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.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#16951
Hans Larsson
1862 - 1944 (82 years)
Hans Larsson was a Swedish Professor of Philosophy at Lund University, Sweden and a Member of the Swedish Academy , chair no. 15. He was known in Sweden as Kloke-Hans . Prof. Larsson was a humanist and an author. He was also a mentor for several Swedish authors and a prominent essayist.
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Ioane Petritsi
1050 - 1200 (150 years)
Ioane Petritsi also referred as John Petritsi was a Georgian Neoplatonist philosopher of the 11th-12th century, active in the Byzantine Empire and Kingdom of Georgia, best known for his translations of Proclus, along with an extensive commentary. In later sources, he is also referred to as Ioane Chimchimeli . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Petritsi as "the most significant Georgian medieval philosopher" and the "most widely read Georgian philosopher."
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Thierry of Chartres
1100 - 1155 (55 years)
Thierry of Chartres or Theodoric the Breton was a twelfth-century philosopher working at Chartres and Paris, France. The cathedral school at Chartres promoted scholarship before the first university was founded in France. Thierry was a major figure in twelfth-century philosophy and learning, and, like many twelfth-century scholars, is notable for his embrace of Plato's Timaeus and his application of philosophy to theological issues. Some modern scholars believed Thierry to have been a brother of Bernard of Chartres who had founded the school of Chartres, but later research has shown that th...
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Richard Gregg
1885 - 1974 (89 years)
Richard Bartlett Gregg was an American social philosopher said to be "the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance" based on the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and so influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., Aldous Huxley, civil-rights theorist Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and socialist reformer Jessie Wallace Hughan, and the Peace Pledge Union.
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Johan Jakob Borelius
1823 - 1909 (86 years)
Johan Jakob Borelius was an influential professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Lund, Sweden from 1866 to 1898. He has been called "The Last Swedish Hegelian." Borelius was born in Skinnskatteberg. He obtained his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1848, afterward becoming a teacher in Kalmar, while he continued his studies under Christopher Jacob Boström. His overall philosophy is laid out in his work Metafysik , not published in full until after his death.
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Aleksander Świętochowski
1849 - 1938 (89 years)
Aleksander Świętochowski was a Polish writer, educator, and philosopher of the Positivist period that followed the January 1863 Uprising. He was widely regarded as the prophet of Polish Positivism, spreading in the Warsaw press the gospel of scientific inquiry, education, economic development, and equality of rights for all, without regard to sex, class, ethnic origin or beliefs. His was a nuanced vision, however, that took account of the shortcomings of human nature; like H.G. Wells, he advocated that power in society be wielded by the most enlightened among its members.
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Ruth Nanda Anshen
1900 - 2003 (103 years)
Ruth Nanda Anshen was an American philosopher, author and editor. She was the author of several books including The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of An Idea, Morals Equals Manners and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival.
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Gerhard Dorn
1530 - 1584 (54 years)
Gerhard Dorn was a Belgian philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile. Biography The details of Gerhard Dorn's early life, along with those of many other 16th century personalities, are lost to history. It is known that he was born about 1530 in Mechelen, which is part of modern-day Belgium's Antwerp Province. He studied with Adam von Bodenstein, to whom his first book is dedicated and began publishing books from around 1565. He used John Dee's personal glyph from his 1564 book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, on the title page of his Chymisticum artificium.
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Vicente Ferreira da Silva
1916 - 1963 (47 years)
Vicente Ferreira da Silva was a Brazilian logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He was one of first men in Brazil history to write and have published an academic book in logic and Phenomenology.
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Brion Gysin
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin ...
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Louise Michel
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.
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Howard Thurman
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Howard Washington Thurman was an American author, philosopher, theologian, mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
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Jules de Gaultier
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Jules de Gaultier , born Jules Achille de Gaultier de Laguionie, was a French philosopher and essayist. He was a contributor to Mercure de France and one of the chief advocates of "nietzscheism" in vogue in the literary circles of the day. He was known especially for his theory of "bovarysme" , by which he meant the continual need of humans to invent themselves, to lie to themselves. His books include De Kant à Nietzsche and Le Bovarysme, essai sur le pouvoir d'imaginer .
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Matthias Bel
1684 - 1749 (65 years)
Matthias Bel or Matthias Bél was a Lutheran pastor and polymath from the Kingdom of Hungary. Bel was active in the fields of pedagogy, philosophy, philology, history, and theoretical theology; he was the founder of Hungarian geographic science and a pioneer of descriptive ethnography and economy. A leading figure in pietism. He is also known as the Great Ornament of Hungary .
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Abraham de Balmes
1440 - 1523 (83 years)
Abraham de Balmes ben Meir was an Italian Jewish physician and translator of the early 16th century. A short time before his death he was physician in ordinary to the cardinal Dominico Grimani at Padua. See Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." xxi. 7 and 67; "Hebr. Uebers." p. 62; Perles, "Beiträge," pp. 193, 197, etc.
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Priscian of Lydia
500 - Present (1526 years)
Priscian of Lydia , was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. Two works of his have survived. Life A contemporary of Simplicius of Cilicia, Priscian was born in Lydia, probably in the late 5th century. He was one of the last Neoplatonists to study at the Academy when Damascius was at its head. When Justinian I closed the school in 529, Priscian, together with Damascius, Simplicius, and four other colleagues were forced to seek asylum in the court of the Persian king Chosroes. By 533 they were allowed back into the Byzantine Empire after Justinian and Chosroes concluded a peace treaty, in whic...
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Guru Tegh Bahadur
1621 - 1675 (54 years)
Guru Tegh Bahadur was the ninth of ten gurus who founded the Sikh religion and was the leader of Sikhs from 1665 until his beheading in 1675. He was born in Amritsar, Punjab, India in 1621 and was the youngest son of Guru Hargobind, the sixth Sikh guru. Considered a principled and fearless warrior, he was a learned spiritual scholar and a poet whose 115 hymns are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, which is the main text of Sikhism.
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Max Dessoir
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Maximilian Dessoir was a German philosopher, psychologist and theorist of aesthetics. Career Dessoir was born in Berlin, into a German Jewish family, his parents being Ludwig Dessoir , "Germany's most admired Shakespearean actor", and Ludwig's third wife Auguste Grünemeyer . Max earned doctorates from the universities of Berlin and Würzburg . He was a professor at Berlin from 1897 until 1933, when the Nazis forbade him to teach.
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Peter Coffey
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Peter Coffey was an Irish Roman Catholic priest and neo-scholastic philosopher. Life Coffey was educated at the Meath Diocesan Seminary in Navan, and St Patrick's College, Maynooth . He studied for his doctorate at the University of Louvain, and attended the University of Strasbourg. He was ordained in 1900.
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Dickinson S. Miller
1868 - 1963 (95 years)
Dickinson Sargeant Miller was an American philosopher best known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He worked with other philosophers including William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Giorgio Colli
1917 - 1979 (62 years)
Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher, philologist and historian. A native of Turin, he taught ancient philosophy at Pisa's university for thirty years; he edited and translated Aristotle's Organon and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for Einaudi, a major publishing house in Italy. Subsequently, he produced the first complete edition of Nietzsche's work together with his friend Mazzino Montinari. His work culminated in La Sapienza greca, an edition and translation of the "Presocratics" . Interrupted by his death in January 1979, it was supposed to be in eleven volumes.
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Jean Charlot
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Louis Henri Jean Charlot was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States. Life Charlot was born in Paris. His father, Henri, owned an import-export business and was a Russian-born émigré, albeit one who supported the Bolshevik cause. His mother Anna was an artist. His mother's family originated from Mexico City; his grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo. His great-grandfather had immigrated to Mexico in the 1820s shortly after the country's independence from Spain, and married a woman who was half-Aztec. This was likely the source of a myth ...
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Bion of Borysthenes
325 BC - Present (2351 years)
Bion of Borysthenes was a Greek philosopher. After being sold into slavery, and then released, he moved to Athens, where he studied in almost every school of philosophy. It is, however, for his Cynic-style diatribes that he is chiefly remembered. He satirized the foolishness of people, attacked religion, and eulogized philosophy.
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Richard Wahle
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Richard Wahle was professor of philosophy at the Universities of Czernowitz and Vienna. Wahle pronounced in his Tragicomedy of Wisdom on what he acknowledged as only "definite, agnostic, absolute critique of knowledge" and psychology as surviving, or rather maintained that critiques of knowledge, logic and psychology have nothing to do with philosophy. As a consequence of his fundamental attitude, Wahle did not recognize the ego as a nucleus of forces but only as an imprint in the texture of the universe.
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Giovanni Battista Piranesi
1720 - 1778 (58 years)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian classical archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" . He was the father of Francesco Piranesi, Laura Piranesi and Pietro Piranesi.
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Danko Grlić
1923 - 1984 (61 years)
Danko Grlić was a Marxist humanist, and a member of the Praxis school of SFR Yugoslavia. He was born in Gračanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He moved to Zagreb with his family in 1931. During the Second World War he joined the anti-fascist struggle. He appreciated freedom above all, so due to his liberal expression, he often came to conflict with the government, which ended very badly for him. Because he opposed the resolution of Cominform, he was sentenced to three months in the prison camp Goli otok in 1948. Grlic did not accept the resolution, but for one part he held that it was correct, - where it says there is not enough democracy in the Yugoslav Communist Party.
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Gareth Evans
1946 - 1980 (34 years)
Michael Gareth Justin Evans was a British philosopher who made substantial contributions to logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his posthumous work The Varieties of Reference , edited by John McDowell. The book considers different kinds of reference to objects, and argues for a number of conditions that must obtain for reference to occur.
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Antonio Maria Valsalva
1666 - 1723 (57 years)
Antonio Maria Valsalva , was an Italian anatomist born in Imola. His research focused on the anatomy of the ears. He coined the term Eustachian tube and he described the aortic sinuses of Valsalva in his writings, published posthumously in 1740. His name is associated with the Valsalva antrum of the ear and the Valsalva maneuver, which is used as a test of circulatory function. Anatomical structures bearing his name are Valsalva’s muscle and taeniae Valsalvae. He observed that when weakness of one side of the body is caused by a lesion in the brain, the culprit lesion tends to be on the si...
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K. N. Jayatilleke
1920 - 1970 (50 years)
Kulatissa Nanda Jayatilleke was an internationally recognised authority on Buddhist philosophy whose book Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge has been described as "an outstanding philosophical interpretation of the Buddha's teaching" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher. He was Darwinian in outlook and the author of several influential theological and philosophical books.
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Juan Luis Vives
1492 - 1540 (48 years)
Juan Luis Vives March was a Spanish scholar and Renaissance humanist who spent most of his adult life in the southern Hapsburg Netherlands. His beliefs on the soul, insight into early medical practice, and perspective on emotions, memory and learning earned him the title of the "father" of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key ideas that established how psychology is perceived today.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Émile Boirac
1851 - 1917 (66 years)
Émile Boirac was a French philosopher, parapsychologist, promoter of Esperanto and writer. Biography Boirac was born in Guelma, Algeria. He became president of the University of Grenoble in 1898, and in 1902 president of Dijon University. A notable advocate for the universal language, Esperanto, he presided over its 1st Universal Congress and directed the Academy of Esperanto.
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Ferdinand Foch
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Ferdinand Foch was a French general and military theorist who served as the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War. An aggressive, even reckless commander at the First Marne, Flanders and Artois campaigns of 1914–1916, Foch became the Allied Commander-in-Chief in late March 1918 in the face of the all-out German spring offensive, which pushed the Allies back using fresh soldiers and new tactics that trenches could not withstand. He successfully coordinated the French, British and American efforts into a coherent whole, deftly handling his strategic reserves. He stopped the German offensive and launched a war-winning counterattack.
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Hermias
401 - 450 (49 years)
Hermias was a Neoplatonist philosopher who was born in Alexandria c. 410 AD. He went to Athens and studied philosophy under Syrianus. He married Aedesia, who was a relative of Syrianus, and who had originally been betrothed to Proclus, but Proclus broke the engagement off after receiving a divine warning. Hermias brought Syrianus' teachings back to Alexandria, where he lectured in the school of Horapollo, receiving an income from the state. He died c. 450 AD , at a time when his children, Ammonius and Heliodorus, were still small. Aedesia, however, continued to receive an income from the sta...
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Alfred Henry Lloyd
1864 - 1927 (63 years)
Alfred Henry Lloyd was an American philosopher. Life Lloyd received both his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Harvard. He studied philosophy at Göttingen University and Heidelberg University, before returning to Harvard for his Ph.D., which he received in 1893. Upon returning from Europe in 1891, Lloyd was recruited by John Dewey as an instructor in philosophy at the University of Michigan. He remained there his entire career, becoming full professor in 1906. He was named dean of the Graduate School in 1915.
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Vladimir Dvorniković
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Vladimir Dvorniković was an ethnic Croat and politically Yugoslav philosopher, ethno-psychologist, and a strong proponent of a Yugoslav ethnicity. He was a professor at the University of Zagreb during the 1920s. Dvorniković was also an advocate of psychologism and animal philosophy. He is best known for authoring the book "Characterology of the Yugoslavs."
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Leonid Andreyev
1871 - 1919 (48 years)
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age literary period. Andreyev's style combines the elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. Of his 25 plays, his 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped is regarded as his finest achievement.
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Moriz Carrière
1817 - 1895 (78 years)
Moriz Carrière was a German philosopher and historian. Carrière was born in Griedel near Darmstadt, Germany. After studying at Giessen, Göttingen and Berlin, he spent a few years in Italy studying the fine arts, and established himself in 1842 at Giessen as a teacher of philosophy. In 1853 he was appointed professor at the University of Munich, where he lectured mainly on aesthetics. In the academy in Munich, he lectured on art history.
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Mondino de Luzzi
1275 - 1326 (51 years)
Mondino de Luzzi, or de Liuzzi or de Lucci, , also known as Mundinus, was an Italian physician, anatomist and professor of surgery, who lived and worked in Bologna. He is often credited as the restorer of anatomy because he made seminal contributions to the field by reintroducing the practice of public dissection of human cadavers and writing the first modern anatomical text.
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James Ensor
1860 - 1949 (89 years)
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.
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Samuel George Morton
1799 - 1851 (52 years)
Samuel George Morton was an American physician, natural scientist, and writer. As one of the early figures of scientific racism, he argued against monogenism, the single creation story of the Bible, instead supporting polygenism, a theory of multiple racial creations.
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Wincenty Lutosławski
1863 - 1954 (91 years)
Wincenty Lutosławski was a Polish philosopher, author, and member of the Polish National League. Life and career Early life Wincenty was the eldest son of Franciszek Dionizy Lutosławski, a landowner from Drozdowo and Maria Lutosławska, nee Szczygielska. He was half-brother to Józef Lutosławski, who was the father of composer Witold Lutosławski. In his youth he was home schooled. In 1880, after suffering a breakdown, he became an atheist and materialist. A year later he graduated from secondary school in Mitawa and commenced his studies at the Riga Polytechnic, where he lasted only for three semesters.
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Helen Knight
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Helen Knight was a British philosopher. She was one of few women active in the early days of analytic aesthetics. Life and education Knight was born in Swiss Cottage, London and attended Fremarch School, Hampstead. She began her BA at Bedford College, London, before coming to Cambridge University in 1921 where she took Part II Moral Sciences in 1923 and obtained a first class degree. From 1923 to 1925 she was a Research Student at Newnham College. She married psychologist Rex Knight on 30 January 1926 , and then appears to have taken a break from academic philosophy until 1932 when she returned to Newnham as Sarah Smithson Research Fellow.
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Robert FitzRoy
1805 - 1865 (60 years)
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, FitzRoy's second expedition to Tierra del Fuego and the Southern Cone.
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Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire
1805 - 1895 (90 years)
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire was a French philosopher, journalist, statesman, and possible illegitimate son of Napoleon I of France. Biography Jules was born in Paris. Marie Belloc Lowndes, in the second volume of her autobiography Where Love and Friendship Dwelt , made claims regarding his paternity. He was reportedly ashamed of and did not talk about it. Lowndes did not say who his mother was.
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Thomas Wharton Jones
1808 - 1891 (83 years)
Thomas Wharton Jones was an eminent ophthalmologist and physiologist of the 19th century. Biography Jones's father was Richard Jones, a native of London. Richard Jones had moved north to St. Andrews and was working with Her Majesty's Customs for Scotland when Thomas Wharton Jones was born in January 1808. Jones grew up in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. From 1827 to 1829, he was an assistant to Robert Knox, a lecturer on anatomy at Edinburgh. Around Christmas of 1827, while working for Knox, he purchased a body from William Hare on Knox's behalf, paying £7 10s to Hare.
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Marian Massonius
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Piotr Marian Massonius was a Polish philosopher and teacher who was born into in the Russian Empire. Life Massonius studied law at the Warsaw University and then abroad, where he took up philosophical and pedagogical studies at various German universities, mainly in Leipzig. He became one of the representatives of the Warsaw school of Positivism who formed a common front against Messianism together with the Polish Neo-Kantians.
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Louis Arnaud Reid
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Louis Arnaud Reid was a British philosopher who held the foundation chair in Philosophy of Education at the London University Institute of Education. He was a founding contributor to the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is best known for his writings on epistemology and aesthetics. He influenced figures as diverse as Susanne Langer, Lionel Trilling and Harold Osborne. Jacques Barzun said that Reid's book A Study in Aesthetics was "the best discussion of art yet produced in our century."
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Thomas Abbt
1738 - 1766 (28 years)
Thomas Abbt was a German mathematician and writer. Biography Born in Ulm as the son of a wig-maker, Abbt visited a secondary school in Ulm, then moved in 1756 to study theology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Halle, receiving a Magister degree in 1758. In 1760 he was appointed as an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt , where he wrote his most well-known work Vom Tode für's Vaterland .
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