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Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince, written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.

Galileo Galilei

Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei, was an Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer and polymath. He was born in Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science. He studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion, and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of the pendulum and "hydrostatic balances". He was one of the earliest developers of the thermoscope and the inventor of various military compasses. With an improved telescope he built, he observed the stars of the Milky Way, the phases of Venus, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, lunar craters, and sunspots. He also built an early microscope. Galileo's championing of Copernican heliocentrism was met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that his opinions contradicted accepted Biblical interpretations. Galileo defended his views in Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632), which appeared to dispute and satirize Pope Urban VIII, thus alienating both the Pope and the Jesuits, who had both strongly supported Galileo until this point. He was trie

Thomas More

Sir Thomas More, venerated in the Catholic Church as a martyr and saint, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, theologian and Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor from October 1529 to May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state.

Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch humanist, Catholic theologian, and pioneering philologist and educationalist. He was, through his writings and translations, one of the most influential scholars of the Northern Renaissance and a major figure of Western culture.

Thinkers

Niccolò Machiavelli

Galileo Galilei

Thomas More

Erasmus

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