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,
#19051
Johannes Schefferus
1621 - 1679 (58 years)
Johannes Schefferus was one of the most important Swedish humanists of his time. He was also known as Angelus and is remembered for writing hymns. Schefferus was born in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He came from the patrician family , studied at university there and briefly in Leiden, and was in 1648 made professor Skytteanus of eloquence and government at Uppsala University, a chair he held until his death in 1679.
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Henry Littlejohn
1826 - 1914 (88 years)
Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn MD LLD FRCSE was a Scottish surgeon, forensic scientist and public health official. He served for 46 years as Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health, during which time he brought about significant improvements in the living conditions and the health of the city's inhabitants. He also served as a police surgeon and medical adviser in Scottish criminal cases.
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Edward Heneage Dering
1827 - 1892 (65 years)
Edward Heneage Dering was an English novelist of the Victorian era. He is largely remembered today as a member of "The Quartet" at Baddesley Clinton, with marriages to two artistic women. Biography He was the younger son of Cholmeley Edward John Dering, rector of Pluckley, Kent, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. He joined the 68th Foot as an ensign in 1844, and in 1848 was a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. Having caught malaria in Italy, he sold out his commission and left the army in 1851.
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Dionysius of Chalcedon
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Dionysius of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected with the Megarian school. He was a native of Chalcedon on the coast of Bithynia. Dionysius was the person who first used the name Dialecticians to describe a splinter group within the Megarian school "because they put their arguments into the form of question and answer". One area of activity for the dialecticians was the framing of definitions, and Aristotle criticises a definition of life by Dionysius in his Topics: Dionysius is also reported to have taught Theodorus the Atheist.
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Susan McKinney Steward
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Susan Maria McKinney Steward was an American physician and author. She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state. McKinney-Steward's medical career focused on prenatal care and childhood disease. From 1870 to 1895, she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women's Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. From 1906, she worked as college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1911, she...
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Joseph von Führich
1800 - 1876 (76 years)
Joseph von Führich was an Austrian painter, one of the Nazarenes. He painted religious pictures almost exclusively. Führich acquired his greatest fame as a draughtsman. Biography He was born at Kratzau in Bohemia. Deeply impressed as a boy by rustic pictures adorning the wayside chapels of his native country, his first attempt at composition was a sketch of the Nativity for the festival of Christmas in his father's house. He lived to see the day when, becoming celebrated as a composer of scriptural episodes, his sacred subjects were transferred in numberless repetitions to the roadside chu...
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Antonio del Pollaiuolo
1429 - 1498 (69 years)
Antonio del Pollaiuolo , also known as Antonio di Jacopo Pollaiuolo or Antonio Pollaiuolo , was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, engraver, and goldsmith, who made important works in all these media, as well as designing works in others, for example vestments, metal embroidery being a medium he worked in at the start of his career.
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Alexander Macalister
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
Prof Alexander Macalister FRS Hon.FRSE FSA FRAI was an Irish anatomist, Professor of Anatomy, Cambridge University, from 1883 until his death. He was a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Life He was born in Dublin, the second son of Robert Macalister, secretary of the Sunday School Society of Ireland, and his wife . Alexander was educated locally then studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin.
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John Dawson
1734 - 1820 (86 years)
John Dawson was both an English mathematician and physician. He was born at Raygill in Garsdale, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where "Dawson's Rock" celebrates the site of his early thinking about conic sections. After learning surgery from Henry Bracken of Lancaster, he worked as a surgeon in Sedbergh for a year, then went to study medicine at Edinburgh, walking 150 miles there with his savings stitched into his coat. Despite a very frugal lifestyle, he was unable to complete his degree, and had to return to Garsdale until he earned enough as a surgeon and as a private tutor in Mat...
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Pavle Stefanović
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Pavle Stefanović was a Serbian philosopher, esthetician, essayist, music writer, critic and writer. He was the son of physician writer and poet Svetislav Stefanović who translated Shakespeare, and other English writers.
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Johann Heynlin
1430 - 1496 (66 years)
Johann Heynlin, variously spelled Heynlein, Henelyn, Henlin, Hélin, Hemlin, Hegelin, Steinlin; and translated as Jean à Lapide, Jean La Pierre , Johannes Lapideus, Johannes Lapidanus, Johannes de Lapide was a German-born scholar, humanist and theologian, who introduced the first printing press in France in 1470.
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Agapius of Athens
500 - 600 (100 years)
Agapius was a Neoplatonist philosopher who lived in Athens. He was a notable philosopher in the Neoplatonist school in Athens when Marinus of Neapolis was scholarch after the death of Proclus . He was admired for his love of learning and for putting forward difficult problems.
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Stanisław Żółkiewski
1547 - 1620 (73 years)
Stanisław Żółkiewski was a Polish nobleman of the Lubicz coat of arms, magnate, military commander and a chancellor of the Polish crown of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, who took part in many campaigns of the Commonwealth and on its southern and eastern borders. He occupied a number of high-ranking posts in the administration of the Commonwealth, including castellan of Lwów , voivod of the Kiev Voivodeship and Great Chancellor of the Crown . From 1588 he was also a Field Crown Hetman, and in 1618 was promoted to Grand Hetman of the Crown. During his military career he won major battles a...
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Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti
1220 - 1280 (60 years)
Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti was a Florentine Epicurean philosopher and father of Guido Cavalcanti, a close friend of Dante Alighieri. Cavalcanti was a wealthy member of the Guelph faction of Florentine aristocrats. He was a merchant banker who, with others, lent money under usurious conditions during the crusades with the consent and support of the papacy. In 1257 Cavalcanti served as Podestà of the Umbrian city of Gubbio. Following the 1260 victory of the Ghibellines over the Florentine Guelphs in the Battle of Montaperti, Cavalcanti went into exile in Lucca in Tuscany. He returned from ex...
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William Penn
1644 - 1718 (74 years)
William Penn was an English writer, religious thinker, and influential Quaker who founded the Province of Pennsylvania during the British colonial era. Penn was an advocate of democracy and religious freedom known for his amicable relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans who had resided in present-day Pennsylvania prior to European settlements in the state.
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Mirosław Dzielski
1941 - 1989 (48 years)
Mirosław Dzielski was a Polish philosopher, writer and politician, founder of the Kraków Industrial Society in 1985. Dzielski was one of the leaders of the democratic anti-communist opposition in the 1980s in Poland. He was married to classics scholar Maria Dzielska. Father to Witold Dzielski.
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Joseph Anthony Murphy
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Joseph Anthony Murphy was born in Ireland but raised in Chicago. He became a Jesuit priest and served, inter alia, as dean of the liberal arts college at Marquette University for eleven years and as Vicar Apostolic for the Catholic mission in British Honduras , Central America, being ordained bishop on March 19, 1924.
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Qian Dehong
1496 - 1574 (78 years)
Qian Dehong was a notable Chinese philosopher, writer, and educator during the mid-late Ming Dynasty. Biography Qian was born in Yuyao, Shaoxing Fu , Zhejiang Province. His original name was Kuan , and courtesy name was Hongfu . Because his recent ancestry also had the same name, to avoid the taboo, his name was changed from Kuan to Dehong.
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Cæsar Peter Møller Boeck
1845 - 1917 (72 years)
Cæsar Peter Møller Boeck was a Norwegian dermatologist born in Lier, Norway. He was a nephew to dermatologist Carl Wilhelm Boeck and zoologist Christian Peder Bianco Boeck . In 1871 he graduated from the Christiania Medical School, and did post-graduate work in Vienna under Ferdinand von Hebra . In 1889 he was appointed chief of dermatology at the Rikshospitalet in Kristiania, later becoming an associate professor .
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Claude Pithoys
1587 - 1676 (89 years)
Claude Pithoys was a French professor of philosophy and law at the Academy of Sedan, Protestant convert and librarian for the Duc de Bouillon. He was raised a Franciscan but in 1632 "he renounced his vows, abjured his faith and became a Protestant, throwing himself under the protection of the Duc de Bouillon who secured for him a post in the protestant Academy of Sedan"; he maintained this post until 1675.
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Jørn Olsen
#19072
Willi Apel
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Willi Apel was a German-American musicologist and noted author of a number of books devoted to music. Among his most important publications are the 1944 edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music and French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century.
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Satyavijaya Tirtha
Shri Satyavijaya Tirtha was an Indian Hindu philosopher, guru, and scholar. He was the successor of Satyapurna Tirtha and the 23rd pontiff of Uttaradi Math since Madhvacharya, the chief proponent and the one who rejuvenated this Dvaita philosophy and served the pontificate from 1726–1737.
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David Ferdinand Koreff
1783 - 1851 (68 years)
David Ferdinand Koreff was a German physician who was a personal doctor of Staatskanzler Karl August von Hardenberg and occupied one of the two chairs for animal magnetism created in 1817 at the University of Berlin. A personal friend of E.T.A. Hoffmann and a member of his literary club The Serapion Brethren , Koreff authored a treatise “Über die Erscheinungen des Lebens und über die Gesetze, nach denen es im menschlichen Organismus sich offenbart” and a volume of lyric poetry "Lyrische Gedichte" .
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John Peter Mettauer
1787 - 1875 (88 years)
John Peter Mettauer was an American surgeon and gynecologist. He was the son of surgeon Francis Joseph Mettauer. Biography John Peter Mettauer was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia in 1787. He was a pupil at Hampden-Sydney College, followed by studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his medical doctorate in 1809. In 1837 he founded a private medical school located between Prince Edward Court House and Kingsville, Virginia. In 1847 he allied his school with Randolph-Macon College, becoming the first medical department at Randolph-Macon.
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Joachim Vadian
1484 - 1551 (67 years)
Joachim Vadian , born as Joachim von Watt, was a humanist, scholar, mayor and reformer in the free city of St. Gallen. Biography Vadian was born in St. Gallen into a family of wealthy and influential linen merchants. After having gone to school in St. Gallen, he moved to Vienna at the end of 1501, where he took up studies at faculty of arts the university, in particular under Conrad Celtis and Matthias Qualle.
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Stanisław Lentz
1861 - 1920 (59 years)
Stanisław Lentz was a Polish painter, portraitist, illustrator, and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1909. Biography Stanisław Lentz was born in Warsaw, Poland, and studied at the Krakow School of Fine Arts with Feliks Szynalewski and Izydor Jabłoński 1877–1879, then continued his studies in Wojciech Gerson's drawing class in Warsaw. In 1880–1884 he studied abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Alexander von Wagner and Gyula Benczúr, and in 1884–1887 at the Académie Julian in Paris.
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James Keill
1673 - 1719 (46 years)
James Keill was a Scottish physician, philosopher, medical writer and translator. He was an early proponent of mathematical methods in physiology. Life Born in Edinburgh on 27 March 1673 the son of Sarah Cockburn and Robert Keill, an Edinburgh lawyer. He was the younger brother of John Keill, and the nephew of William Cockburn. He was educated partly at home, studying under Andrew Massey and David Gregory at the University of Edinburgh, and partly on the continent, studying under Nicolas Lemery and Jean Guichard Duverney in Paris, followed by a period at Leyden University.
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Georg Grimm
1846 - 1887 (41 years)
Johann Georg Grimm was a German painter, designer and decorator who is best known for the work he produced during a lengthy stay in the Empire of Brazil. Biography He was the son of a successful carpenter and was initially trained to follow his father into the trade. When they were hired to do some work in the library at Rauhenzell Castle, he found himself fascinated by the art books and decided that he wanted to become a painter, so he worked his way across Bavaria, finally arriving in Munich in 1868, where he had accumulated just enough money to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under Karl von Piloty and Franz Adam.
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Bernardino Ramazzini
1633 - 1714 (81 years)
Bernardino Ramazzini was an Italian physician. Ramazzini, along with Francesco Torti, was an early proponent of the use of cinchona bark in the treatment of malaria. His most important contribution to medicine was his book on occupational diseases, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba .
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David Roberts
1796 - 1864 (68 years)
David Roberts was a Scottish painter. He is especially known for The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, a prolific series of detailed lithograph prints of Egypt and the Near East that he produced from sketches he made during long tours of the region . These and his large oil paintings of similar subjects made him a prominent Orientalist painter. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 1841.
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Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet
1815 - 1898 (83 years)
Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet, GCB, QHP, FRCP, FRS was a significant English physician primarily known for having discovered the distinction between typhus and typhoid. Biography Jenner was born at Chatham on 30 January 1815, and educated at University College London. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1837, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1852, and in 1844 took the London M.D.
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Scipione Chiaramonti
1565 - 1652 (87 years)
Scipione Chiaramonti was an Italian philosopher and noted opponent of Galileo. Early life The Chiaramonti family was noble and wealthy, claiming to have originated in Clermont and moved to Italy in the fourteenth century. Pope Pius VII was from the same family. The son of a doctor, Scipione studied at the University of Ferrara, lodging first at the house of Cardinal Alessandro d’Este and later associating with the circle of Cardinal Curzio Sangiorgi. In 1588 he married Virginia Abbati, with whom he was to father twelve children . In 1592 he met Galileo, passing through Cesena on his way to P...
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Henry Clerke
1621 - 1687 (66 years)
Henry Clerke was an English academic and physician, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1672. Life He was son of Thomas Clerke of Willoughby, Warwickshire, England, and matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 20 April 1635, at the age of 16. He obtained a demyship at Magdalen College, and was probationer fellow there from 1642 to 1667. He graduated B.A. on 4 December 1641, and M.A. on 21 June 1644. He was reader in logic at his college in 1643, bursar in 1653, 1656, and 1662, vice-president in 1655, and again in 1663. He seems to have submitted to the parliamentary visitors in May ...
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Juan Latino
1518 - Present (508 years)
Juan Latino was a Spanish professor of Ethiopian descent at the University of Granada during the sixteenth century. He could be considered the first African who studied at a European university and who reached a professorship on Grammar and Latin Language at the University of Granada.
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Buddhisagarsuri
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Buddhisagarsuri was a Jain ascetic, philosopher and author from British India. Born in a Hindu family, he was influenced by a Jain monk and later was initiated in asceticism, and later elevated to the title of Acharya. He wrote more than hundred books.
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Pierre Grégoire
1540 - 1597 (57 years)
Pierre Grégoire was a French jurist and philosopher Career and key ideas Grégoire was born to a poor Catholic family in Toulouse. He studied the law and made a career for himself as an influential and at times controversial Catholic jurist. He taught law at Cahors and Toulouse from 1566 until 1582 when his patron, Charles III of Lorraine, procured a professorship in civil and canon law for him at the university of Pont à Mousson. Here Grégoire found himself colleague to the Scottish jurist William Barclay, best known for his invention of the term ‘monarchomach’ and his political treatise De Regno et Regali Potestate .
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Komitas
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Soghomon Soghomonian, ordained and commonly known as Komitas, was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of the Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.
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Richard Walker
1679 - 1764 (85 years)
Richard Walker was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Cambridge, noted as a supporter of Richard Bentley in his long legal battle with the fellowship of Trinity College. Life He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1706, Cambridge Master of Arts in 1710, Bachelor of Divinity in 1724, and Doctor of Divinity per regias literas in 1728. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity, but in 1708 left Cambridge to serve a curacy at Upwell in Norfolk. In 1717 Richard Bentley, who had a difference with the junior bursar, John Myers, removed him, and recalled Walker to Cambridge to fill his place.
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Thomas Nelson Baker Sr.
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
Reverend Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker, Sr. was a minister, author and philosopher. Born into slavery, Baker was the first African-American to receive a PhD in philosophy in the United States. Biography Baker was born in Eastville, Virginia, on August 11, 1860. His parents were Thomas Chadwick and Edith Nottingham Baker, who were slaves on Robert Nottingham's plantation in Northampton County, Virginia.
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Robert Bentley Todd
1809 - 1860 (51 years)
Robert Bentley Todd was an Irish-born physician who is best known for describing the condition postictal paralysis in his Lumleian Lectures in 1849 now known as Todd's palsy. Early life The son of physician Charles Hawkes Todd and Elizabeth Bentley , Robert was born in Dublin, Ireland, 9 April 1809. He was the younger brother of noted writer and minister Rev. James Henthorn Todd, D.D. He is the older brother of Rev. William Gowan Todd, D.D. and Armstrong Todd, MD.
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Giovanni Garzoni
1419 - 1505 (86 years)
Giovanni Garzoni was an Italian humanist and physician from Bologna, where he was professor of medicine and teacher of rhetoric. Biography Born in Bologna in 1419 as the son of Bernardo Garzoni, a physician and rhetoric. Already in his youth, Garzoni's main interest was rhetorics, when he may have been instructed by his father Bernardo Garzoni and by Giovanni Lamola, and met humanists like Leonardo Bruni. When his father became one of the physicians of pope Nicholas V , Giovanni went along with him to Rome. The earliest extant texts by Barzoni date from this period, including a 300 folio lon...
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William Angus Sinclair
1905 - 1954 (49 years)
William Angus Sinclair OBE TD FRSE DLitt was a 20th-century Scottish philosopher. Life He was born in Edinburgh on 27 September 1905 the son of Elizabeth Campbell and her husband, Captain John Sinclair of the Mercantile Marine. He was educated at George Watson's College then studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an MA. In 1932 he began lecturing in logic at the University.
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John Wilson
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
"John Wilson the Revealer of Peyote" was a Caddo medicine man who introduced the Peyote plant into a religion, became a major leader in the Ghost Dance, and introduced a new peyote ceremony with teachings of Christ. John Wilson's Caddo name was Nishkû'ntu, meaning "Moon Head."
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Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider
1750 - 1822 (72 years)
Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider was a German classicist and naturalist. Biography Schneider was born at Collm in Saxony. In 1774, on the recommendation of Christian Gottlob Heine, he became secretary to the famous Strasbourg scholar Richard François Brunck, and in 1811 became professor of ancient languages and eloquence at Breslau where he died in 1822.
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Jakub Górski
1525 - 1583 (58 years)
Jakub Górski was a Polish Renaissance philosopher. Life Jakub Górski was an early Polish representative of Stoicism. He wrote a famous Dialectic and many works in grammar, rhetoric, theology and sociology. A professor at Kraków University, he was an erudite man whose Dialectic gives evidence of extensive acquaintance with new currents and authors, but he was more erudite than independent as a thinker. He tended to eclecticism and sought to reconcile the Stoics with Aristotle.
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Ludwig Traube
1818 - 1876 (58 years)
Ludwig Traube was a German physician and co-founder of the experimental pathology in Germany. Biography Ludwig Traube was a son of a Jewish wine merchant. In 1835, at age 17, he left the gymnasium in Ratibor. He studied medicine in Breslau, Berlin and Vienna. Among his teachers were Jan Evangelista Purkyně and Johannes Müller . Besides medicine, he was very active in philosophical studies; he especially appreciated the philosophy of Spinoza. In 1840 he received his doctorate , a work about pulmonary emphysema. Then he moved to Vienna to broaden his knowledge
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Michał Twaróg of Bystrzyków
1450 - 1520 (70 years)
Michał Twaróg of Bystrzyków was a Polish philosopher and theologian of the early 16th century. Life Michał Twaróg studied at Paris in 1473–77, during the period when, following the anathematization of the Nominalists , the Scotist school of philosophy enjoyed its greatest triumphs there. He brought Scotism to Poland and taught at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków from 1485, serving as its rector in 1513–14.
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Ebenezer Kinnersley
1711 - 1778 (67 years)
Ebenezer Kinnersley was an English scientist, inventor and lecturer, specializing in the investigation of electricity. Life and Scientific Studies Ebenezer Kinnersley was a son of Rev. William Kinnersley, an assistant pastor of the Lower Dublin Baptist church. Ebenezer became a member of this church while young, and in 1743 was ordained as a minister, but he never served as a pastor. He travelled to America with his parents in 1714. His early life was passed at Dublin, and then he went to Philadelphia, where he gave evidence of his genius as a scholar and mechanician. It is supposed that he ...
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Grzegorz of Stawiszyn
1481 - 1540 (59 years)
Grzegorz of Stawiszyn was a Polish philosopher and theologian. He was Rector of the University of Kraków in 1538–1540. Biography Grzegorz was born in Stawiszyn in 1481. He was an adherent of Nominalism, a metaphysical view in philosophy, revived in western Europe at the turn of the 16th century thanks to French philosopher Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples . Once Nominalism reappeared in Kraków and began taking precedence over Thomism and Scotism, Grzegorz of Stawiszyn, a Kraków professor, published Jacques d'Étaples works including his commentaries to works by Aristotle, beginning in 1510. As rector...
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