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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
11 figures
Hildegard of Bingen
1098 – 1179Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 – 1716Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.
Immanuel Kant
1724 – 1804The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 – 1832A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 – 1859Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.
G. W. F. Hegel
1770 – 1831Dialectic and the history of spirit; the pivot from which Marx and existentialism both turn.
Karl Marx
1818 – 1883Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.
Friedrich Engels
1820 – 1895The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 – 1900Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.
Max Weber
1864 – 1920Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.
Hannah Arendt
1906 – 1975The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the reference work on how republics fail.