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,
#16701
Ladislav Klíma
1878 - 1928 (50 years)
Ladislav Klíma , was a Czech philosopher and novelist influenced by George Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His philosophy is referred to varyingly as existentialism and subjective idealism. Life Ladislav Klíma was born in the town of Domažlice in western Bohemia. He came from a moderately wealthy family. After expulsion from the school system in 1895 for allegedly insulting the State, the Church, and — out of what he described as “historical analphabetism” — the Habsburgs, he lived alternately in Tyrol, Zurich, and Prague. As part of his philosophy he only ever took on short term work. F...
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Felix Weltsch
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Felix Weltsch , was a German-speaking Jewish librarian, philosopher, author, editor, publisher and journalist. A close friend of Max Brod, Ludwig Winder and Franz Kafka, he was one of the most important Zionists in Bohemia.
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Herbert James Paton
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Herbert James Paton FBA FSA Scot , usually cited as H. J. Paton, was a Scottish philosopher who taught at various university institutions, including Glasgow and Oxford. He worked in British intelligence during the two world wars and played a diplomatic role on behalf of Poland at the 1919 Versailles conference. In 1968, the year before his death, he published The Claim of Scotland, a plea for greater general understanding of the constitutional position of his own native country.
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Johannes Clauberg
1622 - 1665 (43 years)
Johannes Clauberg was a German theologian and philosopher. Clauberg was the founding Rector of the first University of Duisburg, where he taught from 1655 to 1665. He is known as a "scholastic cartesian".
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Kamo no Mabuchi
1697 - 1769 (72 years)
Kamo no Mabuchi, or Mabuchi of Kamo was a kokugaku scholar, poet and philologist during mid-Edo period Japan. Along with Kada no Azumamaro, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane, he was regarded as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku, and through his research into the spirit of ancient Japan he expounded on the theory of magokoro, which he held to be fundamental to the history of Japan. Independently of and alongside his contemporary Motoori Norinaga, Mabuchi is accredited with the initial discovery of Lyman's Law, governing rendaku in the Japanese language, though which would later be name...
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Immanuel Kant
#16707
Echecrates of Phlius
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Echecrates was a Pythagorean philosopher from the ancient Greek town of Phlius. He appears in Plato's Phaedo dialogue as an aid to the plot. He meets Phaedo, the dialogue's namesake, some time after the execution of Socrates, and asks Phaedo to tell him the story of the famed philosopher's last hours. Phaedo's presentation of the story comprises most of the dialogue's remainder, though Echecrates interrupts at times to ask questions relevant to the retold discussion.
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Dionysius Lardner
1793 - 1859 (66 years)
Dionysius Lardner FRS FRSE was an Irish scientific writer who popularised science and technology, and edited the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopædia. Early life in Dublin He was born in Dublin on 3 April 1793 the son of William Lardner and his wife; his father was a solicitor in Dublin, who wished his son to follow the same calling. After some years of uncongenial desk work, Lardner entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1812. He obtained a B.A. in 1817 and an M.A. in 1819, winning many prizes.
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Bernardus Silvestris
1085 - 1160 (75 years)
Bernardus Silvestris, also known as Bernard Silvestris and Bernard Silvester, was a medieval Platonist philosopher and poet of the 12th century. Biography Little is known about Bernardus's life. In the nineteenth century, it was assumed that Bernardus was the same person as Bernard of Chartres, but the scholarly consensus is now that the two were different people. There is little evidence connecting Bernardus to Chartres, yet his work is consistent with the scholarship associated with Chartres in the twelfth century and is in that sense "Chartrian". Bernardus dedicated his Cosmographia to Thi...
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Jayatirtha
1345 - 1388 (43 years)
Sri Jayatirtha , also known as Teekacharya , was a Hindu philosopher, dialectician, polemicist and the sixth pontiff of Madhvacharya Peetha from . He is considered to be one of the most important seers in the history of Dvaita school of thought on account of his sound elucidations of the works of Madhvacharya. He is credited with structuring the philosophical aspects of Dvaita and through his polemical works, elevating it to an equal footing with the contemporary schools of thought. Along with Madhva and Vyasatirtha, he is venerated as one of the three great spiritual sages, or munitraya of Dvaita.
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Crantor
344 BC - 275 BC (69 years)
Crantor of Soli was an Ancient Greek philosopher and member of the Old Academy who was the first philosopher to write commentaries on the works of Plato. Life Crantor probably born around the middle of the 4th century BC, at Soli in Cilicia . He moved from Cilicia to Athens in order to study philosophy, where he became a pupil of Xenocrates and a friend of Polemon, and one of the most distinguished supporters of the philosophy of the older Academy. As Xenocrates died 314/3 BC, Crantor must have come to Athens prior to that year, although the date of his birth is not known. He died before both Polemon and Crates, who succeeded Polemon as scholarch.
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Theodor Gomperz
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Theodor Gomperz , Austrian philosopher and classical scholar, was born at Brno . Biography Gomperz studied at Brno and at Vienna under Hermann Bonitz. Graduating at the University of Vienna in 1867 he became privatdozent, and subsequently a professor of classical philology . In 1882 he was elected a full member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa from the University of Königsberg, and Doctor of Literature from the universities of Dublin and Cambridge, and became correspondent for several learned societies.
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Sosipatra
400 - 400 (0 years)
Sosipatra was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic who lived in Ephesus and Pergamon in the first half of the 4th century CE. The story of her life is told in Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists. Biography
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Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
1490 - 1573 (83 years)
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was a Spanish humanist, philosopher, and theologian of the Spanish Renaissance. He is mainly known for his participation in a famous debate with Bartolomé de las Casas in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–1551. The debate centered on the legitimacy of the conquest and colonization of America by the Spanish Empire and on the treatment of the Native Americans. The main philosophical referents of Ginés de Sepúlveda were Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roman law and Christian theology. These influences allowed him to argue for the cultural superiority and domination of the Spani...
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William Barton Rogers
1804 - 1882 (78 years)
William Barton Rogers was an American geologist, physicist, and educator at the College of William & Mary from 1828 to 1835 and at the University of Virginia from 1835 to 1853. In 1861, Rogers founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university opened in 1865 after the American Civil War. Because of his affiliation with Virginia, Mount Rogers, the highest peak in the state, is named after him.
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Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza
1578 - 1651 (73 years)
Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza , also called Puente Hurtado de Mendoza, was a Basque scholastic philosopher and theologian. Philosophical work He was a teacher of theology and philosophy in Valladolid and he occupied a chair at the University of Salamanca.
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Methodios Anthrakites
1660 - 1736 (76 years)
Methodios Anthrakites was a Greek Orthodox cleric, author, educator, mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher. He directed the Gioumeios and Epiphaneios Schools in Ioannina. He also supported the use of the people's language in education instead of archaic forms of Greek. He was involved in a controversy regarding Korydalism. He is known for being persecuted for introducing modern philosophical thought to Greek education, the incident is widely known as the Methodios Affair. He made a significant contribution to the growth of the Modern Greek Enlightenment during the Ottoman ...
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Yuri Samarin
1819 - 1876 (57 years)
Yuri Fyodorovich Samarin was a leading Russian Slavophile thinker and one of the architects of the Emancipation reform of 1861. He came from a noble family and befriended Konstantin Aksakov from an early age. An ardent admirer of Hegel and Khomyakov, Samarin attended the Moscow University, where his teachers included Mikhail Pogodin. He came to believe that "Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy alone, is a religion which philosophy can recognize" and that "the Orthodox church cannot exist apart from Hegel's philosophy". Samarin's dissertation was a study of Feofan Prokopovich's influence on the Russian O...
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Wilhelm Busch
1832 - 1908 (76 years)
Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day. Busch drew on the tropes of folk humour as well as a profound knowledge of German literature and art to satirize contemporary life, any kind of piety, Catholicism, Philistinism, religious morality, bigotry, and moral uplift.
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Clémence Royer
1830 - 1902 (72 years)
Clémence Royer was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
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J. H. Muirhead
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
John Henry Muirhead was a British philosopher best known for having initiated the Muirhead Library of Philosophy in 1890. He became the first person named to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in 1900.
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Jacob Freudenthal
1839 - 1907 (68 years)
Jacob Freudenthal was a German philosopher. He was born at Bodenfelde, Hanover and died at Schreiberhau. Life Freudenthal was educated at the universities of Breslau and Göttingen, and at the rabbinical seminary of Breslau. After graduating from the University of Göttingen in 1863, he became a teacher of the in Wolfenbüttel . He then moved to Breslau to teach in the rabbinical seminary there, a position which he resigned in 1888.
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Inoue Tetsujirō
1856 - 1944 (88 years)
Inoue Tetsujirō was a Japanese philosopher, poet and educator. He is known for introducing Western philosophy in Japan and for being a pioneer in Eastern philosophy. He became the first Japanese professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, and also served as the 2nd President of Daito Bunka Academy.
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Raymond of Sabunde
1385 - 1436 (51 years)
Raymond of Sabunde was a Catalan scholar, teacher of medicine and philosophy and finally regius professor of theology at Toulouse. He was born in Barcelona , and died in Toulouse. His Theologia Naturalis sive Liber naturae creaturarum, etc., written 1434–1436 but published in 1484, marks an important stage in the history of natural theology. It was first written in Latin . His followers composed a more classical Latin version of the work. It was translated into French by Michel de Montaigne and edited in Latin at various times .
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Aulus Cornelius Celsus
25 BC - 50 (75 years)
Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a Roman encyclopaedist, known for his extant medical work, De Medicina, which is believed to be the only surviving section of a much larger encyclopedia. The De Medicina is a primary source on diet, pharmacy, surgery and related fields, and it is one of the best sources concerning medical knowledge in the Roman world. The lost portions of his encyclopedia likely included volumes on agriculture, law, rhetoric, and military arts. He made contributions to the classification of human skin disorders in dermatology, such as myrmecia, and his name is often found in medical terminology regarding the skin, e.g., kerion celsi and area celsi.
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Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
1772 - 1844 (72 years)
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific views had a transcendental flavor and were similar to those of German morphologists like Lorenz Oken. He believed in the underlying unity of organismal design, and the possibility of the transmutation of species in time, amassing evidence for his claims through research in comparative anatomy, paleontology, and embryology. He is considered as a predecessor ...
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Han Yu
768 - 824 (56 years)
Han Yu , courtesy name Tuizhi , and commonly known by his posthumous name Han Wengong , was an essayist, Confucian scholar, poet, and government official during the Tang dynasty who significantly influenced the development of Neo-Confucianism. Described as "comparable in stature to Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe" for his influence on the Chinese literary tradition, Han Yu stood for strong central authority in politics and orthodoxy in cultural matters.
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Kumazawa Banzan
1619 - 1691 (72 years)
Kumazawa Banzan was a Japanese Confucian. He learned Yangmingism from Nakae Tōju and served Ikeda Mitsumasa, the lord of Bizen Province. In his later years, he was imprisoned for writing Daigaku Wakumon, which contained criticism of Tokugawa shogunate politics.
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David George Ritchie
1853 - 1903 (50 years)
David George Ritchie was a Scottish philosopher who had a distinguished university career at Edinburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford, and after being fellow of Jesus College and a tutor at Balliol College was elected professor of logic and metaphysics at St Andrews. He was also the third president of the Aristotelian Society in 1898.
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Gerrit Mannoury
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Gerrit Mannoury was a Dutch philosopher and mathematician, professor at the University of Amsterdam and communist, known as the central figure in the signific circle, a Dutch counterpart of the Vienna circle.
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Augusto Vera
1813 - 1885 (72 years)
Augusto Vera was an Italian philosopher who followed Hegel's theories and translated many of his works. Life Vera was born in Amelia in the province of Terni. He was educated in Rome and Paris, and, after teaching classics for some years in Geneva, held chairs of philosophy in various colleges in France. He was a philosophy teacher at the Lycée Victor-Duruy and subsequently was professor in Strasbourg and in Paris. He left Paris after the coup d'etat of 1851 and spent nine years in England. Attaching himself with enthusiasm to Hegel's system, Vera became widely influential in spreading a kn...
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Hugo Kükelhaus
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hugo Kükelhaus was a German carpenter, writer, pedagogue, philosopher and artist. Kükelhaus is best known for his infant toys "allbedeut" and the "Erfahrungsfeld zur Entfaltung der Sinne." Throughout his life, he presented his views for a human-scaled living environment in talks and publications. He is also regarded as a harbinger for infant toy designs that fulfil the requirements of pedagogy and developmental psychology. He gained international recognition for his design of 30 "Experience stations" at the German Pavilion of the Expo 1967 in Montreal. His ideas are relevant for contemporary ...
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Konstantin Leontiev
1831 - 1891 (60 years)
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev, monastic name: Clement was a conservative tsarist and imperial monarchist Russian philosopher who advocated closer cultural ties between Russia and the East against what he believed to be the West's catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian and revolutionary influences. He also advocated Russia's cultural and territorial expansion eastward to India, Tibet and China.
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Ishaq ibn Hunayn
830 - 910 (80 years)
Abū Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn was an influential Arab physician and translator, known for writing the first biography of physicians in the Arabic language. He is also known for his translations of Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest. He is the son of the famous translator Hunayn Ibn Ishaq.
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Marcello Malpighi
1628 - 1694 (66 years)
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian biologist and physician, who is referred to as the "Founder of microscopical anatomy, histology & Father of physiology and embryology". Malpighi's name is borne by several physiological features related to the biological excretory system, such as the Malpighian corpuscles and Malpighian pyramids of the kidneys and the Malpighian tubule system of insects. The splenic lymphoid nodules are often called the "Malpighian bodies of the spleen" or Malpighian corpuscles. The botanical family Malpighiaceae is also named after him. He was the first person to see capillar...
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Émile Chartier
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Émile-Auguste Chartier , commonly known as Alain , was a French philosopher, journalist, and pacifist. He adopted his pseudonym as an allusion to the 15th-century Norman poet Alain Chartier. Early life Alain was born in 1868 in Mortagne-au-Perche . He entered Lycée d'Alençon in 1881 and studied there for five years. On 13 June 1956, the lycée was renamed Lycée Alain, after its most famous student.
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S. R. Ranganathan
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Librarian Day in India.
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Anton Günther
1783 - 1863 (80 years)
Anton Günther was an Austrian Roman Catholic philosopher whose work was condemned by the church as heretical tritheism. His work has been described as Liberal Catholicism and Vienna's first Catholic political movement. His writings made him a leader among the generation of German Catholic theologians who emerged from the Romantic movement.
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James Black Baillie
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Sir James Black Baillie, was a British moral philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. He wrote the first significant translation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Mind." He is said to be the model for the character Sir John Evans in the novel The Weight of the Evidence by Michael Innes.
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Joe Orton
1933 - 1967 (34 years)
John Kingsley Orton , known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
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Ibn Zuhr
1091 - 1162 (71 years)
Abū Marwān ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Zuhr , traditionally known by his Latinized name Avenzoar , was an Arab physician, surgeon, and poet. He was born at Seville in medieval Andalusia , was a contemporary of Averroes and Ibn Tufail, and was the most well-regarded physician of his era. He was particularly known for his emphasis on a more rational, empiric basis of medicine. His major work, Al-Taysīr fil-Mudāwāt wal-Tadbīr , was translated into Latin and Hebrew and was influential to the progress of surgery. He also improved surgical and medical knowledge by keying out several diseases and their treatme...
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Alberto Giacometti
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art.
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Jesse Glenn Gray
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Jesse Glenn Gray was an American philosopher, writer, and professor of philosophy at Colorado College. Gray published numerous books and essays. His first major publication, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, is a philosophical memoir of his years as a counter-intelligence officer near the battle lines in Italy during World War II inspired by Gray’s opposition to war. Its reprint in 1967 and subsequent editions included an introduction by Hannah Arendt.
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František Palacký
1798 - 1876 (78 years)
František Palacký was a Czech historian and politician, the most influential person of the Czech National Revival, called "Father of the Nation". Life František Palacký was born on 14 June 1798, at Hodslavice house 108, a northeastern Moravian village now part of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. His ancestors had been members of the community of the Bohemian Brethren, and had clandestinely maintained their Protestant belief throughout the period of religious persecution, eventually giving their adherence to the Augsburg confession as approximate to their original faith. Palacký's father was a schoolmaster and a man of some learning.
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Franz Samuel Karpe
1747 - 1806 (59 years)
Franz Samuel Karpe, , was a Slovenian philosopher and rector of University of Olomouc. Biography Karpe was born in Kranj, Carniola , to a townsman's family. His parents died soon and subsequently Count Lichteberg's family assumed responsibility for his upbringing and education. Karpe entered a Jesuit college in Ljubljana, which he finished in 1768.
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Lucius Annaeus Cornutus
10 - 80 (70 years)
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus , a Stoic philosopher, flourished in the reign of Nero , when his house in Rome was a school of philosophy. Life Cornutus was a native of Leptis Magna in Libya, but resided for the most part in Rome. He is best known as the teacher and friend of Persius, whose fifth satire is addressed to him, as well as other distinguished students, such as Claudius Agathemerus. "Through Cornutus Persius was introduced to Annaeus, as well as to Lucan, who was of his own age, and also a disciple of Cornutus". At Persius's death, Cornutus returned to Persius' sisters a bequest made to him, but accepted Persius' library of some 700 scrolls.
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Nicholas St. John Green
1830 - 1876 (46 years)
Nicholas St. John Green was an American philosopher and lawyer, one of the members of The Metaphysical Club. Green is known for his contributions in the field of law as well as his involvement in the formation of pragmatism. He has been named as the “grandfather of pragmatism” by Charles Peirce.
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Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey was an American professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont. Torrey was a great-grandson of Manasseh Cutler who had been a member of the United States Congress. His father, Augustus Torrey, was a medical doctor. Torrey was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. He moved to the household of his uncle Joseph Torrey to go to Burlington High School. He then studied at the University of Vermont, completing his bachelor's degree in 1858. After teaching school for a time in Beverly, Massachusetts, he went to the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York from which he graduated in 1864.
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Lawrence Joseph Henderson
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Lawrence Joseph Henderson was an American physiologist, chemist, biologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He became one of the leading biochemists of the early 20th century. His work contributed to the Henderson–Hasselbalch equation, used to calculate pH as a measure of acidity.
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Titus Brandsma
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Titus Brandsma, OCarm was a Dutch Carmelite friar, Catholic priest and professor of philosophy. Brandsma was vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology and spoke out against it many times before the Second World War. He was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in November 1985 as a martyr of the faith and canonized as a saint on 15 May 2022 by Pope Francis.
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