Thinkers Timeline

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. He was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, a city in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). His family was Lutheran and not wealthy. His father was a saddle-maker. His mother, who died when he was 13, was a strong early influence and encouraged his studies. He studied at the University of Königsberg from the age of 16. He worked for several years as a private tutor for noble families before returning to the university as a lecturer in 1755. He became a full professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. He stayed in Königsberg his whole life. He is said never to have travelled more than about 150 kilometres from his birthplace. His daily routine was famously strict: neighbours were said to set their watches by his afternoon walks. For most of his career he was a respected but not famous teacher. Then, starting in his late fifties, he wrote a series of huge books that changed philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgement (1790) set out a new system. He wrote important shorter works on ethics, religion, politics, and history. He continued writing until his death on 12 February 1804, aged 79. His work is hugely influential, but parts of it are also troubling. He wrote racist statements about non-European peoples. These texts sat alongside his claims about universal human dignity. Modern scholarship has taken this tension seriously, and honest study of Kant now includes this difficulty.

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) was a Russian chemist who devised the periodic table of the elements, one of the most important organising schemes in the history of science. He was born in Tobolsk, Siberia, the youngest of what may have been as many as seventeen children. His father, a teacher of philosophy and literature, went blind and then died when Dmitri was still young; his mother kept the family going by running a glass factory. When the factory burned down, she travelled more than two thousand kilometres by horse and cart to take her gifted youngest son to St Petersburg, where she eventually placed him in what became his university. He completed his studies there and went on to postgraduate research in Heidelberg and Paris before returning to teach in St Petersburg. In 1869, while preparing a chemistry textbook, he arranged the known chemical elements in order of atomic weight and noticed that their properties repeated at regular intervals. He published his first periodic table that year. The table left gaps for elements he predicted would be discovered, with detailed forecasts of their properties; when gallium, scandium, and germanium were found in the following decades and matched his predictions, the table's power became undeniable. Mendeleev was also a practical scientist who worked on Russian oil production, agriculture, metrology, and economics. He never received the Nobel Prize, despite being nominated. He died in St Petersburg in 1907.

Volodymyr Ivanovych Vernadsky (in Russian: Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky) was a mineralogist, geochemist, and philosopher of science. He helped found three modern scientific disciplines: geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was born in 1863 in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. His father, Ivan Vernadsky, came from a Ukrainian Cossack family and had been a professor of political economy in Kyiv before moving to Saint Petersburg. His mother was a Russian noblewoman. Vernadsky himself spent much of his childhood in Ukraine and considered himself Ukrainian by descent. He studied natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, then did postgraduate work in mineralogy and crystallography in Italy and France, including study under leading European chemists. He returned to Russia and built one of the first geochemistry research programmes in the world. He read widely across science and philosophy and corresponded with major scientists across Europe, including Marie Curie. His political life was complicated. He was a liberal in tsarist Russia, a member of the constitutional democratic party, and briefly served in a 1917 provisional government. After the Bolshevik revolution, he chose to stay in Soviet science. In 1918 he played a leading role in founding the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv and became its first president. He published his most important work, The Biosphere, in 1926. He continued to lead Soviet scientific institutions until his death in Moscow in 1945, aged 81. His ideas about the biosphere and the noosphere have shaped modern environmental science.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist usually credited as one of the pioneers of abstract painting in the European tradition. He was born in Moscow to a prosperous tea-trading family and spent his early childhood in the southern Russian port of Odessa. He studied law and economics at Moscow University and was preparing for an academic career when, at thirty, he decided to abandon it and become a painter. He moved to Munich in 1896 and trained at the city's art academy. Over the following decade he developed from a competent painter of folk-inflected landscapes into a theorist and practitioner of a new kind of painting that dispensed with recognisable subjects. In 1910 he painted what is often regarded as one of the earliest purely abstract works, a watercolour that broke decisively with representation. He co-founded the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, published his major theoretical work Concerning the Spiritual in Art that same year, and played a central role in the artistic ferment of the years before the First World War. He returned to Russia during the war, worked in the cultural institutions of the early Soviet period, and came back to Germany in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944. He was married twice and had a long partnership with the painter Gabriele Münter during his Munich years.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and political theorist. He led the October Revolution of 1917 and founded the Soviet Union, the world's first communist state. His real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. He took the name Lenin around 1901. He was born on 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk, a town on the Volga river. His family was educated and middle class. His father was a school inspector who had risen into the Russian nobility. Two family events shaped him. In 1886 his father died. The next year, his older brother Alexander was hanged for taking part in a plot to kill Tsar Alexander III. Lenin was seventeen. He kept his brother's revolutionary commitment but rejected terrorism as a method. He turned to Marxism, a theory developed by Karl Marx, who argued that workers would eventually overthrow capitalism. Lenin trained as a lawyer but spent most of his life as a full-time revolutionary. He was arrested in 1895 and exiled to Siberia. In 1900 he moved to Western Europe, where he lived for most of the next seventeen years. He edited newspapers and wrote major books. In 1902 he published What Is to Be Done?, arguing for a small, disciplined revolutionary party. In April 1917, after the Tsar fell, he returned to Russia. His Bolshevik party seized power in the October Revolution. He led the new Soviet state through civil war, famine, and foreign intervention. A series of strokes from 1922 left him unable to work. He died on 21 January 1924, aged 53. His body is still on display in Red Square in Moscow.

Lesya Ukrainka was a Ukrainian poet, dramatist, essayist, and political activist. She is widely regarded as the greatest Ukrainian woman writer and one of the foremost Ukrainian writers of any gender. Her real name was Larysa Petrivna Kosach. She was born in 1871 in Novohrad-Volynskyi, in what is now western Ukraine. The pen name 'Lesya Ukrainka' (Lesya the Ukrainian) was given to her by her mother and made a clear political statement: at a time when Russian imperial law banned publication in Ukrainian, naming yourself after your forbidden country was an act of resistance. Her family were intellectuals and Ukrainian patriots. Her mother, Olha Drahomanova-Kosach, was a writer who published as Olena Pchilka. Her father was a lawyer and landowner who funded Ukrainian-language publications out of his own pocket. Lesya and her siblings were educated at home in Ukrainian, which was forbidden in schools. She was an extraordinary student, eventually fluent in over a dozen languages including Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, French, English, Italian, Latin, and Greek. At the age of twelve she contracted tuberculosis, which attacked her bones and later her lungs and kidneys. She suffered constant pain for the rest of her life. The disease made her dream of being a concert pianist impossible. It also took her abroad constantly: to Germany, Italy, Egypt, Crimea, Georgia, and the Caucasus, in long searches for cures that did not work. She wrote constantly through pain. She died in Surami, Georgia, in 1913, aged 42. Her body was returned to Kyiv. Russian police banned speeches at her funeral. Six women carried her coffin in protest.

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Russian psychologist whose ideas about how children learn and develop have become central to education and developmental psychology worldwide. He was born in Orsha, in present-day Belarus, into a Jewish family. His father was a bank manager; his mother trained as a teacher. He grew up in the city of Gomel, where his early schooling was done partly at home because Jewish students faced restrictions in the Russian school system of that period. Despite these restrictions, he won a place at Moscow State University in 1913 through a lottery system that was one of the few routes open to Jewish applicants. He studied law at Moscow State while also taking courses in history, philosophy, and literature at the more liberal Shaniavsky People's University. He graduated in 1917, just as the Russian Revolution was beginning. For several years he taught literature and psychology in his home city of Gomel, where he also started research on the psychological foundations of learning. In 1924, at age twenty-eight, he gave a lecture at a psychology conference in Leningrad that attracted national attention. He was invited to Moscow and began his brief but extraordinary scientific career. Over the following decade he wrote an enormous amount — books, research papers, and reports — while leading research teams, treating patients, teaching, and helping to build Soviet psychology and special education. His most important book, Thought and Language, was published in the year of his death. He had suffered from tuberculosis since his twenties. His condition worsened in the early 1930s, and he died in Moscow in June 1934 at the age of thirty-seven. His work was banned in the Soviet Union in 1936 — partly because of his use of Western sources, partly because Stalin's regime preferred more mechanical theories of human development. His writings were rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s, first in the Soviet Union and then, through the efforts of his students and of Western scholars, internationally. By the 1980s his ideas had become central to education worldwide.

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a Russian-American economist, novelist and philosopher. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, Russia, and lived through the Russian Revolution and the early years of Soviet communism before emigrating to the United States in 1926. She developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, which she expressed through both novels and non-fiction writing. Her two most famous novels — The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) — sold millions of copies and made her one of the most widely read thinkers of the 20th century, despite being largely ignored or dismissed by academic philosophers. Her ideas remain deeply influential in American politics and business culture, particularly on the political right.