#16351
Ibn al-Nafis
1210 - 1288 (78 years)
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Abī Ḥazm al-Qarashī , known as Ibn al-Nafīs , was an Arab polymath whose areas of work included medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic studies, jurisprudence, and philosophy. He is known for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The work of Ibn al-Nafis regarding the right sided circulation pre-dates the later work of William Harvey's De motu cordis. Both theories attempt to explain circulation. 2nd century Greek physician Galen's theory about the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged unt...
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Moses Hess
1812 - 1875 (63 years)
Moses Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, early communist and Zionist thinker. His socialist theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor Zionism.
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William Kingdon Clifford
1845 - 1879 (34 years)
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry.
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Heinrich Blücher
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.
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Maurice Cornforth
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Maurice Campbell Cornforth was a British Marxist philosopher. Life Cornforth was born in Willesden, London, in 1909, and educated at University College School, where he was friends with Stephen Spender. In 1925 he went up to University College London, graduating in 1929, and then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the only student on a specialised course in logic, taught by Moore, Braithwaite, and Wittgenstein. In 1931, after graduating, Cornforth was awarded a three-year research scholarship at Trinity. In the summer of the same year he joined the Communist Party, setting up...
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Richard Montague
1930 - 1971 (41 years)
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory . For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.
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Śāntarakṣita
725 - 788 (63 years)
, whose name translates into English as "protected by the One who is at peace" was an important and influential Indian Buddhist philosopher, particularly for the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Śāntarakṣita was a philosopher of the Madhyamaka school who studied at Nalanda monastery under Jñānagarbha, and became the founder of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet.
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Francis Picabia
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada. When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic". After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921. He was later briefly assoc...
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Christian Garve
1742 - 1798 (56 years)
Christian Garve was one of the best-known philosophers of the late Enlightenment along with Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn. Life Christian Garve was born into a family of manual workers and died aged 56 in his parental home. He studied in Frankfurt an der Oder and Halle . In 1766 he gained his master's degree in philosophy. From 1770 until 1772 he was extraordinary professor of mathematics and logic in Leipzig. From 1772 he was in Breslau, where he was active as a bookseller. The greatest part of his life was however spent staying with his mother in Breslau. In this city he also became a...
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David Hartley
1705 - 1757 (52 years)
David Hartley was an English philosopher and founder of the Associationist school of psychology. Early life and family history David Hartley was born in 1705 in the vicinity of Halifax, Yorkshire. His mother died three months after his birth. His father, an Anglican clergyman, died when David was fifteen. Hartley was educated at Bradford Grammar School and in 1722 was admitted as a Sizar to Jesus College, Cambridge where he was a Rustat scholar. He received his BA in 1726 and MA in 1729. In April 1730 he became the first layperson to be Master of Magnus Grammar School , Newark, and it was there that he began to practise medicine.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712 - 1778 (66 years)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher , writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
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Bernard Bosanquet
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Bernard Bosanquet was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work influenced but was later subject to criticism by many thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bernard was the husband of Helen Bosanquet, the leader of the Charity Organisation Society.
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Étienne-Gabriel Morelly
1717 - 1778 (61 years)
Étienne-Gabriel Morelly was a French utopian thinker, philosopher and novelist. An otherwise "obscure tax official", and teacher, Morelly wrote two books on education, a critique of Montesquieu and The Code of Nature, which was published anonymously in France in 1755. This book, initially attributed to philosophes including Rousseau and Diderot, criticised contemporary society, postulated a social order without avarice, and proposed a constitution intended to lead to an egalitarian society without property, marriage, church or police.
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Camille Pissarro
1830 - 1903 (73 years)
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.
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Guo Xiang
252 - 312 (60 years)
Guo Xiang is credited with the first and most important revision of the text known as the Zhuangzi which, along with the Tao Te Ching, forms the textual and philosophical basis of the Taoist school of thought. He was also a scholar of xuanxue.
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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
1463 - 1494 (31 years)
Giovanni Pico dei conti della Mirandola e della Concordia , known as Pico della Mirandola, was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic Reformation". He was the founder of the tradition of Christian Kabbalah, a key tenet of early modern Western esotericism.
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Strato of Lampsacus
335 BC - 269 BC (66 years)
Strato of Lampsacus was a Peripatetic philosopher, and the third director of the Lyceum after the death of Theophrastus. He devoted himself especially to the study of natural science, and increased the naturalistic elements in Aristotle's thought to such an extent, that he denied the need for an active god to construct the universe, preferring to place the government of the universe in the unconscious force of nature alone.
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Giacomo Leopardi
1798 - 1837 (39 years)
Count Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist, and philologist. He is considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the principals of literary romanticism; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition—of sensuous and materialist inspiration—has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century but routinely compared ...
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Dugald Stewart
1753 - 1828 (75 years)
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment, he was renowned as a populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and of Adam Smith. Trained in mathematics, medicine and philosophy, his lectures at the University of Edinburgh were widely disseminated by his many influential students. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In most contemporary documents he is referred to as Prof Dougal Stewart.
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Ralph Barton Perry
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Ralph Barton Perry was an American philosopher. He was a strident moral idealist who stated in 1909 that, to him, idealism meant "to interpret life consistently with ethical, scientific, and metaphysical truth." Perry's viewpoints on religion stressed the notion that religious thinking possessed legitimacy should it exist within a framework accepting of human reason and social progress.
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1828 - 1882 (54 years)
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti , generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti , was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti inspired the next generation of artists and writers, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in particular. His work also influenced the European Symbolistss and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
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Jan Patočka
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher. Having studied in Prague, Paris, Berlin, and Freiburg, he was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Freiburg he also developed a lifelong philosophical friendship with Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink. Patočka worked in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for almost his entire career, but never joined the Communist Party and was affected by persecution, which ended in his death as a dissident spokesperson of Charter 77.
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Maine de Biran
1766 - 1824 (58 years)
François-Pierre-Gontier de Biran , usually known as Maine de Biran , was a French philosopher. Life Maine de Biran was born at Bergerac; died at Paris, 16 July, 1824. The name Maine he assumed from an estate called Le Maine, near Mouleydier. After studying with distinction at Périgueux, he entered the life guards of King Louis XVI of France, and was present at Versailles during the events of October 1789.
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Ferdinand Alquié
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Ferdinand Alquié was a French philosopher and member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques from 1978. In the years 1931 to 1945 he was a professor in various provincial and Parisian lycees, and later at the University of Montpellier and Sorbonne where he worked until he retired in 1979.
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Crates of Thebes
365 BC - 285 BC (80 years)
Crates of Thebes was a Greek Cynic philosopher, the principal pupil of Diogenes of Sinope and the husband of Hipparchia of Maroneia who lived in the same manner as him. Crates gave away his money to live a life of poverty on the streets of Athens. Respected by the people of Athens, he is remembered for being the teacher of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Various fragments of Crates' teachings survive, including his description of the ideal Cynic state.
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Georges Palante
1862 - 1925 (63 years)
Georges Toussaint Léon Palante was a French philosopher and sociologist. Palante advocated aristocratic individualist ideas similar to Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He was opposed to Émile Durkheim's holism, promoting methodological individualism instead.
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Giovanni Gentile
1875 - 1944 (69 years)
Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher, educator, and politician. Described by himself and by Benito Mussolini as the "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian Fascism, and ghostwrote part of "The Doctrine of Fascism" with Mussolini. He was involved in the resurgence of Hegelian idealism in Italian philosophy and also devised his own system of thought, which he called "actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition".
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Robert Hooke
1635 - 1703 (68 years)
Robert Hooke FRS was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of the first two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that he built himself, the other scientist being Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1674. An impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood, he found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London's great fire of 1666. Hooke was also a member of the Royal Society and since 1662 was its curator of experiments. Hooke was also Professor of Geometry a...
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Friedrich Albert Lange
1828 - 1875 (47 years)
Friedrich Albert Lange was a German philosopher and sociologist. Biography Lange was born in Wald, near Solingen, the son of the theologian, Johann Peter Lange. He was educated at Duisburg, Zürich and Bonn, where he distinguished himself in gymnastics as much as academically. In 1852 he became a schoolmaster at Cologne; in 1853 Privatdozent in philosophy at Bonn; and in 1858 schoolmaster at Duisburg, resigning when the government forbade schoolmasters to take part in political activities.
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Muhammad Iqbal
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Sir Muhammad Iqbal , was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, and politician, whose poetry in the Urdu language is considered among the greatest of the twentieth century, and whose vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British-ruled India was to animate the impulse for Pakistan. He is commonly referred to by the honorific Allama .
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Philipp Mainländer
1841 - 1876 (35 years)
Philipp Mainländer was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main. In his central work — according to Theodor Lessing, "perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature" — Mainländer proclaims that life is worthless, and that "the will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."
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Bernard Mandeville
1670 - 1733 (63 years)
Bernard Mandeville, or Bernard de Mandeville , was an Anglo-Dutch philosopher, political economist and satirist. Born in Rotterdam, he lived most of his life in England and used English for most of his published works. He became famous for The Fable of the Bees.
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Alexander Bain
1818 - 1903 (85 years)
Alexander Bain was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist in the British school of empiricism and a prominent and innovative figure in the fields of psychology, linguistics, logic, moral philosophy and education reform. He founded Mind, the first ever journal of psychology and analytical philosophy, and was the leading figure in establishing and applying the scientific method to psychology. Bain was the inaugural Regius Chair in Logic and Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, where he also held Professorships in Moral Philosophy and English Literature and was twice elected Lord...
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Hypatia
360 - 415 (55 years)
Hypatia was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although preceded by Pandrosion, another Alexandrine female mathematician, she is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's ...
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Ammonius Saccas
175 - 242 (67 years)
Ammonius Saccas was a Hellenistic Platonist self-taught philosopher from Alexandria, generally regarded as the precursor of Neoplatonism and/or one of its founders. He is mainly known as the teacher of Plotinus, whom he taught from 232 to 242. He was undoubtedly the most significant influence on Plotinus in his development of Neoplatonism, although little is known about his own philosophical views. Later Christian writers stated that Ammonius was a Christian, but it is now generally assumed that there was a different Ammonius of Alexandria who wrote biblical texts.
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Ali Shariati
1933 - 1977 (44 years)
Ali Shariati Mazinani was an Iranian revolutionary and sociologist who focused on the sociology of religion. He is held as one of the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century, and has been called the "ideologue of the Islamic Revolution", although his ideas did not end up forming the basis of the Islamic Republic.
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Syrianus
500 - 437 (-63 years)
Syrianus was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, and head of Plato's Academy in Athens, succeeding his teacher Plutarch of Athens in 431/432 A.D. He is important as the teacher of Proclus, and, like Plutarch and Proclus, as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle. His best-known extant work is a commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. He is said to have written also on the De Caelo and the De Interpretatione of Aristotle and on Plato's Timaeus.
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Ludwig Klages
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Friedrich Konrad Eduard Wilhelm Ludwig Klages was a German philosopher, psychologist, graphologist, poet, writer, and lecturer, who was a two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the Germanosphere, he is considered one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He began his career as a research chemist according to his family's wishes, though soon returned to his passions for poetry, philosophy and classical studies. He held a post at the University of Munich, where in 1905 he founded the ; the latter was forced to close in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. In 1915...
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Eduard von Hartmann
1842 - 1906 (64 years)
Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann was a German philosopher, independent scholar and author of Philosophy of the Unconscious . His notable ideas include the theory of the Unconscious and a pessimistic interpretation of the "best of all possible worlds" concept in metaphysics.
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert
1717 - 1783 (66 years)
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to the wave equation is named after him. The wave equation is sometimes referred to as d'Alembert's equation, and the fundamental theorem of algebra is named after d'Alembert in French.
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Henry of Ghent
1217 - 1293 (76 years)
Henry of Ghent was a scholastic philosopher, known as Doctor Solemnis , and also as Henricus de Gandavo and Henricus Gandavensis. Life Henry was born in the district of Mude, near Ghent. He is supposed to have belonged to an Italian family named Bonicolli, in Dutch Goethals, but the question of his name has been much discussed . He studied at Ghent and then at Cologne under Albertus Magnus. After obtaining the degree of doctor he returned to Ghent, and is said to have been the first to lecture there publicly on philosophy and theology.
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Ernst Troeltsch
1865 - 1923 (58 years)
Ernst Peter Wilhelm Troeltsch was a German liberal Protestant theologian, a writer on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history, and a classical liberal politician. He was a member of the history of religions school. His work was a synthesis of a number of strands, drawing on Albrecht Ritschl, Max Weber's conception of sociology, and the Baden school of neo-Kantianism.
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Xavier Zubiri
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Xavier Zubiri was a Spanish philosopher. Zubiri was a member of the Madrid School, composed of philosophers José Ortega y Gasset , José Gaos, and Julián Marías, among others. Zubiri's philosophy has been categorized as a "materialist open realism", which "attempted to reformulate classical metaphysics, in a language that was entirely compatible with modern science". This relates to Xavier Zubiri's educational background.
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Houston Stewart Chamberlain
1855 - 1927 (72 years)
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a British-German philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, scientific racism, and Nordicism; he has been described as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts , published 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. Indeed, Chamberlain has been referred to as "Hitler's John the Baptist".
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Phaedo of Elis
401 BC - 400 BC (1 years)
Phaedo of Elis was a Greek philosopher. A native of Elis, he was captured in war as a boy and sold into slavery. He subsequently came into contact with Socrates at Athens, who warmly received him and had him freed. He was present at the death of Socrates, and Plato named one of his dialogues Phaedo.
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Walter Pitts
1923 - 1969 (46 years)
Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. was an American logician who worked in the field of computational neuroscience. He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and generative processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, together with what has come to be known as the generative sciences. He is best remembered for having written along with Warren McCulloch, a seminal paper in scientific history, titled "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" .
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Tommaso Campanella
1568 - 1639 (71 years)
Tommaso Campanella , baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet. Campanella was prosecuted by the Roman Inquisition for heresy in 1594 and was confined to house arrest for two years. Accused of conspiring against the Spanish rulers of Calabria in 1599, he was tortured and sent to prison, where he spent 27 years. He wrote his most significant works during this time, including The City of the Sun, a utopia describing an egalitarian theocratic society where property is held in common.
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Joan Miró
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
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Nicos Poulantzas
1936 - 1979 (43 years)
Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading structural Marxist; while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of the "democratic road to socialism." He is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s, such as Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's in Portugal, an...
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Paul Natorp
1854 - 1924 (70 years)
Paul Gerhard Natorp was a German philosopher and educationalist, considered one of the co-founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He was known as an authority on Plato. Biography Paul Natorp was born in Düsseldorf, the son of the Protestant minister Adelbert Natorp and his wife Emilie Keller. From 1871 he studied music, history, classical philology and philosophy in Berlin, Bonn and Strasbourg. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1876 at the University of Strasbourg under the supervision of the philosopher Ernst Laas and in 1881 completed his Habilitation under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.
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