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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#18201

Nikolay Lossky

1870 - 1965 (95 years)

Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky , also known as N. O. Lossky, was a Russian philosopher, representative of Russian idealism, intuitionist epistemology, personalism, libertarianism, ethics and axiology . He gave his philosophical system the name intuitive-personalism. Born in Latvia, he spent his working life in St. Petersburg, New York, and Paris. He was the father of the influential Christian theologian Vladimir Lossky.

#18202

Theodor Kroyer

1873 - 1945 (72 years)

Theodor Kroyer was a German musicologist. Life Kroyer was born in Munich. After he won his Abitur in 1893 at the Wilhelmsgymnasium he studied at the University of Munich and the Akademie für Tonkunst in Munich. He received his doctorate in 1897 and habilitated in 1902 at the University of Munich, where he taught from 1907 as a non-permanent associate professor.

#18203

Austin Gill

1906 - 1990 (84 years)

Austin Gill, was a British scholar of the French language and culture. He was the Marshall Professor of French at the University of Glasgow from 1966 to 1971. Gill's family was of Irish extraction, but he was born in Stockport, England, which is just southeast of Manchester proper. Gill matriculated at the University of Manchester where he studied French and played football. After graduation, he went on to study first at Grenoble, where he played centre-half for FC Grenoble, and then in Paris. In France, Gill was a Faulkner Fellow from 1930 to 1931 and a then back in Manchester a Langton Fellow from 1931 to 1933.

#18204

George Smith

1919 - 1984 (65 years)

George Smith was a 20th century Scottish surgeon who emigrated to the United States of America. Life He was born on 4 June 1919 in Carnoustie the son of John Shand Smith and his wife Lilimina Myles Mathers. He was educated at the Grove Academy. He then studied Medicine at St. Andrews University graduating MB ChB in 1942, and starting as an intern at Dundee Royal Infirmary.

#18205

Susan Grey Akers

Susan Grey Akers

1889 - 1984 (95 years)

Susan Grey Akers was an American librarian and the first woman to hold an academic deanship at the University of North Carolina. Biography Akers was born on April 3, 1889, in Richmond, Kentucky, to Clara Elizabeth Harris and James Tazewell Akers, a language professor at the University of Kentucky. She received a bachelor's degree with a major of Latin and minor in Greek from the University of Kentucky in 1909, following which she taught Latin one year in a high school in Kentucky and fifth and sixth grades one year in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1911, she began work at a public library in Louisvi...

#18206

Alexander Nahum Sack

1890 - 1955 (65 years)

Alexander Nahum Sack or Aleksandr Naumovich Zak was a jurisprudence expert and professor of Russian law, specialized in international financial legislation. Sack was born in Moscow. After teaching at Petrograd Imperial University, he left Soviet Russia in 1921 to settle in Estonia, where he advised the government in monetary issues. He also gained Estonian citizenship, but he moved to Paris in 1925. He taught at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and at the International Law Academy in The Hague before moving to London in 1929 to work as an expert for Equitable Life Insurance. Work for this company led him to New York in 1930.

#18207

Heinz Cassirer

1903 - 1979 (76 years)

Heinrich Walter Cassirer was a Kantianian philosopher, son of a famous German philosopher, Ernst Cassirer. Being Jews, the Cassirer family fled the Nazis in the 1930s. As a refugee scholar, Heinz went to University of Glasgow working with Professor H. J. Paton, who persuaded him to write a book on Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. Following Paton, he moved to Oxford, lecturing at Corpus Christi College, where his students included Iris Murdoch . He returned to the University of Glasgow in 1946, having been appointed to a permanent lectureship, and remained there until 1960 wh...

#18208

Amelia Earhart

1897 - 1939 (42 years)

Amelia Mary Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and writer. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.

#18209

Edwin Stringham

1890 - 1974 (84 years)

Edwin John Stringham was an American composer. Life Stringham was a native of Kenosha, Wisconsin. He earned a bachelor's degree in music from Northwestern University, a doctorate in music from the University of Denver, and a doctorate in teaching from the University of Cincinnati. He also studied at the Royal Academy of Rome, the Italian Academy, and the University of Munich. He died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

#18210

August Siegrist

1865 - 1947 (82 years)

August Siegrist was a Swiss ophthalmologist remembered for describing Siegrist streaks. He trained at Basel, Zurich, Lausanne, Vienna and Bern, where he received his M.D. in 1892. He studied further in Bern under Emil Theodor Kocher and in Vienna under Ernst Fuchs. He was habilitated in ophthalmology at Basel in 1900, and in 1903 succeeded Ernst Pflüger as professor of ophthalmology and director of the eye clinic at the University of Bern. He maintained these positions at Bern up until 1935. He worked on the correction of keratoconus including the use of early contact lenses.

#18211

Martin F. Angell

1876 - 1930 (54 years)

Martin Fuller Angell was an American football and baseball coach and physics and mathematics professor. Angell was born in Delavan, Wisconsin, in 1878. He attended the University of Wisconsin where he received a bachelor's degree in 1902.

#18212

Ingemar Hedenius

Ingemar Hedenius

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

Per Arvid Ingemar Hedenius was a Swedish philosopher. He was Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University . He was a famous opponent of organised Christianity. The Swedish Humanist Association, known in Sweden as "Humanisterna", offers the Ingemar Hedenius Award each year to support humanist ideas and critical thinking.

#18213

Albert Kappis

1836 - 1914 (78 years)

Albert Kappis was a German painter and draughtsperson specializing in landscapes and genre motifss. Biography From 1850 to 1857, Kappis trained as a lithographer in his uncle's workshop. he also took drawing lessons and, from 1855 to 1860, attended classes at the Royal Art School in Stuttgart under Heinrich von Rustige and Bernhard von Neher. In 1860, he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich under Karl von Piloty. While there, he made friends with fellow painters from Swabia, including Anton Braith, Ludwig Willroider, Friedrich Salzer and Jakob Grünenwald.

#18214

Douglas Waples

1893 - 1978 (85 years)

Douglas Waples was a pioneer of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School in the areas of print communication and reading behavior. Waples authored one of the first books on library research methodology, a work directed at students supervised through correspondence courses. Jesse Shera credits Waples’s scholarly research into the social effects of reading as the foundation for the approaches to the study of knowledge known as social epistemology. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".

#18215

Hermann Friedmann

1873 - 1957 (84 years)

Adolph Hermann Friedmann was a German philosopher and jurist, Finnish citizen from 1906. In Finland Friedmann became known to the general public as a lawyer. His most famous case was a murder committed in 1927 in Turku. Friedmann defended the head of the University Library of Åbo Akademi and his wife in a murder trial, which was extensively reported in the newspapers around Europe.

#18216

Arnold Geering

1902 - 1982 (80 years)

Arnold Geering was a Swiss musicologist and philologist. Born in Basel, Geering was a son of and the brother of . He studied musicology and philology at the University of Basel, where he received his doctorate in 1931 and his habilitation in 1947. From 1950 to 1972, he was professor of musicology at the University of Bern. From 1948 to 1951, he was secretary of the International Musicological Society and from 1949 to 1963 director of the Schweizerisches Volksliedarchiv. Geering edited the works of Ludwig Senfl.

#18217

Rachel Bespaloff

1895 - 1949 (54 years)

Rachel Bespaloff was a Ukrainian-French philosopher. Life Rachel Bespaloff came from a Jewish family: her father was the Zionist writer and activist Daniel Pasmanik. A disciple of Lev Shestov, Bespaloff took an increasingly critical distance from Shestov throughout the 1930s. She was one of the first French readers of Heidegger, and wrote on Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, André Malraux, and Julien Green. In 1942 she left France for the United States, working for the French section of the Office of War Information before teaching French at Mount Holyoke College. She committed suicide in 1949.

#18218

Friedrich Gustav von Bramann

1854 - 1913 (59 years)

Friedrich Gustav von Bramann was a German surgeon born in Wilhelmsberg near Darkehmen, East Prussia. He studied medicine at the University of Königsberg and joined the Corps Hansea. He became assistant surgeon to Ernst von Bergmann at the Charité in Berlin. In 1889 he declined the call to the University of Greifswald and became a senior lecturer at the Charité. In 1890 he was appointed professor of surgery at the University of Halle an der Saale, succeeding Richard von Volkmann

#18219

Pura Belpré

1899 - 1982 (83 years)

Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras was an Afro-Puerto Rican educator who served as the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. Life Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903. Belpré graduated from Central High School in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she originally planned on becoming a teacher. But, in 1920, Belpré interrupted her studies...

#18220

Paul Häberlin

1878 - 1960 (82 years)

Paul Haeberlin was a Swiss philosopher who at different times in his career took the standpoint that either religion or theoretical knowledge was the answer to human problems. He always gave philosophy an important role, but religion was to him the only way man could understand his real position in existence. Haeberlin made contributions to characterology and psychotherapeutics, and was especially successful in treating psychopathic youth and teens. Made a full professor of philosophy, psychology and pedagogics at the University of Basel.

#18221

Takeo Yamaguchi

Takeo Yamaguchi

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Takeo Yamaguchi was an avant-garde Japanese painter of monochrome Art Informel works. About Yamaguchi studied Western painting at the Tokyo Art School. Upon graduation in 1927, he moved to Paris to study European painting. He developed his mature style during the mid-1950s, with a focus on flatness.

#18222

Haridas Bhattacharya

1891 - 1956 (65 years)

Haridas Bhattacharyya was a Bengali Indian philosopher, author and educationist, known for his works on comparative religion. Early life He was born in an orthodox Brahmin family on 7 November 1891, at Bhatpara, West Bengal to Pandit Ramprasanna Bhattacharyya, a scholar at the princely court of Krishnanagar and a Sanskrit scholar.

#18223

Kurt Sternberg

1885 - 1942 (57 years)

Kurt Max Julius Sternberg was a Neo-Kantian German philosopher, author, and Holocaust victim. Biography Sternberg was born in Berlin, studied with the Neo-Kantian philosophers Alois Riehl and Friedrich Paulsen, and published on academic philosophy and liberal politics. Sternberg engaged in Neo-Kantian debates over the natural sciences and cultural sciences in Zur Logik der Geschichtswissenschaft . He rejected the pessimism of Oswald Spengler in Idealismus und Kultur . He also wrote works on literary and political figures such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Heine, and Walther Rathenau. Later...

#18224

Ernest Désiré Glasson

1839 - 1907 (68 years)

Ernest Désiré Glasson was a French academic, jurist, professor of civil procedure and specialist in the history of French, Roman, and comparative law.

#18225

Herman Kiefer

1825 - 1911 (86 years)

Herman Kiefer , also spelled Hermann Kiefer, was a physician, politician and diplomat of the United States. Biography Germany He was the only son of a physician, Conrad Kiefer. His mother was a daughter of the gardener of the Grand Duke in Karlsruhe. Thus, he was brought up in a conservative environment and trained to respect the established order of things. He attended gymnasia at Freiburg, Mannheim, and Karlsruhe. His childhood hero was Frederick the Great. He wrote his first poem, "The Death of Socrates," in 1839, while at Freiburg. He continued writing poems for the rest of his life, and spent much of his youth wandering in the Black Forest.

#18226

Lionel Dauriac

1847 - 1923 (76 years)

Lionel Dauriac was a French philosopher and musicologist. Dauriac was born in Brest, the son of an admiral. He was professor of musical aesthetics at the Sorbonne between 1896 and 1903. He died 26 May 1923 in Paris. An internationally minded music critic, he wrote biographies of Gioachino Rossini, Richard Wagner and Giacomo Meyerbeer.

#18227

Florentino Ameghino

Florentino Ameghino

1853 - 1911 (58 years)

Florentino Ameghino was an Argentine naturalist, paleontologist, anthropologist and zoologist, whose fossil discoveries on the Argentine Pampas, especially on Patagonia, rank with those made in the western United States during the late 19th century. Along with his two brothers – Carlos and Juan – Florentino Ameghino was one of the most important founding figures in South American paleontology.

#18228

Keiji Nishitani

Keiji Nishitani

1900 - 1990 (90 years)

Keiji Nishitani was a Japanese philosopher. He was a scholar of the Kyoto School and a disciple of Kitarō Nishida. In 1924, Nishitani received his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University for his dissertation "Das Ideale und das Reale bei Schelling und Bergson". He studied under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg from 1937 to 1939.

#18229

Guðmundur Finnbogason

Guðmundur Finnbogason

1873 - 1944 (71 years)

Guðmundur Finnbogason was an Icelandic philosopher, the son of Guðrún Jónsdóttir and Finnbogi Finnbogason. He was one of the first Icelandic psychologists. His work "Sympathetic Understanding" inspired Jean Piaget's development stages model.

#18230

Ödön Pártos

1907 - 1977 (70 years)

Ödön Pártos [alternate transcription in English: Oedoen Partos, , ] was a Hungarian-Israeli violist and composer. A recipient of the Israel Prize, he taught and served as director of the Rubin Academy of Music, now known as the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv.

#18231

Ludwig Schiedermair

1876 - 1957 (81 years)

Ludwig Ferdinand Schiedermair was a German minister and musicologist. He concerned himself with opera history, Mozart, and Beethoven. In 1914 he edited the first complete critical edition of the letters of Mozart and his family.

#18232

Thomas Hocken

1836 - 1910 (74 years)

Thomas Morland Hocken was a New Zealand collector, bibliographer and researcher. Early life He was born in Rutlandshire on 14 January 1836, the son of Wesleyan minister Joshua Hocken, and educated at Woodhouse Grove School and a school in Newcastle. He studied medicine at Durham University and Trinity College Dublin, and in 1859 became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

#18233

Isadore Gilbert Mudge

Isadore Gilbert Mudge

1875 - 1957 (82 years)

Isadore Gilbert Mudge was ranked by the magazine American Libraries as one of the top 100 important leaders that libraries have had in the 20th century. Mudge was a defining influence on what a contemporary reference librarian is and was essential for helping organize and promote reference books for use in helping patrons find information and answers to questions.

#18234

Charles Jacques Bouchard

Charles Jacques Bouchard

1837 - 1915 (78 years)

Charles Jacques Bouchard was a French pathologist and an esperantist born in Montier-en-Der, a commune the department of Haute-Marne. Biography He studied medicine in Lyon and Paris, where he obtained his doctorate in 1866. In 1874 he became a physician at Bicêtre Hospital, and in 1879 was appointed chair of general pathology. In 1886, he became a member of the Academie de Médecine.

#18235

Clay Johnston

S. Claiborne "Clay" Johnston is the former Dean of the Dell Medical School and Frank and Charmaine Denius Distinguished Dean's Chair at the University of Texas, Austin, United States. Dell Medical School opened in 2016 with Johnston being named as the inaugural dean in January 2014 In July 2021, Johnston announced that he would step down as the dean of the Dell Medical School. He officially left his position on August 31, 2021.

#18236

Aristotle

384 BC - 322 BC (62 years)

Aristotle was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.

#18237

Plato

427 BC - 347 BC (80 years)

Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period. In Athens, Plato founded the Academy, a philosophical school where he taught the philosophical doctrines that would later become known as Platonism. Plato, or Platon, was a pen name derived, apparently, from the nickname given to him by his wrestling coachallegedly a reference to his physical girth. According to Alexander Polyhistor, quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, his actual name was Aristocles, son of Ariston, of the deme Collytus, in Athens.

#18238

Immanuel Kant

1724 - 1804 (80 years)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy.

#18239

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

1872 - 1970 (98 years)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

#18240

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883 (65 years)

Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume ; the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and represents his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.

#18241

Socrates

469 BC - 399 BC (70 years)

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre. Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem.

#18242

Thomas Aquinas

1225 - 1274 (49 years)

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, an influential philosopher and theologian, and a jurist in the tradition of scholasticism from the county of Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily.

#18243

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1770 - 1831 (61 years)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.

#18244

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

1889 - 1976 (87 years)

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is often considered to be among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century.

#18245

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900 (56 years)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

#18246

René Descartes

1596 - 1650 (54 years)

René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a Deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.

#18247

John Locke

1632 - 1704 (72 years)

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

#18248

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

1889 - 1951 (62 years)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung , which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His only other published works were an article, "Some Remarks on Logical Form" ; a book review; and a children's dictionary.

#18249

Baruch Spinoza

1632 - 1677 (45 years)

Baruch Spinoza was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam, the Dutch Republic, and mostly known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza. One of the foremost and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment, modern biblical criticism, and 17th-century Rationalism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered "one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period". He was influenced by Stoicism, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, and a variety of heterodox Christian thinkers of his day.

#18250

Thomas Hobbes

1588 - 1679 (91 years)

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.

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