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,
#17501
Rabindranath Tagore
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; where his elegant prose and magical poetry were widely popular in the Indian subcontinent. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
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Carneades
214 BC - 129 BC (85 years)
Carneades was a Greek philosopher, perhaps the most prominent head of the Skeptical Academy in ancient Greece. He was born in Cyrene. By the year 159 BC, he had begun to attack many previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism and even the Epicureans, whom previous skeptics had spared.
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Hunayn ibn Ishaq
808 - 873 (65 years)
Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi Ḥunayn ibn Isḥaq was the most productive translator of Greek medical and scientific treatises in his day. He studied Greek and became known as the "Sheikh of the Translators". He mastered four languages: Arabic, Syriac, Greek and Persian. Hunayn's method was widely followed by later translators. He was originally from al-Hirah, the capital of a pre-Islamic cultured Arab kingdom, but he spent his working life in Baghdad, the center of the great ninth-century Greek-into-Arabic/Syriac translation movement. His fame went far beyond his own community.
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Arnold Ruge
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Arnold Ruge was a German philosopher and political writer. He was the older brother of Ludwig Ruge. Studies in university and prison Born in Bergen auf Rügen, he studied in Halle, Jena and Heidelberg. As an advocate of a free and united Germany, he shared in the student agitations of 1821–24, and was jailed from 1824 to 1830 in the fortress of Kolberg, where he studied Plato and the Greek poets. Moving to Halle on his release, he published a number of plays — including Schill und die Seinen, a tragedy — and translations of ancient Greek texts — e.g. Oedipus at Colonus. He became a Privatdo...
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Semyon Frank
1877 - 1950 (73 years)
Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank was a Russian philosopher. Born into a Jewish family, he became an Orthodox Christian in 1912. In 1922 he was expelled from Soviet Russia and lived in Berlin. In 1933 he was replaced as head of the Russian Scientific Institute. In 1945, he moved to Britain.
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Wilhelm Windelband
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
Wilhelm Windelband was a German philosopher of the Baden School. Biography Windelband was born the son of a Prussian official in Potsdam. He studied at Jena, Berlin, and Göttingen. Philosophical work Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who argued against other contemporary neo-Kantians, maintaining that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries,...
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Jean Paul
1763 - 1825 (62 years)
Jean Paul was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories. Life and work Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtel Mountains . His father was an organist at Wunsiedel. In 1765 his father became a pastor at Joditz near Hof and, in 1767 at Schwarzenbach, but he died on 25 April 1779, leaving the family in great poverty. Later in life, Jean Paul noted, "The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity." After attending the Gymnasium at Hof, in 1781 Jean Paul went to the University of Leipzig.
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Pericles
494 BC - 429 BC (65 years)
Pericles was a Greek politician and general during the Golden Age of Athens. He was prominent and influential in Ancient Athenian politics, particularly between the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and was acclaimed by Thucydides, a contemporary historian, as "the first citizen of Athens". Pericles turned the Delian League into an Athenian empire and led his countrymen during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War. The period during which he led Athens, roughly from 461 to 429 BC, is sometimes known as the "Age of Pericles", but the period thus denoted can include times as...
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Władysław Tatarkiewicz
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Władysław Tatarkiewicz was a Polish philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of art, esthetician, and ethicist. Early life and education Tatarkiewicz began his higher education at Warsaw University. When it was closed by the Russian Imperial authorities in 1905, he was forced to continue his education abroad in Marburg, Germany, where he studied from 1907 to 1910.
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Theodor Lipps
1851 - 1914 (63 years)
Theodor Lipps was a German philosopher, famed for his theory regarding aesthetics, creating the framework for the concept of Einfühlung , defined as, "projecting oneself onto the object of perception." This has then led onto opening up a new branch of interdisciplinary research in the overlap between psychology and philosophy.
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Jean Hyppolite
1907 - 1968 (61 years)
Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of G.W.F. Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers. His major works include Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Studies on Marx and Hegel.
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William Harvey
1578 - 1657 (79 years)
William Harvey was an English physician who made influential contributions in anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the brain and the rest of the body by the heart, though earlier writers, such as Realdo Colombo, Michael Servetus, and Jacques Dubois, had provided precursors of the theory.
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Alexander Herzen
1812 - 1870 (58 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer and thinker known as the precursor of Russian socialism and one of the main precursors of agrarian populism . With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. He published the important social novel Who is to Blame? . His autobiography, My Past and Thoughts , is often considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature.
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Leon Chwistek
1884 - 1944 (60 years)
Leon Chwistek was a Polish avant-garde painter, theoretician of modern art, literary critic, logician, philosopher and mathematician. Career and philosophy In 1919 he was one of the founders of the Polish Mathematical Society. From 1922, he lectured in mathematics for natural scientists at the Jagiellonian University, where he obtained his habilitation in 1928 in mathematical logic.
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Themistius
317 - 388 (71 years)
Themistius , nicknamed Euphrades, , was a statesman, rhetorician, and philosopher. He flourished in the reigns of Constantius II, Julian, Jovian, Valens, Gratian, and Theodosius I; and he enjoyed the favour of all those emperors, notwithstanding their many differences, and the fact that he himself was not a Christian. He was admitted to the senate by Constantius in 355, and he was prefect of Constantinople in 384 on the nomination of Theodosius. Of his many works, thirty-three orations of his have come down to us, as well as various commentaries and epitomes of the works of Aristotle.
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Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
1788 - 1856 (68 years)
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet FRSE was a Scottish metaphysician. He is often referred to as William Stirling Hamilton of Preston, in reference to his mother, Elizabeth Stirling. Early life He was born in rooms at the University of Glasgow, He was from an academic family: his father Professor William Hamilton, had in 1781, on the recommendation of William Hunter, been appointed to succeed his own father, Dr Thomas Hamilton, as Regius Professor of Anatomy, Glasgow; he died in 1790, aged 32. William Hamilton and his younger brother, Thomas Hamilton, were brought up by their mother.
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Richard Price
1721 - 1791 (70 years)
Richard Price was a Welsh moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was also a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions. He was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. According to the historian John Davies, Price was "the greatest Welsh thinker of all time".
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Gottlob Ernst Schulze
1761 - 1833 (72 years)
Gottlob Ernst Schulze was a German philosopher, born in Heldrungen . He was the grandfather of the pioneering biochemist Ernst Schulze. Biography Schulze was a professor at Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Göttingen. His most influential book was Aenesidemus , a skeptical polemic against Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Philosophy of the Elements.
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Lev Shestov
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian existentialist and religious philosopher. He is best known for his critiques of both philosophic rationalism and positivism. His work advocated a movement beyond reason and metaphysics, arguing that these are incapable of conclusively establishing truth about ultimate problems, including the nature of God or existence. Contemporary scholars have associated his work with the label "anti-philosophy."
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Simone Weil
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work.
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Gersonides
1288 - 1344 (56 years)
Levi ben Gershon , better known by his Graecized name as Gersonides, or by his Latinized name Magister Leo Hebraeus, or in Hebrew by the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG, was a medieval French Jewish philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, physician and astronomer/astrologer. He was born at Bagnols in Languedoc, France. According to Abraham Zacuto and others, he was the son of Gerson ben Solomon Catalan.
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René Guénon
1886 - 1951 (65 years)
René Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon , also known as Abdalwahid Yahia , was a French intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having written on topics ranging from esotericism, "sacred science" and "traditional studies" to symbolism and initiation.
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Constantin Noica
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Constantin Noica was a Romanian philosopher, essayist and poet. His preoccupations were throughout all philosophy, from epistemology, philosophy of culture, axiology and philosophic anthropology to ontology and logics, from the history of philosophy to systematic philosophy, from ancient to contemporary philosophy, from translating and interpretation to criticism and creation. In 2006 he was included to the list of the 100 Greatest Romanians of all time by a nationwide poll.
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Anton Chekhov
1860 - 1904 (44 years)
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
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Adam Ferguson
1723 - 1816 (93 years)
Adam Ferguson, , also known as Ferguson of Raith , was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson was sympathetic to traditional societies, such as the Highlands, for producing courage and loyalty. He criticized commercial society as making men weak, dishonourable and unconcerned for their community. Ferguson has been called "the father of modern sociology" for his contributions to the early development of the discipline. His best-known work is his Essay on the History of Civil Society.
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Callicles
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Callicles is thought to have been an ancient Athenian political philosopher. He figures prominently in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, where he "presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik". In terms of dramatic action, his function in the dialogue is to provide a counter-argument to Plato's philosophical ideas. The absence of contemporaneous sources external to this single text attesting to his existence has suggested to some that he may be no more than a character created by Plato for the dialogue. In this vein, it has also been proposed that Callic...
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Tadeusz Kotarbiński
1886 - 1981 (95 years)
Tadeusz Marian Kotarbiński was a Polish philosopher, logician and ethicist. A pupil of Kazimierz Twardowski, he was one of the most representative figures of the Lwów–Warsaw School, and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning as well as the Polish Academy of Sciences . He developed philosophical theory called reism and an ethical system called independent ethics. Kotarbiński also contributed significantly to the development of praxeology.
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Melissus of Samos
470 BC - 430 BC (40 years)
Melissus of Samos was the third and last member of the ancient school of Eleatic philosophy, whose other members included Zeno and Parmenides. Little is known about his life, except that he was the commander of the Samian fleet in the Samian War. Melissus’ contribution to philosophy was a treatise of systematic arguments supporting Eleatic philosophy. Like Parmenides, he argued that reality is ungenerated, indestructible, indivisible, changeless, and motionless. In addition, he sought to show that reality is wholly unlimited, and infinitely extended in all directions; and since existence is ...
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Raya Dunayevskaya
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Raya Dunayevskaya , later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.
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Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was a Polish philosopher and logician, a prominent figure in the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic. He originated many novel ideas in semantics. Among these was categorial grammar, a highly flexible framework for the analysis of natural language syntax and semantics that remains a major influence on work in formal linguistics. Ajdukiewicz's fields of research were model theory and the philosophy of science.
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John of St. Thomas
1589 - 1644 (55 years)
John of St. Thomas, O.P., born João Poinsot , was a Portuguese Dominican friar, Thomist theologian, and professor of philosophy. He is known for being an early theorist in the field of semiotics. Biography Of noble parentage, he was sent early to the University of Coimbra, displayed talents of the first order, completed his humanities and philosophy, and obtained the degree of Master of Arts. He then entered the University of Louvain. Here, too, he showed remarkable ability, and won the title of Bachelor of Theology at an early age. He joined the Dominicans at Madrid in 1612 or 1613, taking the name of John of St.
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Susanne Langer
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She was one of the earliest American women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best remembered for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key which was followed by a sequel Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art in 1953. In 1960, Langer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Antiochus of Ascalon
130 BC - 68 BC (62 years)
Antiochus of Ascalon was an 1st century BC Platonism philosopher who rejected skepticism and blended Stoic doctrines with Platonism as the first philosopher in the tradition of Middle Platonism. Antiochus moved to Athens early in his life and became a pupil of Philo of Larissa at the Platonic Academy, but he went on to reject the prevailing Academic skepticism of Philo and his predecessors. This led to his resignation from the academy and the establishment of his own school, which he named the "Old Academy" as he claimed it was closer to original doctrines of Platonism that he believed had been betrayed by the skeptics of the New Academy under Philo.
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C. I. Lewis
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Clarence Irving Lewis , usually cited as C. I. Lewis, was an American academic philosopher. He is considered the progenitor of modern modal logic and the founder of conceptual pragmatism. First a noted logician, he later branched into epistemology, and during the last 20 years of his life, he wrote much on ethics. The New York Times memorialized him as "a leading authority on symbolic logic and on the philosophic concepts of knowledge and value." He was the first to coin the term "Qualia" as it is used today in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive sciences.
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Zhang Dongsun
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Zhang Dongsun , also known as Chang Tung-sheng, was a Chinese philosopher, public intellectual and political figure. He was a professor of Philosophy and Sinology at Yenching University and Tsinghua University.
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William Paley
1743 - 1805 (62 years)
William Paley was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his natural theology exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, which made use of the watchmaker analogy.
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Damascius
450 - 550 (100 years)
Damascius , known as "the last of the Athenian Neoplatonists," was the last scholarch of the neoplatonic Athenian school. He was one of the neoplatonic philosophers who left Athens after laws confirmed by emperor Justinian I forced the closure of the Athenian school in c. 529 AD. After he left Athens, he may have sought refuge in the court of the Persian King Chrosroes, before being allowed back into the Byzantine Empire. His surviving works consist of three commentaries on the works of Plato, and a metaphysical text entitled Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles.
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Marsilius of Padua
1275 - 1342 (67 years)
Marsilius of Padua was an Italian scholar, trained in medicine, who practiced a variety of professions. He was also an important 14th-century political figure. His political treatise Defensor pacis , an attempt to refute papal claims to a "plenitude of power" in affairs of both church and state, is seen by some scholars as the most revolutionary political treatise written in the later Middle Ages. It is one of the first examples of a trenchant critique of caesaropapism in Western Europe. Marsilius is sometimes seen as a forerunner of the Protestant reformation, because many of his beliefs we...
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Vladimir Solovyov
1853 - 1900 (47 years)
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer, and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.
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Rashi
1040 - 1105 (65 years)
Shlomo Yitzchaki , generally known by the acronym Rashi, was a medieval French rabbi, the author of comprehensive commentaries on the Talmud and Hebrew Bible. Acclaimed for his ability to present the basic meaning of the text in a concise and lucid fashion, Rashi's commentaries appeal to both learned scholars and beginning students, and his works remain a centerpiece of contemporary Torah study. A large fraction of rabbinic literature published since the Middle Ages discusses Rashi, either using his view as supporting evidence or debating against it. His commentary on the Talmud, which covers ...
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Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
1781 - 1832 (51 years)
Karl Christian Friedrich Krause was a German philosopher whose doctrines became known as Krausism. Krausism, when considered in its totality as a complete, stand-alone philosophical system, had only a small following in Germany, France, and Belgium, in contradistinction to certain other philosophical systems that had a much larger following in Europe at that time. However, Krausism became very popular and influential in Restoration Spain not as a complete, comprehensive philosophical system per se, but as a broad cultural movement. In Spain, Krausism was known as "Krausismo", and Krausists were known as "Krausistas".
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Ernest Renan
1823 - 1892 (69 years)
Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote works on the origins of early Christianity, and espoused popular political theories especially concerning nationalism, national identity, and the alleged superiority of White people over other human "races". Renan is known as being among the first scholars to advance the disputed Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars, Turkic peoples who had adopted Jewis...
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Julian Huxley
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London , the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society , and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
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Abram Deborin
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Abram Moiseyevich Deborin was a Soviet Marxist philosopher and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . Deborin oscillated between The Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, before settling with the Bolsheviks and enjoying a long career as a philosopher in the Soviet Union. Although this career suffered under Stalin, he lived to see his works republished when the Soviet Union was led by Nikita Khrushchev.
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Galvano Della Volpe
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Galvano Della Volpe was an Italian professor of philosophy and Marxist theorist. Life Born on 24 September 1895 in Imola, in the then province of Bologna, Della Volpe served in the First World War and afterwards completed his studies at the University of Bologna. Della Volpe taught history and philosophy in a liceo in Ravenna and at the University of Bologna from 1925 to 1938, when he became chair of history and philosophy at the University of Messina, a post he held until his retirement in 1965. Della Volpe died on 13 July 1968 in Rome.
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Georgy Chelpanov
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Georgy Ivanovich Chelpanov was a Ukrainian and Soviet psychologist, philosopher and logician. Biography Chelpanov was born in Mariupol in to an upper-class family. Chelpanov received his primary education in Mariupol at the local parish school, and then studied at the Gymnasium Alexandrinum , graduating in 1883 with a gold medal. After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of the Novorossiysk University in Odessa and graduated in 1887 with a Ph.D.
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Henry More
1614 - 1687 (73 years)
Henry More was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school. Biography Henry was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire on 12 October 1614. He was the seventh son of Alexander More, mayor of Grantham, and Anne More . Both his parents were Calvinists but he himself "could never swallow that hard doctrine."
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Carl Linnaeus
1707 - 1778 (71 years)
Carl Linnaeus , also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as .
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Swaminarayan
1781 - 1830 (49 years)
Swaminarayan , also known as Sahajanand Swami, was a yogi and ascetic, who is believed by followers to be a manifestation of Krishna, or as the highest manifestation of Purushottama, and around whom the Swaminarayan Sampradaya developed.
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Carl von Clausewitz
1780 - 1831 (51 years)
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" and political aspects of waging war. His most notable work, , though unfinished at his death, is considered a seminal treatise on military strategy and science.
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