#18651
Ben Nicholson
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM was an English painter of abstract compositions , landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in his country. Background and training Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 in Denham, Buckinghamshire, the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and brother of the artist Nancy Nicholson, the architect Christopher Nicholson and to Anthony Nicholson. His maternal grandmother Barbara Pryde was a niece of the famous artist brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. The family moved to London in 1896. Nic...
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Antonio Aliotta
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Antonio Aliotta was an Italian philosopher. He was born in Palermo and studied philosophy at the University of Florence, graduating in 1903. His initial work was in experimental psychology. In 1912 he won the Paladin prize for his work, La reazione idealistica contro la scienza. He became professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Padua from 1913 to 1919, then served as a professor at the University of Naples until 1951.
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Amelius
200 - 300 (100 years)
Amelius , whose family name was Gentilianus, was a Neoplatonist philosopher and writer of the second half of the 3rd century. Biography Amelius was a native of Tuscany. Originally a student of the works of Numenius of Apamea, he began attending the lectures of Plotinus in the third year after Plotinus came to Rome, and stayed with him for more than twenty years, until 269, when he retired to Apamea in Syria, the native place of Numenius. He is erroneously called Apameos by the Suda.
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Fazlur Rahman Malik
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Fazlur Rahman Malik , commonly known as Fazlur Rahman, was a modernist scholar and Islamic philosopher from today's Pakistan. Fazlur Rahman is renowned as a prominent liberal reformer of Islam, who devoted himself to educational reform and the revival of independent reasoning . His works are subject of widespread interest and criticism in Muslim-majority countries. He was protested by more than a thousand clerics, faqihs, muftis, and teachers in his own country and banished.
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Johannes Nikolaus Tetens
1736 - 1807 (71 years)
Johannes Nikolaus Tetens was a German-Danish philosopher, statistician and scientist. He has been called the "German Locke," on the basis of a comparison of his major work Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung with the work of John Locke. He is considered to have been an influence on Immanuel Kant.
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Rolf Schock
1933 - 1986 (53 years)
Rolf Schock was a Swedish–American philosopher and artist, born in Cap-d'Ail, France of German parents. Biography Schock was born at Cap-d'Ail on the French Riviera. His parents, who had left Germany, would eventually settle in the United States, where Schock would go on to obtain a bachelor's degree in geology at the University of New Mexico. After completing a bachelor of arts in 1955, he pursued studies in philosophy and logic from 1956 to 1960 at the University of California, first in Berkeley and then in Los Angeles , and in 1960 moved to Stockholm, Sweden, to specialize in theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University with a particular interest in free logic.
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Norman Kemp Smith
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Norman Duncan Kemp Smith, FBA, FRSE was a Scottish philosopher who was Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Princeton University and was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh .
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Paul Hensel
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Paul Hugo Wilhelm Hensel was a German philosopher. Biography Hensel was born in Groß-Barten in the Province of Prussia. He was the son of the landowner and entrepreneur Sebastian Hensel, brother of the mathematician Kurt Hensel, grandson of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn and the painter Wilhelm Hensel. Fanny was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, daughter of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and granddaughter of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. Both of Hensel's paternal grandmothers and his mother were from Jewish families that had converted to Christianity...
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Charles Renouvier
1815 - 1903 (88 years)
Charles Bernard Renouvier was a French philosopher. He considered himself a "Swedenborg of history" who sought to update the philosophy of Kantian liberalism and individualism for the socio-economic realities of the late nineteenth century, and influenced the sociological method of Émile Durkheim.
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Govinda Chandra Dev
1907 - 1971 (64 years)
Govinda Chandra Dev , known as Dr. G. C. Dev, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Dhaka. He was assassinated at the onset of Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 by the Pakistan Army. Early life and education Dev was born in the village of Lauta of the Panchakhanda Pargana of Sylhet District, East Bengal on 1 February 1907. His ancestors were high-caste Brahmins who settled in Sylhet from Gujarat. After his father's death at an early age, Dev was raised by the local Christian missionaries. Dev passed the Entrance Examination in first division from Biani Bazar High English School in 1925.
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Ruth L. Saw
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Ruth Lydia Saw was a British philosopher and aesthetician. Education and career Ruth Saw attended the County School for Girls in Wallington, Surrey, followed in 1926 by Bedford College, University of London, where she studied under Susan Stebbing. She accepted a position as lecturer in philosophy at Smith College and remained there for several years. She then returned to England and was appointed to a Lecturership in Philosophy at Bedford College in 1939 and remained there for the rest of her career. She became Reader in Philosophy in 1946 and then Professor of Aesthetics from 1961 to 1964. S...
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Epimenides
700 BC - 600 BC (100 years)
Epimenides of Cnossos was a semi-mythical 7th or 6th century BC Greek seer and philosopher-poet, from Knossos or Phaistos. Life While tending his father's sheep, Epimenides is said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years in a Cretan cave sacred to Zeus, after which he reportedly awoke with the gift of prophecy . Plutarch writes that Epimenides purified Athens after the pollution brought by the Alcmeonidae, and that the seer's expertise in sacrifices and reform of funeral practices were of great help to Solon in his reform of the Athenian state. The only reward he would accept was a branc...
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Shrimad Rajchandra
1867 - 1901 (34 years)
Shrimad Rajchandra was a Jain poet, mystic, philosopher, scholar, and reformer. Born in Vavaniya, a village near Morbi, he claimed to have recollection of his past lives at the age of seven. He performed Avadhāna, a memory retention and recollection test that gained him popularity, but he later discouraged it in favour of his spiritual pursuits. He wrote much philosophical poetry including Atma Siddhi. He also wrote many letters and commentaries and translated some religious texts. He is best known for his teachings on Jainism and his spiritual guidance to Mahatma Gandhi.
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Felix Adler
1851 - 1933 (82 years)
Felix Adler was a German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, influential lecturer on euthanasia, religious leader and social reformer who founded the Ethical Culture movement.
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Gopala Dasa
1722 - 1762 (40 years)
Gopala Dasa was a prominent 18th-century Kannada language poet and saint belonging to the Haridasa tradition. With other contemporary Haridasas such as Vijaya Dasa and Jagannatha Dasa, Gopala Dasa propagated the Dvaita philosophy of Madhvacharya in South India through Kirtans known as Dasara Padagalu with the pen-name "Gopala Vittala".He is Ganesa Amsha.
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John Cowper Powys
1872 - 1963 (91 years)
John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance , Weymouth Sands , and Maiden Castle have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography.
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Ioannis Theodorakopoulos
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Ioannis Theodorakopoulos was a Greek philosopher. In 1920 Theodorakopoulos moved to Vienna to study Classical Philology and Philosophy. Subsequently, he continued his studies of philosophy in Heidelberg and received in 1925 his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg.
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Basava
1134 - 1196 (62 years)
Basava , also called Basaveshwara and Basavanna, was an Indian philosopher, poet, Lingayat social reformer in the Shiva-focused bhakti movement, and a Hindu Shaivite social reformer during the reign of the Kalyani Chalukya/Kalachuri dynasty. Basava was active during the rule of both dynasties but reached the peak of his influence during the rule of King Bijjala II in Karnataka, India.
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Marinus of Neapolis
440 - Present (1586 years)
Marinus was a Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician and rhetorician born in Flavia Neapolis , Palestine. He was a student of Proclus in Athens. His surviving works are an introduction to Euclid's Data; a Life of Proclus, and two astronomical texts. Most of what we know of his life comes from an epitome of a work by Damascius conserved in the Byzantine Suda encyclopaedia.
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Pontus Wikner
1837 - 1888 (51 years)
Carl Pontus Wikner was a famed Swedish lecturer in philosophy and professor of aesthetics in Oslo from 1884. Wikner's contribution to homosexual history consists foremostly of producing the first description of the problematics about homosexual identity and the coming-out process. He deposited for future research at the medical faculty in Uppsala his Psychological Self-Confessions from 1879 and diaries from 1853 to 1871. According to his own wishes, they were not published before his wife and sons - the nearest members of the family - had died.
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José Rizal
1861 - 1896 (35 years)
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is considered a national hero of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.
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John Grier Hibben
1861 - 1933 (72 years)
John Grier Hibben was a Presbyterian minister, a philosopher, and educator. He served as president of Princeton University from 1912–1932, succeeding Woodrow Wilson and implementing many of the reforms started by Wilson. His term as President began after the term of Acting Princeton President Stewart, who served for two years after Wilson's departure.
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Yoshishige Abe
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Yoshishige Abe was a philosopher, educator, and statesman in Shōwa period Japan. As Minister of Education in the immediate post-war era, he oversaw major reforms to the Japanese educational system. Biography Abe was born in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture as the son of a doctor of Chinese medicine. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, and was a close associate of Natsume Sōseki, Seiichi Hatano, Kyoshi Takahama and Shigeo Iwanami, although he was forced to return home to teach English in Matsuyama due to reduced family circumstances. He later married the sister of Misao Fujimura. While stil...
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Konstantin Melnikov
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov was a Russian architect and painter. His architectural work, compressed into a single decade , placed Melnikov on the front end of 1920s avant-garde architecture. Although associated with the Constructivists, Melnikov was an independent artist, not bound by the rules of a particular style or artistic group. In 1930s, Melnikov refused to conform with the rising Stalinist architecture, withdrew from practice and worked as a portraitist and teacher until the end of his life.
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Osamu Tezuka
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Osamu Tezuka was a Japanese manga artist, cartoonist and animator. Born in Osaka Prefecture, his prolific output, pioneering techniques and innovative redefinitions of genres earned him such titles as , and . Additionally, he is often considered the Japanese equivalent to Walt Disney, who served as a major inspiration during Tezuka's formative years. Though this phrase praises the quality of his early manga works for children and animations, it also blurs the significant influence of his later, more literary, gekiga works.
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Richard Aaron
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Richard Ithamar Aaron, , was a Welsh philosopher who became an authority on the work of John Locke. He also wrote a history of philosophy in the Welsh language. Early life and education Born in Blaendulais, Glamorgan, Aaron was the son of a Welsh Baptist draper, William Aaron, and his wife, Margaret Griffith. He was educated at Ystalyfera Grammar School, then at the University of Wales from 1918, where he studied history and philosophy. In 1923 he was elected a Fellow of the university, allowing him to attend Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained a DPhil in 1928 for a dissertation on "The Hi...
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Poul Martin Møller
1794 - 1838 (44 years)
Poul Martin Møller was a Danish academic, writer, and poet. During his lifetime, he gained renown in Denmark for his poetry. After his death, his posthumously published fiction and philosophical writings were well received. He also devoted several decades of study to classical languages and literature. While serving as a professor at the University of Copenhagen, he was a mentor to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
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Alexander Meiklejohn
1872 - 1964 (92 years)
Alexander Meiklejohn was a philosopher, university administrator, educational reformer, and free-speech advocate, best known as president of Amherst College. Background Alexander Meiklejohn was born on February 3, 1872, in Newbold Street, Rochdale, Lancashire, England. He was of Scottish descent, and the youngest of eight sons. When he was eight, the family moved to the United States, settling in Rhode Island. Family members pooled their money to send him to school. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Brown University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and completed his doctorate in philosophy at Cornell in 1897.
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D. H. Th. Vollenhoven
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Vollenhoven was a Dutch philosopher. Life history and early work Vollenhoven was born in Amsterdam, son of Dirk Hendrik Vollenhoven and Catharina Pruijs. His father was a custom house officer of telegraphy in Amsterdam. In 1911, Vollenhoven registered in two faculties at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy and obtained his PhD in philosophy in 1918. He was a pastor of the Reformed Churches, first in Oostkapelle, 1918-1921, then in The Hague, 1921-1926. He was appointed professor of philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit in 1926, and retired in 1963.
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Sylvain Maréchal
1750 - 1803 (53 years)
Sylvain Maréchal was a French essayist, poet, philosopher and political theorist, whose views presaged utopian socialism and communism. His views on a future golden age are occasionally described as utopian anarchism. He was editor of the newspaper .
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Immanuel Velikovsky
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-American psychoanalyst, writer, and catastrophist. He is the author of several books offering pseudohistorical interpretations of ancient history, including the U.S. bestseller Worlds in Collision published in 1950. Velikovsky's work is frequently cited as a canonical example of pseudoscience and has been used as an example of the demarcation problem.
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Knud Ejler Løgstrup
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Knud Ejler Løgstrup was a Danish philosopher and theologian. His work, which combines elements of phenomenology, ethics and theology, has exerted considerable influence in postwar Nordic thought. More recently, his work has been discussed by prominent figures in anglophone philosophy and sociology such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Stern, Simon Critchley and Zygmunt Bauman.
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Sosigenes the Peripatetic
Sosigenes the Peripatetic was a philosopher living at the end of the 2nd century AD. He was the tutor of Alexander of Aphrodisias and wrote a work On Revolving Spheres, from which some important extracts have been preserved in Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo.
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Michel de Certeau
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
Michel de Certeau was a French Jesuit priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was known as a philosopher of everyday life and widely regarded as a historian who had interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to contemporary urban life.
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Luigi Galvani
1737 - 1798 (61 years)
Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician, physicist, biologist and philosopher, who studied animal electricity. In 1780, he discovered that the muscles of dead frogs' legs twitched when struck by an electrical spark. This was an early study of bioelectricity, following experiments by John Walsh and Hugh Williamson.
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Dio Chrysostom
40 - 120 (80 years)
Dio Chrysostom , Dio of Prusa or Cocceianus Dio , was a Greek orator, writer, philosopher and historian of the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD. Eighty of his Discourses are extant, as well as a few letters, a mock essay Encomium on Hair, and a few other fragments. His sobriquet Chrysostom comes from the Greek , which literally means "golden-mouthed".
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Vyasatirtha
1447 - 1548 (101 years)
Vyāsatīrtha , also called Vyasaraja or Chandrikacharya, was a Hindu philosopher, scholar, polemicist, commentator and poet belonging to the Madhwacharya's Dvaita order of Vedanta. As the patron saint of the Vijayanagara Empire, Vyasatirtha was at the forefront of a golden age in Dvaita which saw new developments in dialectical thought, growth of the Haridasa literature under bards like Purandara Dasa and Kanaka Dasa and an amplified spread of Dvaita across the subcontinent. Three of his polemically themed doxographical works Nyayamruta, Tatparya Chandrika and Tarka Tandava documented and crit...
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Otto Heinrich Warburg
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Otto Heinrich Warburg , son of physicist Emil Warburg, was a German physiologist, medical doctor, and Nobel laureate. He served as an officer in the elite Uhlan during the First World War, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery. He was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931. In total, he was nominated for the award 47 times over the course of his career.
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Uisang
625 - 702 (77 years)
Uisang was one of the most eminent early Silla Korean scholar-monks, a close friend of Wonhyo . He traveled to China, studying at Mount Zhongnan as a student of the influential Huayan master Zhiyan and as a senior colleague of Fazang , with whom he established a lifelong correspondence. He became an expert in Huayan doctrine and was the founder of the Korean Hwaeom school. Most well known among his writings is the Beopseongge or Hwaeom ilseung beopgye do . This is a commentary on his mandala-like diagram haein do , which consists of 210 Chinese characters that express the essence of the Huayan doctrine.
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John Alexander Smith
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
John Alexander Smith was a British idealist philosopher, who was the Jowett Lecturer of philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford from 1896 to 1910, and Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, carrying a Fellowship at Magdalen College in the same university, from 1910 to 1936. He was born in Dingwall and died in Oxford.
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Alexander Potebnja
1835 - 1891 (56 years)
Alexander Potebnja was a linguist, philosopher and panslavist of Ukrainian Cossack descent, who was a professor of linguistics at the Imperial University of Kharkiv. He is well known as a specialist in the evolution of Russian phonetics.
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Donald Cary Williams
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Donald Cary Williams , usually cited as D. C. Williams, was an American philosopher and a professor at both the University of California Los Angeles and at Harvard University . Life Williams was born in Crows Landing, California in 1899. As a teenager he was greatly interested in classics, English literature, poetry, and science fiction. He was a lifelong fan of the works of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and H.G. Wells. He studied English at Occidental College, California, and then English and Philosophy at Harvard University where he received an AM in Philosophy in 1925. He continued to study Philosophy and Psychology at UC-Berkeley.
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Giorgio de Santillana
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Giorgio Diaz de Santillana was an Italian-American philosopher and historian of science, born in Rome. He was Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Biography A son of the Tunisian-Italian jurist David Santillana and expert on Islamic Law, Giorgio de Santillana was born in Rome and got most of his education there. Santillana moved to the United States in 1936 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1941, he began his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming an assistant professor the following year. From 1943 to 1945 he served in the United States Army as a war correspondent.
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George Croom Robertson
1842 - 1892 (50 years)
George Croom Robertson was a Scottish philosopher. He sat on the Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and his wife, Caroline Anna Croom Robertson was a college administrator. Biography He was born in Aberdeen. In 1857 he gained a bursary at Marischal College, and graduated MA in 1861, with the highest honours in classics and philosophy. In the same year he won a Fergusson scholarship of £100 a year for two years, which enabled him to pursue his studies outside Scotland. He went first to University College, London; at the University of Heidelberg he worked on his German; at ...
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Jules Lequier
1814 - 1862 (48 years)
Jules Lequier was a French philosopher from Brittany. Lequier died, presumably by suicide, by swimming out into the ocean. Philosophical work Lequier wrote in favour of dynamic divine omniscience, wherein God's knowledge of the future is one of possibilities rather than actualities. Omniscience, under this view, is the knowledge of necessary facts as necessary, and contingent facts as contingent. Since the future does not yet exist as anything more than a realm of abstract possibilities, it is no impugning of divine omniscience to claim that God does not know the future as a fixed and unalterable state of affairs: that he does not know what is not there to be known.
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Andrew Ure
1778 - 1857 (79 years)
Andrew Ure FRS was a Scottish physician, chemist, scriptural geologist, and early business theorist who founded the Garnet Hill Observatory. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society. Ure published a number of books based on his industrial consulting experiences.
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Constance Jones
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones known as Constance Jones or E.E. Constance Jones, was an English philosopher and educator. She worked in logic and ethics. Life and career Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was born at Langstone Court, Llangarron, Herefordshire, to John Jones and his wife, Emily, daughter of Thomas Oakley JP, of Monmouthshire. She was the eldest of ten children. Constance was mostly tutored at home. She spent her early teenage years with her family in Cape Town, South Africa, and when they returned to England in 1865 she attended a small school, Miss Robinson's, in Cheltenham, fo...
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Luís António Verney
1713 - 1792 (79 years)
Luís António Verney was a Portuguese philosopher, theologian, and pedagogue. An estrangeirado, Verney is sometimes called the most important figure of the Portuguese Enlightenment. Most notably, Verney advocated a plan to completely reform the educational system in Portugal, in radical opposition to the methods employed at the time by the Jesuits, who had long had a near-monopoly on teaching in the country; his controversial manifesto, Verdadeiro Método de Estudar , would later serve as the basis for many of the educational reforms instituted under the Marquis of Pombal.
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André Lalande
1867 - 1963 (96 years)
André Lalande was a French philosopher. In 1904, he was appointed Professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. Whilst still at school in 1883-4 he was taught by Émile Durkheim, whom he greatly appreciated. His notes have provided the basis for the publication Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883–1884 in 2004.
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