The " Philosophes " were eighteenth century French intellectuals who dominated the French Enlightenment and were influential across Europe.

In this respect he is the forerunner of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, etc., and is the first to formulate that idea of “ education according to nature ” so influential during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century.

Norman Fiering, a specialist in the intellectual history of colonial New England, has described Francis Hutcheson as “ probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century .” Hutcheson's early Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, introducing his perennial association of " unalienable rights " with the collective right to resist oppressive government, was used at Harvard College as a textbook as early as the 1730s.

Jansenist theology remained a minority party within Catholicism, and during the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was condemned as a heresy for its similarities to Calvinism, though its style remained influential in ascetic circles.

Painted in a lighter, less rhetorical style, these late works, prefiguring Rococo, proved influential throughout the eighteenth century, and werer admired by Fragonard.

The Paraphrase was an important and influential document to the evolution of theology of the early medieval Haside Ashkenaz ( not to be confused with the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century ), the Maimonidean controversy and early Kabbalah.

Printed in Amsterdam in 1733, this was one of the most influential musical publications of the early eighteenth century.

He wrote an influential treatise on gunnery, for the first time introducing Newtonian science to military men, was an early enthusiast for rifled gun barrels, and his work had substantive influence on the development of artillery during the latter half of the eighteenth century – and directly stimulated the teaching of calculus in military academies.

Van Mander was famously influential on the art writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Sir Lewis Namier produced an equally influential study of the eighteenth century British House of Commons, and inspired a circle of historians whom Stone lightly termed " Namier Inc ." Stone contrasted this older prosopography with what in 1971 was the newer form of quantitative prosopography, whose concern was with much wider populations including, particularly, " ordinary people ".

In the eighteenth century the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in his hugely influential The Social Contract ( 1762 ), outlined the basis for a political order based on popular sovereignty rather than the rule of monarchs.

One of Rudé ’ s most influential works is The Crowd in History, focusing on eighteenth and nineteenth century dissidents and revolutionaries in France and Great Britain.

Earlier, in the late eighteenth century, when Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the fourth Nawab of Awadh, attempted to grant the kshatriya title of Raja to a group of influential landed Ayodhya Kurmis, he was thwarted by a united opposition of Rajputs, who were themselves ( as described by Buchanan ), " a group of newcomers to the court, who had been peasant soldiers only a few years before ..." According to historian William Pinch: ( The ) Rajputs of Awadh, who along with brahmans constituted the main beneficiaries of what historian Richard Barnett characterizes as " Asaf's permissive program of social mobility ," were not willing to let that mobility reach beyond certain arbitrary socio-cultural boundaries.

While the style goes back to the late eighteenth century, the term " Empire silhouette " arose over a century later in early twentieth-century Britain ; here the word empire refers to the period of the First French Empire ; Napoleon's first Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais was influential in popularizing the style around Europe.

Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot went so far as to say the works are " perhaps the most influential collection of instrumental music to appear during the whole of the eighteenth century ".

Saint Paisius Velichkovsky ( November 15 ) was powerfully influential in bringing the almost-lost hesychastic tradition of Orthodox spirituality to Russia in the eighteenth century, and his labors found in Optina Monastery a ' headquarters ' from which they spread throughout the Russian land.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was commonly believed that Beowulf was not an Anglo-Saxon pagan tale, but a Scandinavian Christian one ; it was not until the influential critical essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics by J. R. R.

Jean Bodin, writing in the sixteenth century, may have been the seminal thinker, but it was the vastly influential John Austin who set out the main lines of the concept as now understood.

Throughout the 18th century in France, a new wealthy and influential middle-class was beginning to rise, even though the royalty and nobility continued to be patrons of the arts.

Aurelius Ambrosius, better known in English as Saint Ambrose ( c. 330 – 4 April 397 ), was an archbishop of Milan who became one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures of the 4th century.

Wallace was a prolific author who wrote on both scientific and social issues ; his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Indonesia and Malaysia, The Malay Archipelago, was one of the most popular and influential journals of scientific exploration published during the 19th century.

He was born into the aristocratic, warrior class that dominated Mytilene, the strongest city-state on the island of Lesbos and, by the end of the seventh century BC, the most influential of all the North Aegean Greek cities, with a strong navy and colonies securing its trade-routes in the Hellespont.

André Weil (; 6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998 ) was an influential French mathematician of the 20th century, renowned for the breadth and quality of his research output, its influence on future work, and the elegance of his exposition.

The early translators included Mashallah, who helped to elect the time for the foundation of Baghdad, and Sahl ibn Bishr, ( a. k. a. Zael ), whose texts were directly influential upon later European astrologers such as Guido Bonatti in the 13th century, and William Lilly in the 17th century.

The influential Leoussi family originated on the isle of Aigina ; their roots go as far back as the 15th century.

His works were so influential that late in the 9th century Notker the Stammerer, a monk of the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, wrote that " God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the world has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth ".

In the 20th century, one of the most influential plays, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's ( 1928 ) The Threepenny Opera was a reworking of The Beggar's Opera, setting a similar story with the same characters, and containing much of the same satirical bite, but only using one tune from the original.

There are indications Joachim Meyer, author of the influential 16th century martial arts text Kunst des Fechten (" The Art of Fencing ") came from Basel.

John Stuart Mill, an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century and a teacher of utilitarianism, albeit his teachings are a bit different from Jeremy Bentham's philosophy

In the 8th century BC, power became decentralized during the Spring and Autumn Period, named after the influential Spring and Autumn Annals.

Although founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891, the college attracted influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century.

* Stefano Colonna, an influential noble in Medieval Rome an Imperial vicar in the early 14th century.

In various revised editions ( 12 in all, through 1872 ), Principles of Geology was the most influential geological work in the middle of the 19th century, and did much to put geology on a modern footing.

On being asked to name the ten most influential guitarists of the 20th century, he named Django Reinhardt to the first position, and also placed himself on the list.

The History sold well and was influential for nearly a century when it was superseded by Goldsmith's history ( which itself was partly plagiarized from Hume's ).

Other influential 2nd century authors include Juvenal and Pliny the Younger, the latter of whom was a friend of Tacitus and in 100 delivered his famous Panygericus Traiani before Trajan and the Roman Senate, exalting the new era of restored freedom while condemning Domitian as a tyrant.

The work De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (" About the wedding of Mercury and Philologia ") written by Martianus Capella ( 4th-5th century ) was very influential on the successive medieval encyclopedias.

Of the influential late-18th century and early-19th century encyclopedias, the Conversations-Lexikon is perhaps most similar in form to today's encyclopedias.

His Elements is one of the most influential works in the history of mathematics, serving as the main textbook for teaching mathematics ( especially geometry ) from the time of its publication until the late 19th or early 20th century.

The picture of Elizabeth painted by her Protestant admirers of the early 17th century has proved lasting and influential.

one influential French critic remarked: `` Pity for Arnolphe comes with age ''.

Anthropology in France has a less clear genealogy than the British and American traditions, in part because many French writers influential in anthropology have been trained or held faculty positions in sociology, philosophy, or other fields rather than in anthropology.

Most commentators consider Marcel Mauss ( 1872 – 1950 ), nephew of the influential sociologist Émile Durkheim, to be the founder of the French anthropological tradition.

They proved influential in the world of French anthropology.

The French Revolution ( 1787 – 99 ) that began during his youth was also influential: Ampère ’ s father was called into public service by the new revolutionary government, becoming a justice of the peace in a small town near Lyon.

Cahiers du Cinéma (, Notebooks on Cinema ) is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.

Some of the most influential contemporary classical double bass players are known as much for their contributions to pedagogy as for their performing skills, such as US bassist Oscar G. Zimmerman ( 1910 – 1987 ), known for his teaching at the Eastman School of Music and, for 44 summers at the Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan and French bassist François Rabbath ( b. 1931 ) who developed a new bass method that divided the entire fingerboard into six positions.

Jacques-Louis David (; ) ( 30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825 ) was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era.

François Roland Truffaut ( 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984 ) was an influential filmmaker and film critic, one of the founders of the French New Wave.

Conversely, French directors have had prolific and influential careers in other countries, such as Luc Besson, Jacques Tourneur, or Francis Veber in the United States.

An important, and possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes.

One of Ganshof's contemporaries, the French historian Marc Bloch, was arguably the most influential 20th century medieval historian.

The editors of the influential 18th century French encyclopedia Encyclopedie were ideologically opposed to biographies because they believed too much ink had already been spilled on hagiographies of church fathers and deeds of kings, and not enough about the average person or life in general.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, following the French Revolution of 1789, a hugely influential grimoire was published under the title of the Grand Grimoire, which was considered particularly powerful because it involved conjuring and making a pact with the Devil's chief minister, Lucifugé Rofocale, in order to gain wealth from him.

An influential formulation of the hierarchy of genres, confirming the history painting at the top, was made in 1667 by André Félibien, a historiographer, architect and theoretician of French classicism became the classic statement of the theory for the 18th century: Celui qui fait parfaitement des païsages est au-dessus d ' un autre qui ne fait que des fruits, des fleurs ou des coquilles.

Elements of historicism appear in the writings of Italian philosopher G. B. Vico and French essayist Michel de Montaigne, and became fully developed with the dialectic of G. W. F. Hegel, influential in 19th-century Europe.

Following the French committee's findings, in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind ( 1818 ), Dugald Stewart, an influential academic philosopher of the " Scottish School of Common Sense ", encouraged physicians to salvage elements of Mesmerism by replacing the supernatural theory of " animal magnetism " with a new interpretation based upon " common sense " laws of physiology and psychology.

The thought of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has been influential in individualist anarchism specifically in thinkers such as the French Émile Armand, the Italian Renzo Novatore, the Colombian Biofilo Panclasta, and also " translations of Nietzsche's writings in the United States very likely appeared first in Liberty, the anarchist journal edited by Benjamin Tucker ".

John Calvin (, born: 10 July 150927 May 1564 ) was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation.

Lewis has long remained popular in Europe: he was consistently praised by some French critics in the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma for his absurd comedy, in part because he had gained respect as an auteur who had total control over all aspects of his films, comparable to Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock.

* Alberti wrote an influential work on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria, which by the 18th century had been translated into Italian, French, Spanish and English.

Another influential book which he read at the time was a translation of Great Heroes of the World, becoming inspired by the American revolutionary George Washington and French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military prowess and nationalistic fervour greatly impressed him.