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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
11 figures
Leonardo da Vinci
1452 – 1519Proved that art and science are one act of looking.
Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 – 1527The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.
Miguel de Cervantes
1547 – 1616Don Quixote, the first modern novel and the most translated after the Bible.
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.
René Descartes
1596 – 1650Cogito ergo sum and coordinate geometry.
Blaise Pascal
1623 – 1662Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.
John Locke
1632 – 1704Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.
Baruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677Ethics identified God with Nature and grounded secular democratic thought.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 – 1716Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.
Voltaire
1694 – 1778Weaponised satire for tolerance and free expression.