Ayn Rand

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian economist, philosopher, and classical liberal who was a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought. Fearing a Nazi take-over of Europe, Mises emigrated to New York in 1940. He published his magnum opus Human Action in 1949. Mises had... a significant influence on the Libertarian movement that developed in the United States in the mid-20th century. Ludwig von Mises was born to wealthy Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, in Galicia, Austria-Hungary . The family of his father Arthur Edler von Mises had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century, and was involved in building and financing railroads. Ludwig's mother, Adele , was a niece of Dr. Joachim Landau, a Liberal Party deputy to the Austrian Parliament. Arthur was stationed there as a construction engineer with Czernowitz railway company. At the age of twelve Ludwig spoke fluent Yiddish, German, Polish, and French, read Latin, and could understand Ukrainian.
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Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name. Her educational method is in use today in public as well as private schools throughout the world. Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in... Chiaravalle, Italy, to Alessandro Montessori and Renilde Stoppani . At the age of thirteen she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dream of becoming an engineer. At the time, she insisted specifically that she did not want to be a teacher because the teaching profession was one of the few that women were encouraged to take part in at the time. Montessori was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome La Sapienza Medical School, becoming one of the first female doctors in Italy. She was a member of the University's Psychiatric Clinic and became intrigued with trying to educate the "special needs" or "unhappy little ones" and the "uneducable" in Rome. In 1896, she gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Turin about the training of the disabled.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains... substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, amor fati, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky ; November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881 was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. His name has been variously transcribed in English, his first name... sometimes being rendered as Theodore. This is because, before the post-revolutionary orthographic reform which, amongst other things, replaced the Cyrillic letter Ѳ with the Cyrillic letter Ф , Dostoyevsky's name was written Ѳеодоръ Михайловичъ Достоевскій. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. With the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground , which has been called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann. He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.
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