#15751
Julius Frauenstädt
1813 - 1879 (66 years)
Christian Martin Julius Frauenstädt was a German philosopher and editor. He was educated at the house of his uncle at Neisse, and converted from Judaism to protestant Christianity in 1833. He studied theology and, later, philosophy at Berlin, where he came under the sway of the philosophies of Hegel and Schelling. He worked as a private tutor for the Sayn-Wittgenstein family during this period.
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Robert Koch
1843 - 1910 (67 years)
Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. As the discoverer of the specific causative agents of deadly infectious diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax, he is regarded as one of the main founders of modern bacteriology. As such he is popularly nicknamed the father of microbiology , and as the father of medical bacteriology. His discovery of the anthrax bacterium in 1876 is considered as the birth of modern bacteriology. Koch used his discoveries to establish that germs "could cause a specific disease" and directly provided proofs for that germ theory of diseases, therefore creating the scientific basis of public health, saving millions of lives.
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David Prall
1886 - 1940 (54 years)
David Wight Prall was a philosopher of art and an academic. His interests include aesthetics, value theory, abstract ideas, truth and the history of philosophy. He is noted for his notion of aesthetic surfaces.
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Ilya Repin
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Ilya Yefimovich Repin was a Ukrainian-born Russian painter. He became one of the most renowned artists in Russia in the 19th century. His major works include Barge Haulers on the Volga , Religious Procession in Kursk Province , Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan ; and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks . He is also known for the revealing portraits he made of the leading Russian literary and artistic figures of his time, including Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Pavel Tretyakov, and especially Leo Tolstoy, with whom he had a long friendship.
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Giotto
1267 - 1337 (70 years)
Giotto di Bondone , known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great a...
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Christian von Ehrenfels
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Christian von Ehrenfels was an Austrian philosopher, and is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology. Christian von Ehrenfels was born on 20 June 1859 in Rodaun near Vienna and grew up at his father's castle Brunn am Walde in Lower Austria. He joined secondary school in Krems and first studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and then changed to the University of Vienna.
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Dharmapala of Nalanda
530 - 561 (31 years)
Dharmapāla . A Buddhist scholar, he was one of the main teachers of the Yogacara school in India. He was a contemporary of Bhavaviveka , with whom he debated. Xuanzang, the famous Chinese pilgrim, tells that Dharmapāla was born in Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. He was a son of a high official, and betrothed to a daughter of the king, but escaped on the eve of the wedding feast, entered the order, studied all views, from Hinayana as well as Mahayana, and attained to reverence and distinction. He studied in Nalanda as a student of Dignāga. Later he succeeded him as abbot of the University. He spent h...
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Alfred Baeumler
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
Alfred Baeumler , was an Austrian-born German philosopher, pedagogue and prominent Nazi ideologue. From 1924 he taught at the Technische Universität Dresden, at first as an unsalaried lecturer Privatdozent. Bäumler was made associate professor in 1928 and full professor a year later. From 1933 he taught philosophy and political education in Berlin as the director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy.
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Antonio Labriola
1843 - 1904 (61 years)
Antonio Labriola was an Italian Marxist theoretician and philosopher. Although an academic philosopher and never an active member of any Marxist political party, his thought exerted influence on many political theorists in Italy during the early 20th century, including the founder of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce, as well as the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga. He also influenced the Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician Leon Trotsky.
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Albinus
100 - 200 (100 years)
Albinus was a Platonist philosopher, who lived at Smyrna, and was teacher of Galen. A short tract by him, entitled Introduction to Plato's dialogues, has survived. From the title of one of the extant manuscripts we learn that Albinus was a pupil of Gaius the Platonist. The original title of his work was probably Prologos, and it may have originally formed the initial section of notes taken at the lectures of Gaius. After explaining the nature of the Dialogue, which he compares to a Drama, the writer goes on to divide the Dialogues of Plato into four classes, logical, critical, physical, ethical, and mentions another division of them into Tetralogies, according to their subjects.
Go to ProfileHicetas was a Greek philosopher of the Pythagorean School. He was born in Syracuse, Magna Graecia. Like his fellow Pythagorean Ecphantus and the Academic Heraclides Ponticus, he believed that the daily movement of permanent stars was caused by the rotation of the Earth around its axis. When Copernicus referred to Nicetus Syracusanus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium as having been cited by Cicero as an ancient who also argued that the Earth moved, it is believed that he was actually referring to Hicetas.
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James Burnett, Lord Monboddo
1714 - 1799 (85 years)
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution, philosopher and deist. He is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics. In 1767 he became a judge in the Court of Session.
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Friedrich Paulsen
1846 - 1908 (62 years)
Friedrich Paulsen was a German Neo-Kantian philosopher and educator. Biography He was born at Langenhorn and educated at the Gymnasium Christianeum, the University of Erlangen, and the University of Berlin. He completed his doctoral thesis under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg at Berlin in 1871, he habilitated there in 1875, and he became extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy there in 1878. In 1896 he succeeded Eduard Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin.
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Jean Bodin
1530 - 1596 (66 years)
Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. Bodin lived during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote against the background of religious conflict in France. He seemed to be a nominal Catholic throughout his life but was critical of papal authority over governments and there was evidence he may have converted to Protestantism during his time in Geneva. Known for his theory of sovereignty, he favoured the strong central control of a national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife.
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Pierre Leroux
1797 - 1871 (74 years)
Pierre Henri Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist. He was born at Bercy, now a part of Paris, the son of an artisan. Life His education was interrupted by the death of his father, which compelled him to support his mother and family. Having worked first as a mason and then as a compositor, he joined P. Dubois in the foundation of Le Globe which became in 1831 the official organ of the Saint-Simonian community, of which he became a prominent member. In November of the same year, when Prosper Enfantin became leader of the Saint-Simonians and preached the enfranchisement of women and the functions of the couple-prêtre, Leroux separated himself from the sect.
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Georg Jellinek
1851 - 1911 (60 years)
Georg Jellinek was a German public lawyer and was considered to be "the exponent of public law in Austria“. Life From 1867, Jellinek studied law, history of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He also studied philosophy, history and law in Heidelberg and Leipzig up until 1872. He was the son of Adolf Jellinek, a famous preacher in Vienna's Jewish community. In 1872 he completed his Dr. phil. thesis in Leipzig and in 1874 also his Dr. jur. in Vienna.
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Branislav Petronijević
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Branislav "Brana" Petronijević was a Serbian philosopher and paleontologist. His major work is the two-volume Prinzipien der Metaphysik , in which he outlines his original metaphysical system – a synthesis of Baruch Spinoza's monism and Gottfried Leibniz's monadological pluralism into what he called "monopluralism". Influenced by George Berkeley and G.W.F. Hegel, Petronijević held that our immediate experience is the source of basic logical and metaphysical axioms – what he called "empirio-rationalist" epistemology.
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Kurt Riezler
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Kurt Riezler was a German philosopher and diplomat. A top-level cabinet adviser in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he negotiated Germany's underwriting of Russia's October Revolution and authored the 1914 September Program which outlined German war aims during World War I. The posthumous publication of his secret notes and diaries played a role in the "Fischer Controversy" among German historians in the early 1960s.
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Heydar Huseynov
1908 - 1950 (42 years)
Dr. Heydar Najaf oglu Huseynov was an Azerbaijani philosopher and academician. Life Huseynov was born in Erivan into the petty bourgeois family of Haji Najaf Karbalai Huseynoglu and his wife Mashadi Gulsum, being the youngest of their six children. His father died shortly after Heydar's birth. After their eldest son Yusif was killed in an ethnic conflict in 1918, the family moved first to Batumi, then to Stavropol, until they finally settled in Baku where he received secondary education, graduated from the Azerbaijan State Pedagocical Institute with a degree in linguistics in 1931 and a Candidate of Sciences degree in philosophy.
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John Amos Comenius
1592 - 1670 (78 years)
John Amos Comenius was a Moravian philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century.
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Edward Bellamy
1850 - 1898 (48 years)
Edward Bellamy was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of his political ideas.
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Karl Rosenkranz
1805 - 1879 (74 years)
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Life Born in Magdeburg, he read philosophy at Berlin, Halle and Königsberg, devoting himself mainly to the doctrines of Hegel and Schleiermacher. After holding the chair of philosophy at Halle for two years, he became, in 1833, professor at the University of Königsberg. In his last years he was blind.
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Jan van Eyck
1390 - 1441 (51 years)
Jan van Eyck was a painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting, though most now regard that claim as an oversimplification.
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Bhāviveka
500 - 578 (78 years)
Bhāviveka, also called Bhāvaviveka , and Bhavya was a sixth-century madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher. Alternative names for this figure also include Bhavyaviveka, Bhāvin, Bhāviviveka, Bhagavadviveka and Bhavya. Bhāviveka is the author of the Madhyamakahrdaya , its auto-commentary the Tarkajvālā and the Prajñāpradīpa .
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Stanisław Jaśkowski
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Stanisław Jaśkowski was a Polish logician who made important contributions to proof theory and formal semantics. He was a student of Jan Łukasiewicz and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic. He is regarded as one of the founders of natural deduction, which he discovered independently of Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. He is also known for his research into paraconsistent logic. Upon his death, his name was added to the Genius Wall of Fame. He was the President of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Constantin Brâncuși
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought ...
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Herman Van Breda
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Herman Leo Van Breda was a Franciscan, philosopher and founder of the Husserl Archives at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. On 19 August 1934, he was ordained as a priest and in 1936 he started studying philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he obtained a PhD degree in 1941 with a dissertation on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Later he became a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he stayed until his death in 1974.
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Jakob Sigismund Beck
1761 - 1840 (79 years)
Jakob Sigismund Beck was a German philosopher. Biography Beck was born in the village of Liessau in the rural district of Marienburg in Royal Prussia, Poland in 1761. The son of a priest , he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Königsberg, where Christian Jakob Kraus, Johann Schultz, and Immanuel Kant were his teachers. After his studies he first accepted a post as a teacher at a grammar school in Halle. With his thesis Dissertatio de Theoremate Tayloriano, sive de lege generali, secundum quam functionis mutantur, notatis a quibus pendent variabilibus, which he wrote in Halle, he was qualified as a university lecturer.
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Manuel Sacristán
1925 - 1985 (60 years)
Manuel Sacristán Luzón was a Spanish philosopher and writer. Sacristán, the son of a Francoist collaborator, moved to Barcelona in 1940, thereafter living most of his life in said city. He soon became a member of the Falange Española youth section and studied Law and Philosophy in the University of Barcelona, where he became a member of the cultural section of the Sindicato Español Universitario . After a thwarted contact with a clandestine Anarchist group, he and two fellow Falangists were shunned and persecuted by the mainstream SEU officials, resulting in the suicide of one of them and an ...
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Joseph Henry Woodger
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Joseph Henry Woodger was a British theoretical biologist and philosopher of biology whose attempts to make biological sciences more rigorous and empirical was significantly influential to the philosophy of biology in the twentieth century. Karl Popper, the prominent philosopher of science, claimed "Woodger... influenced and stimulated the evolution of the philosophy of science in Britain and in the United States as hardly anybody else".
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Edgar S. Brightman
1884 - 1953 (69 years)
Edgar Sheffield Brightman was an American philosopher and Christian theologian in the Methodist tradition, associated with Boston University and liberal theology, and promulgated the philosophy known as Boston personalism.
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Jean Grenier
1898 - 1971 (73 years)
Jean Grenier was a French philosopher and writer. He taught for a time in Algiers, where he became a significant influence on the young Albert Camus. Biography Born in Paris, Grenier spent his childhood and adolescence in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, the birthplace of Jules Lequier, the visionary philosopher to whom Grenier would eventually dedicate his doctoral thesis. These early years, during which he became acquainted with Louis Guilloux, Edmond Lambert and Max Jacob, are documented in his autobiographical novel Les grèves . In 1922 Grenier gained a teaching qualification in philosophy and began his academic career at the Institut français in Naples, alongside Henri Bosco.
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Walter Dubislav
1895 - 1937 (42 years)
Walter Dubislav was a German logician and philosopher of science . Biography After studying mathematics and philosophy, Dubislav attained a doctorate in 1922 with "Contributions to the theories of definition and proof within mathematical logic" . In 1928 he became a private lecturer in philosophy of mathematics and the natural sciences at the Technical University of Berlin and from 1931 was Professor Extraordinarius . In 1936 he emigrated to Prague.
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Helen Keller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the Unite...
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Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1846 - 1926 (80 years)
Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life", after he had been nominated by a member of the Swedish Academy.
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Ogyū Sorai
1666 - 1728 (62 years)
Ogyū Sorai, pen name Butsu Sorai, was a Japanese historian, philologist, philosopher, and translator. He has been described as the most influential such scholar during the Edo period Japan. His primary area of study was in applying the teachings of Confucianism to government and social order. He responded to contemporary economic and political failings of the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as the culture of mercantilism and the dominance of old institutions that had become weak with extravagance. Sorai rejected the moralism of Neo-Confucianism and instead looked to the ancient works. He argue...
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Max Bense
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Max Bense was a German philosopher, writer, and publicist, known for his work in philosophy of science, logic, aesthetics, and semiotics. His thoughts combine natural sciences, art, and philosophy under a collective perspective and follow a definition of reality, which – under the term existential rationalism – is able to remove the separation between humanities and natural sciences.
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Karl Groos
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Karl Groos was a German philosopher and psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play. His 1898 book on The Play of Animals suggested that play is a preparation for later life.
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Leo the Mathematician
790 - 900 (110 years)
Leo the Mathematician, the Grammarian or the Philosopher was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century". He was archbishop of Thessalonica and later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic.
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Owen Barfield
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Arthur Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings. Life Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth and Arthur Edward Barfield . He had three elder siblings: Diana , Barbara , and Harry . He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America.
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John Everett Millais
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street . Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophel...
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Vinoba Bhave
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Vinayak Narahari Bhave, also known as Vinoba Bhave , was an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights. Often called Acharya , he is best known for the Bhoodan Movement. He is considered as National Teacher of India and the spiritual successor of Mahatma Gandhi. He was an eminent philosopher. The Gita has been translated into the Marathi language by him with the title Geetai .
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Heinrich Gomperz
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Heinrich Gomperz was an Austrian philosopher. He was a son of Theodor Gomperz. He was a patient of Sigmund Freud and was married to Ada Stepnitz. Works , 1898., 1907.Die indische Theosophie, 1925., 2 Vols., 1905–1908., 1915.Über Sinn und Sinngebilde, Erklären und Verstehen, 1929., 1953.
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James Frederick Ferrier
1808 - 1864 (56 years)
James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer and philosopher. He introduced the word epistemology in philosophical English, as well as coining agnoiology for the study of ignorance. Education and early writings Ferrier was born at 15 Heriot Row in Edinburgh, the son of John Ferrier, writer to the signet. He was educated at the Royal High School, the University of Edinburgh and Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently, his metaphysical tastes having been fostered by his intimate friend, Sir William Hamilton, spent some time at Heidelberg studying German philosophy.
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Euclid of Megara
436 BC - 365 BC (71 years)
Euclid of Megara was a Greek Socratic philosopher who founded the Megarian school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates in the late 5th century BC, and was present at his death. He held the supreme good to be one, eternal and unchangeable, and denied the existence of anything contrary to the good. Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter's Elements.
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Dagobert D. Runes
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Dagobert David Runes was an immigrant publisher in the US, a philosopher and author. Biography Runes was born in Zastavna, Bukovina, Austro-Hungary . He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1924, under the direction of Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle of positivist philosophers.
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Edgar Cayce
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Edgar Cayce was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to speak from his higher self while in a trance-like state. His words were recorded by his friend, Al Layne; his wife, Gertrude Evans, and later by his secretary, Gladys Davis Turner. During the sessions, Cayce would answer questions on a variety of subjects such as healing, reincarnation, dreams, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition, Atlantis, and future events. Cayce, a devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher, said that his readings came from his subconscious mind exploring the dream realm, where he said all minds were timelessly connected.
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John Lewis
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
John Lewis was a British Unitarian minister and Marxist philosopher and author of many works on philosophy, anthropology, and religion. Lewis's father, a successful builder and architect, came from a Welsh farming family, and was a very devout Methodist. Young Lewis's social and political views clashed with those of his father. Their quarrels eventually led to his father disinheriting him.
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Francis Ellingwood Abbot
1836 - 1903 (67 years)
Francis Ellingwood Abbot was an American philosopher and theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method. His lifelong romance with his wife Katharine Fearing Loring forms the subject of If Ever Two Were One, a collection of his correspondence and diary entries.
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Dietrich von Hildebrand
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer. Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII. He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Pope John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicist...
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