#17052
Pontormo
1494 - 1556 (62 years)
Jacopo Carucci or Carrucci , usually known as Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo , was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine School. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.
Go to Profile#17053
Blasius of Parma
1355 - 1416 (61 years)
Blasius of Parma was an Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer. He popularised English and French philosophical work in Italy, where he associated both with scholastics and with early Renaissance humanists.
Go to Profile#17054
Caspar Barlaeus
1584 - 1648 (64 years)
Caspar Barlaeus was a Dutch polymath and Renaissance humanist, a theologian, poet, and historian. Life Born Caspar van Baerle in Antwerp, Barlaeus' parents fled the city when it was occupied by Spanish troops shortly after his birth. They settled in Zaltbommel, where his father eventually would become head of the Latin school. Caspar studied theology and philosophy at the University of Leiden. After his study, he preached for 1.5 years in the village of Nieuwe-Tonge, before returning to Leiden in 1612 as an under-regent of a college. From 1617 he also was professor in philosophy at the university.
Go to Profile#17055
Gonzalo Arango
1931 - 1976 (45 years)
Gonzalo Arango Arias was a Colombian writer, poet, and journalist. In 1958 he led a modern literary and cultural movement known as Nadaism , inspired by surrealism, French existentialism, beat generation, dadaism, and influenced by the Colombian writer and philosopher Fernando González Ochoa.
Go to Profile#17056
Li Ao
772 - 841 (69 years)
Li Ao , courtesy name Xizhi , was Chinese philosopher and prose writer of the Tang Dynasty. Biography Li was born in present-day Tianshui, Gansu, but some accounts relate he was from Zhao, Hebei. After achieving the degree of Jinshi in 798, he joined the imperial bureaucracy and served in the history department at Changan.
Go to Profile#17057
Archibald Arthur
1744 - 1797 (53 years)
Archibald Arthur FRSE was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. An alumnus of the University of Glasgow, he served as University chaplain from 1774 – 1794, and librarian from 1780 - 1794. Between 1780 and 1794 he worked as an assistant to Professor of Moral Philosophy Thomas Reid, taking on the latter's teaching duties, and succeeding him in 1796.
Go to Profile#17058
Johann Konrad Dippel
1673 - 1734 (61 years)
Johann Konrad Dippel, also spelled Johann Conrad Dippel , was a German Pietist theologian, physician, alchemist and occultist. Life Dippel was born at Castle Frankenstein near Mühltal and Darmstadt, and therefore once at his school the addendum Franckensteinensis and once at his university the addendum Franckensteina-Strataemontanus was used.
Go to Profile#17059
Andrej Dudrovich
1782 - 1830 (48 years)
Andrej Dudrovich was a Russian philosopher, professor and president of Kharkov University during the Age of Enlightenment. Biography Andrej Dudrovich was born in Serbia, then part of the Austrian Empire before emigrating to Imperial Russia. Like many intellectuals of his generation who received an education abroad, he became influenced by Immanuel Kant's moral teachings. His chief work was a doctoral dissertation dealing with Kant while in the class of Johann Baptist Schad, a Benedictine monk who converted to Protestanism and became one of Kant's disciples in Imperial Russia. Dudrovich was a...
Go to Profile#17060
Melissa
280 BC - 210 BC (70 years)
Melissa was a Pythagorean philosopher. Her name derives from the Greek word melli meaning honey. Nothing is known about her life. She is known only from a letter written to another woman named Cleareta . The letter is written in a Doric Greek dialect dated to around the 3rd century BC. The letter discusses the need for a wife to be modest and virtuous, and stresses that she should obey her husband. The content has led to the suggestion that it was written pseudonymously by a man. On the other hand, the author of the letter does not suggest that a woman is naturally inferior or weak, or that s...
Go to Profile#17061
Metrocles
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Metrocles was a Cynic philosopher from Maroneia. He studied in Aristotle’s Lyceum under Theophrastus, and eventually became a follower of Crates of Thebes, who married Metrocles’ sister Hipparchia. Very little survives of his writings, but he is important as one of the first Cynics to adopt the practice of writing moral anecdotes about Diogenes and other Cynics.
Go to Profile#17063
Ludwig Marcuse
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Ludwig Marcuse was a German philosopher and writer of Jewish origin. From 1933 to 1940 Marcuse lived in France, settling with other German exiles in Sanary-sur-Mer. From 1940 to 1950 he lived in Los Angeles. He returned to Germany at the end of his life.
Go to Profile#17064
Kikuo Chishima
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Kikuo Chishima was a Japanese medical researcher who promoted a variant of the Soviet medical biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya's pseudoscientific cellular theories, known as neo-Haematology, now largely discredited.
Go to Profile#17065
George Caruana
1831 - 1872 (41 years)
George Caruana was a Maltese minor philosopher mostly interested in epistemology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta . Life Caruana was a diocesan priest. He was born in Victoria, Gozo in 1831, and dedicated his relatively short life to academic work. He studied at the bishop’s seminary in Gozo, and then at the Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, from where he graduated as Doctor of Ecclesiastical Studies. Back in the Maltese islands, in 1858 Caruana was appointed Rector at the bishop’s seminary of Malta. Here he taught philosophy and mathematics. A few months later, in 1859, he was appointed Professor of the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta.
Go to Profile#17066
Richard Rudolf Walzer
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Richard Rudolf Walzer, FBA was a German-born British scholar of Greek philosophy and of Arabic philosophy. Education: Werner-Siemens-Realgymnasium, Berlin-Schöneberg; Frederick William University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#17067
Marcus Elieser Bloch
1723 - 1799 (76 years)
Marcus Elieser Bloch was a German physician and naturalist who is best known for his contribution to ichthyology through his multi-volume catalog of plates illustrating the fishes of the world. Brought up in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family, he learned German and Latin and studied anatomy before settling in Berlin as a physician. He amassed a large natural history collection, particularly of fish specimens. He is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologistss of the 18th century, and wrote many papers on natural history, comparative anatomy, and physiology.
Go to Profile#17068
Fyodor Khaskhachikh
1907 - 1942 (35 years)
Fyodor Ignatyevich Khaskhachikh was a Soviet philosopher and dean of philosophy at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History from 1939 to 1941. He worked on the history of epistemology and problems of epistemology within the framework of dialectical materialism.
Go to Profile#17069
Isaac Rülf
1831 - 1902 (71 years)
Isaac Rülf was a Jewish teacher, journalist and philosopher. He became widely known for his aid work and as a prominent early Zionist. Rülf was born in Rauischholzhausen, Hesse, Germany. He received a teaching certificate in 1849, became an assistant to the county rabbi and then taught in other small communities. He received his rabbinical certificate in 1854 from the University of Marburg and his Ph.D in 1865 at the University of Rostock. That year he became the rabbi of Memel, East Prussia.
Go to Profile#17070
Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi
787 - 886 (99 years)
Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi, Latinized as Albumasar , was an early Persian Muslim astrologer, thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium.
Go to Profile#17071
Erich von Hornbostel
1877 - 1935 (58 years)
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs.
Go to Profile#17073
Persaeus
306 BC - 243 BC (63 years)
Persaeus of Citium, son of Demetrius, was a Greek Stoic philosopher, and a friend and favourite student of Zeno of Citium. Life He lived in the same house as Zeno. Later writers wrote that Persaeus had been Zeno's slave, who had perhaps originally been an amanuensis sent to Zeno by King Antigonus II Gonatas; however, the source of this story seems to be due to a sarcastic remark made about Persaeus by Bion of Borysthenes who, upon seeing a statue of Persaeus inscribed: "Persaeus the pupil of Zeno", sneered that it ought to have been: "Persaeus the Servant of Zeno".
Go to Profile#17074
Austin Woodbury
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Austin M. Woodbury was an Australian Catholic philosopher. Biography Austin Maloney Woodbury S.M. was born on 2 March 1899 at Lower Mangrove , New South Wales, Australia. He was the sixth child of Austin Herbert Woodbury and his wife Margaret, nee Maloney, who had eleven children. His family was devoutly Catholic. Four of his sisters joined religious orders. From an early age Woodbury showed great intellectual promise and a love of learning. He discerned a vocation to the religious life and entered the Society of Mary in 1918, completing his secondary studies at the juniorate in Sydney and Mittagong .
Go to Profile#17075
Jay DeFeo
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”
Go to Profile#17076
Mikhail Iovchuk
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Mikhail Trifonovich Iovchuk was a Soviet philosopher, Communist Party official and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Biography Born in to a peasant family, Iovchuk joined the Communist Party in 1926.
Go to Profile#17077
Erich Mühsam
1878 - 1934 (56 years)
Erich Mühsam was a German antimilitarist anarchist essayist, poet and playwright. He emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading agitators for a federated Bavarian Soviet Republic, for which he served 5 years in prison.
Go to Profile#17078
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably , sometimes known as Abbé de Mably, was a French philosopher, historian, and writer, who for a short time served in the diplomatic corps. He was a popular 18th-century writer.
Go to Profile#17079
Pierius
201 - Present (1825 years)
Pierius was a Christian priest and probably head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, conjointly with Achillas. He flourished while Theonas was bishop of Alexandria, and died at Rome after 309. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 4 November.
Go to Profile#17080
Olga Plümacher
1839 - 1895 (56 years)
Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher was a Russian-born Swiss-American philosopher and scholar. She engaged with the philosophies of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, and published three books which contributed to the pessimism controversy in Germany. Her book on the history of philosophical pessimism, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett.
Go to Profile#17081
Heinrich Christoph Kolbe
1771 - 1836 (65 years)
Heinrich Christoph Kolbe was a German painter. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Life Kolbe was born and died in Düsseldorf. After his education at the 'old' Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and then went to Paris for ten years to study. He was part of the circle of Friedrich Schlegel and worked on the review "Europa". He later worked in the studio of François Gérard. In 1811 he returned to Düsseldorf, becoming the favorite portraitist of the Rhineland, painting 60 portraits in Barmen and Elberfeld alone. His subjects in Weimar included Goethe, Charles Augustus, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and two of Charles Augustus's mistress Karoline Jagemann.
Go to Profile#17082
Jean Reynaud
1806 - 1863 (57 years)
Jean Ernest Reynaud was a French mining engineer and socialist philosopher. He was a member of the Saint-Simonianian community. He was a co-founder of the Encyclopédie nouvelle. Life He was born in Lyon on 4 February 1806. He graduated from the Polytechnic School in Lyon in 1827 and joined the School of Mines. In May 1829 he began a four month study tour of Germany including the Harz Mountains, Black Forest, Saxony, Hanover, Oldenbourg and Westphalia. He then spent a further two months studying mines in Belgium and the Netherlands. He graduated from the mining school in 1830.
Go to Profile#17083
Edward Lhuyd
1660 - 1709 (49 years)
Edward Lhuyd was a Welsh naturalist, botanist, herbalist, alchemist, scientist, linguist, geographer and antiquary. He is also named in a Latinate form as Eduardus Luidius. Life Lhuyd was born in 1660, in Loppington, Shropshire, England, the illegitimate son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, Oswestry, and Bridget Pryse of Llansantffraid, near Talybont, Cardiganshire in 1660. His family belonged to the gentry of south-west Wales. Though well-established, the family was not wealthy. His father experimented with agriculture and industry in a manner that impinged on the new science of the day. The ...
Go to Profile#17084
Zhi Dun
314 - 366 (52 years)
Zhi Dun was a Chinese Buddhist monk and philosopher. A Chinese author, scholar and confidant of Chinese government officials in 350, he claimed that all who followed Buddhism would, at the end of their life, enter Nirvana.
Go to Profile#17085
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens
1704 - 1771 (67 years)
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens was a French rationalist, author and critic of the Catholic Church, who was a close friend of Voltaire and spent much of his life in exile at the court of Frederick the Great.
Go to Profile#17086
Livingston Farrand
1867 - 1939 (72 years)
Livingston Farrand was an American physician, anthropologist, psychologist, public health advocate and academic administrator. Early life and education Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Dr. Samuel Ashbel Farrand, headmaster of the historic Newark Academy, and Rachel Louise Farrand, Farrand received an undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1888, and went on to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he earned his M.D. in 1891.
Go to Profile#17087
Thomas Chubb
1679 - 1747 (68 years)
Thomas Chubb was a lay English Deist writer born near Salisbury. He saw Christ as a divine teacher, but held reason to be sovereign over religion. He questioned the morality of religions, while defending Christianity on rational grounds. Despite little schooling, Chubb was well up on the religious controversies. His The True Gospel of Jesus Christ, Asserted sets out to distinguish the teaching of Jesus from that of the Evangelists. Chubb's views on free will and determinism, expressed in A Collection of Tracts on Various Subjects , were extensively criticised by Jonathan Edwards in Freedom of...
Go to Profile#17088
Jinul
1158 - 1210 (52 years)
Jinul Puril Bojo Daesa , often called Jinul or Chinul for short, was a Korean monk of the Goryeo period, who is considered to be the most influential figure in the formation of Korean Seon Buddhism. He is credited as the founder of the Jogye Order, by working to unify the disparate sects in Korean Buddhism into a cohesive organization.
Go to Profile#17089
Alessandro Achillini
1463 - 1512 (49 years)
Alessandro Achillini was an Italian philosopher and physician. He is known for the anatomic studies that he was able to publish, made possible by a 13th-century edict putatively by Emperor Frederick II allowing for dissection of human cadavers, and which previously had stimulated the anatomist Mondino de Luzzi at Bologna.
Go to Profile#17090
Evarts Ambrose Graham
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Evarts Ambrose Graham was an American academic, physician, and surgeon. Early years and military service Born in Chicago, Illinois to a surgeon, David Wilson Graham, and Ida Ansbach Barned Graham, Evarts attended college at Princeton University and received his M.D. degree from Rush Medical College in 1907. Graham then trained as a surgery resident at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, and subsequently as a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Chicago. There, he met his wife, Helen Tredway, Ph.D. , a biochemist and pharmacologist. Evarts served as a Major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1917 to 1919, and was initially posted to Camp Lee .
Go to Profile#17091
Phintys
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Phintys was a Pythagorean philosopher, probably from the third century BC. She wrote a work on the correct behaviour of women, two extracts of which are preserved by Stobaeus. According to Stobaeus, Phintys was the daughter of Callicrates, who is otherwise unknown. Holger Thesleff suggests that this Callicrates might be identified with Callicratidas, a Spartan general who died at the Battle of Arginusae. If so, this would make Phintys a Spartan, and date her birth to the late fifth century BC, and her floruit to the fourth century. I. M. Plant considers this emendation "fanciful". Iamblich...
Go to Profile#17092
John Smith
1580 - 1631 (51 years)
John Smith was an English soldier, explorer, colonial governor, admiral of New England, and author. He played an important role in the establishment of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in the early 17th century. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony between September 1608 and August 1609, and he led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, during which he became the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area. Later, he explored and mapped the coast of New England. He was knighted for his services...
Go to Profile#17093
Afdal al-Din Kashani
Afzal ad-Din Maragi Kashani also known as Baba Afzal was a Persian poet and philosopher. Several dates have been suggested for his death, with the best estimate being around 1213/1214. Life The information on his life is scanty and few. His writing portray a disdain for officials of his time and he is said to have once been imprisoned by the local governor on trumped-up charges of practicing sorcery. His tomb located in the village Maraq, forty-two km northwest of Kashan, is still a place of pilgrimage. The best summary of Persian of what is known about Baba Afza's life and work, is written...
Go to Profile#17095
Shankar Vaman Dandekar
1896 - 1969 (73 years)
Shankar Vaman Dandekar , also known as Sonopant Dandekar, was a philosopher and educationist from Maharashtra, India. Dandekar was an important interpreter of Warkari Bhakti Sampraday in Maharashtra. He served as a professor of philosophy and the principal of Sir Parashurambhau College in Pune for many years.
Go to Profile#17096
William Wallace
1844 - 1897 (53 years)
William Wallace was a Scottish philosopher and academic who became fellow of Merton College and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. He was best known for his studies of German philosophers, most notably Hegel, some of whose works he translated into highly regarded English editions. While reputedly forbidding in manner, he was known as an able and effective teacher and writer who succeeded in greatly improving the understanding of German philosophy in the English-speaking world. He died at the age of 52 after a bicycle accident near Oxford.
Go to Profile#17097
Antipater of Tyre
50 BC - 40 BC (10 years)
Antipater of Tyre was a Greek Stoic philosopher and a friend of Cato the Younger and Cicero. Life Antipater lived after, or was at least younger than, Panaetius. Cicero, in speaking of him, says, that he died "recently at Athens", which must mean shortly before 45 BC. He is mentioned by Strabo as a "famous philosopher" from Tyre. Antipater is said to have befriended Cato when Cato was a young man, and introduced him to Stoic philosophy:
Go to Profile#17098
Valentin Asmus
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus was a Soviet philosopher. He was one of the small group who continued the classical European philosophical tradition through the early Soviet times. He was an independent thinker and unorthodox Marxist, with interests in the history of philosophy and aesthetics.
Go to Profile#17099
Sopater of Apamea
242 - 325 (83 years)
Sopater of Apamea was a distinguished sophist and Neoplatonist philosopher. Biography Sopater was a disciple of Iamblichus, after whose death , he went to Constantinople, where he enjoyed the favour and personal friendship of Constantine I.
Go to Profile#17100
H. Wildon Carr
1857 - 1931 (74 years)
Herbert Wildon Carr was a British philosopher. Life He was Professor of Philosophy, King's College, London from 1918 to 1925, and Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California from 1925 until his death on 8 July 1931 in Los Angeles, California, United States.
Go to Profile