firsts in Mathematics and Literae Humaniores or 'Greats' .
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Ljubomir Nedić
1858 - 1902 (44 years)
Ljubomir Nedić was a Serbian philosopher and literary critic. Having received academic training in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Nedić taught at the Belgrade Higher School beginning in 1885, after having defended his doctorate thesis on Sir William Hamilton's logic. During the 1890s, Nedić left philosophy and began his career as a literary critic. His criticisms were controversial during his time and targeted many highly respected Serbian writers such as Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Laza Kostić and Milan Milićević. Nedić advocated an interpretation of literary works with minimal attention...
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Yanagi Sōetsu
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Yanagi Sōetsu, also known as Yanagi Muneyoshi, was a Japanese art critic, philosopher, and founder of the mingei movement in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s. Personal life Yanagi was born in 1889 to Yanagi Narayoshi, a hydrographer of the Imperial Navy and Katsuko.
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George Sylvester Morris
1840 - 1889 (49 years)
George Sylvester Morris was a 19th-century American educator and philosophical writer. Biography Morris was born in Norwich, Vermont. He was the son of a well known abolitionist and temperance man. In 1861, he graduated from Dartmouth College, served in the Union army for two years during the American Civil War, and taught at Dartmouth in 1863–1864.
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John Norris
1657 - 1711 (54 years)
John Norris, sometimes called John Norris of Bemerton , was an English theologian, philosopher and poet associated with the Cambridge Platonists. Life John Norris was born at Collingbourne Kingston, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester School, and Exeter College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1680. He was later appointed a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford . He lived a quiet life as a country parson and thinker at Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, Wiltshire, from 1692 until his death early in 1712.
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Edward Wheeler Scripture
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Edward Wheeler Scripture was an American physician and psychologist. He founded the experimental psychology laboratory at Yale University, directed the Vanderbilt Speech Clinic at Columbia University and was a founder of the American Psychological Association. Trained under experimental psychology pioneer Wilhelm Wundt, Scripture became best known for his contributions to speech science.
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Alice Hamilton
1869 - 1970 (101 years)
Alice Hamilton was an American physician, research scientist, and author. She was a leading expert in the field of occupational health, laid the foundation for health and safety protections, and a pioneer in the field of industrial toxicology.
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William of Conches
1080 - 1154 (74 years)
William of Conches was a French scholastic philosopher who sought to expand the bounds of Christian humanism by studying secular works of the classics and fostering empirical science. He was a prominent member of the School of Chartres. John of Salisbury, a bishop of Chartres and former student of William's, refers to William as the most talented grammarian after Bernard of Chartres.
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Georgia Harkness
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Georgia Elma Harkness was an American Methodist theologian and philosopher. Harkness has been described as one of the first significant American female theologians and was important in the movement to legalize the ordination of women in American Methodism.
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Gaston Berger
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Gaston Berger was a French futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and for his studies on the character structure.
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Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
1657 - 1757 (100 years)
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle , also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author and an influential member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of Enlightenment.
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Carlo Cattaneo
1801 - 1869 (68 years)
Carlo Cattaneo was an Italian philosopher, writer, and activist, famous for his role in the Five Days of Milan in March 1848, when he led the city council during the rebellion. Early life and education Cattaneo was born in Milan on 15 June 1801. He was the son of Melchiorre Cattaneo, a goldsmith, and Maria Antonia Sangiorgi. After attending school in Milan he studied law at the University of Pavia, graduating in 1824.
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Nikolay Strakhov
1828 - 1896 (68 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Strakhov, also transliterated as Nikolai Strahov , was a Russian philosopher, publicist, journalist and literary critic. He shared the ideals of Pochvennichestvo and was a longtime friend and correspondent of Leo Tolstoy.
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Svetozar Marković
1846 - 1875 (29 years)
Svetozar Marković was a Serbian political activist, literary critic and socialist philosopher. He developed an activistic anthropological philosophy with a definite program of social change. He was called the Serbian Nikolay Dobrolyubov.
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Raymond Ruyer
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher in the late 20th century. His work covered topics including the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of informatics, the philosophy of value and others. His most popular book is The Gnosis of Princeton in which he presents his own philosophical views under the pretence that he was representing the views of an imaginary group of American scientists. He developed an account of panpsychism which was a major influence on philosophers such as Adolf Portmann, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
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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.
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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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