Ernst Friedrich Apelt was a German philosopher and entrepreneur. He was a student of Jakob Friedrich Fries, succeeding him at the University of Jena. He was the principal contributor to the Abhandlungen der Fries'sche Schule, which he founded with Matthias Jakob Schleiden.

Baron Ernst Friedrich von Liphart (1847–1932), russified as Ernst Karlovich Lipgart and also referred to in English as Earnest Lipgart, was a painter, a noted art expert and art collector from what is now Tartu in Estonia. After living for a time in Florence, he moved to France and then to Russia, where he was a curator at the Hermitage Museum.

Ernst Friedrich Heilborn (1867–1942) was a German writer, critic and journalist.

Ernst Heinrich Kneschke was a German heraldist, ophthalmologist and writer.

Ernst Hermann Joseph Münch was a distinguished Roman Catholic historian of Germany.

Ernst Jandl was an Austrian writer, poet, and translator. He became known for his experimental lyric, mainly sound poems (Sprechgedichte) in the tradition of concrete and visual poetic forms.

Ernst Jünger was a German author, highly decorated soldier, philosopher, and entomologist who became publicly known for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel.

Ernst Laas was a German positivist philosopher.

Ernst Maass was a German classical philologist.

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves. The ratio of the speed of a flow or object to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honour. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism. Through his criticism of Newton's theories of space and time, he foreshadowed Einstein's theory of relativity.