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Category
Era
Countries (85)
28 figures
Karl Popper
1902 – 1994Falsifiability became science's demarcation criterion.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 – 1980Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.
Elias Canetti
1905 – 1994Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.
Neville Goddard
1905 – 1972Taught imagination as the sole creative power; 'assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled'.
Viktor Frankl
1905 – 1997Logotherapy: meaning as the primary human drive, tested in the camps.
Léopold Sédar Senghor
1906 – 2001Poet-president who co-founded Négritude.
Kurt Gödel
1906 – 1978Incompleteness theorems set permanent limits on formal systems.
Hannah Arendt
1906 – 1975The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the reference work on how republics fail.
Simone de Beauvoir
1908 – 1986The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.
Simone Weil
1909 – 1943Wrote on attention, affliction and rootedness while working the factory floor.
Arne Næss
1912 – 2009Founded deep ecology and the case for nature's intrinsic worth.
Albert Camus
1913 – 1960The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.
Octavio Paz
1914 – 1998The Labyrinth of Solitude defined Mexican self-understanding.
Nelson Mandela
1918 – 2013Twenty-seven years in prison, then negotiated the end of apartheid without civil war.
Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.
John Rawls
1921 – 2002A Theory of Justice: fairness derived from behind the veil of ignorance.
Paulo Freire
1921 – 1997Pedagogy of the Oppressed rewrote literacy teaching for the global south.
Amílcar Cabral
1924 – 1973Agronomist whose theory of culture and liberation shaped decolonisation.
Frantz Fanon
1925 – 1961Psychiatrist whose Wretched of the Earth remains the core text of decolonisation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
1929 – 1968Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.
Kwasi Wiredu
1931 – 2022Built modern African philosophy on Akan concepts and consensual democracy.
Ali Mazrui
1933 – 2014Defined the 'triple heritage' framework for African identity.
Amartya Sen
b. 1933Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.
Mario Vargas Llosa
1936 – 2025Anatomies of power across the Andes and the Caribbean.
Epeli Hau'ofa
1939 – 2009'Our Sea of Islands' reframed the Pacific as vast, not small.
Martha Nussbaum
b. 1947Capabilities approach to justice, and a defence of emotion in public reason.
David Frawley
b. 1950Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.
Vandana Shiva
b. 1952Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.