The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time–A Philosophy Study Starter

The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time–A Philosophy Study Starter
By Dr. Brian Carlson
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Whether you’re majoring in philosophy, beginning your personal journey to better understand the universe, or you just have some humanities credits to fulfill, this is a great place to start. Logically speaking (which is an important way to speak within the context of philosophy), the most influential philosophers in history are responsible for the most influential ideas in history. These are the thinkers who put forth notions that still inform our understanding of the human condition today—groundbreaking, illuminating, ingenious (and frequently debunked) notions about reasoning, reality, spirituality, consciousness, dreams, social organization, human behavior, logic, and even love.

The list here is a portal to the history of human thought, a window into everything and nothing all at once. And yet, this is by no means a comprehensive discussion. The number of individuals who have impacted the course of human history through their insight, intuition, and intellect is far too great to quantify. And ideas expressed just by those included here fill untold volumes of writing. But based on our findings, this is the top tier of thinkers, those who paved the way for all which came after, who laid the foundation for so much of what we hold to be true, who in essence created the field of study we call philosophy.

What follows is a list of the The 25 Most Influential Philosophers of all time based on the period of history between 1000 BCE and 2000 CE. This is a bird’s eye view of philosophy, an overview from the very top, but by no means a comprehensive nor probing dive into any one area. That’s why we call this a Study Starter. We just get the ball rolling. The rest is up to you...

Influence Rankings

The InfluenceRanking engine calculates a numerical influence score for people, institutions, and disciplinary programs. It performs this calculation by drawing from Wikipedia/data, Crossref, and an ever-growing body of data reflecting academic achievement and merit.

The InfluenceRanking engine measures the influence of a given person in a given discipline, as well as in important related subdisciplines. Influence can also be measured within a specific set of time parameters. For instance, it is said that Greek thinker Pythagoras coined the term philosophy in the 6th Century BC. This, therefore, seems an appropriate starting point for the period under investigation. Accordingly, our ranking of the 25 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time uses the time parameters of 1000 BC to 2000 CE.

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A Note On Diversity

We concede from the outset that this ranking list reflects a problem, not specifically with our algorithm, but with the human history of influence. What follows is a list composed entirely of men, most of them European, descendent from European ancestry, or famous for proliferating European ideas. Absent are the great women who have altered the course of human history by way of their ideas and actions. Also limited in appearance are the brilliant thinkers from Arabic or African antiquity, from Eastern traditions of thought, or from more recent centuries where the greatest minds were set to work on advancing civil rights.

This is not because we have overlooked these thinkers, nor because their contributions don’t warrant inclusion in such a list. Rather, this is a direct reflection of the enormous scope of time accounted for in our ranking. Across the vast majority of the 3000 years represented here, social, racial, and gender inequality have been very real and very consequential realities. Moreover, our rankings are limited to those thinkers whose work has enjoyed extensive translation in the English-speaking world.

Because our influence rankings measure the raw permeation of citations, writing, and ideas originating with each of these thinkers, the rigid prejudices that have persisted throughout history are also reflected on our list. This is not an endorsement of those prejudices-merely a faithful reporting on a subject which is inherently reflective of those prejudices.

Happily, when one distills a more current period of history in the philosophy discipline, one can see just how much the field of thought has evolved today, such that a meaningful number of women, people of color, and people of non-European origin are represented. This denotes a clear evolution in an academic field that, for all of its insight and illumination, also has a deep-seated history of Eurocentrism.

For a look at the philosophers with the greatest influence on the field today, check out:

With this limitation acknowledged, we bring you...

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The Most Influential Philosophers of All Time

What follows is a list, in order, of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. Most of the names below will be familiar, though you might find a few surprises.

Other information provided below includes a condensed Wikipedia bio for each philosopher, their Key Contributions to the discipline, and Selected Works. You can also click on the profile link for each philosopher to see where they rank in specific philosophy subdisciplines, such as logic, ethics, and metaphysics.

1.Socrates (470 BC–399 BC)/Plato (429 BC–347 BC)

*Socrates and Plato are inseparable from one another in the history of thought and are therefore inseparable in our ranking.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates’ lifetime, though a fragment of Ion of Chios’ Travel Journal provides important information about Socrates’ youth.

The most influential of Socrates’ students, Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He was the founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.

Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-called neoplatonism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato’s entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated, Plato’s works have consistently been read and studied.

Key Contributions from Socrates

Key Contributions from Plato

Selected Works

*There is limited consensus about the exact publication date for each of these works. Dates below should be seen as approximations.

**Though Socrates is widely considered the father of the Western philosophical tradition, he authored no texts during his lifetime. His influence was felt in his lifetime through his dialogues with prominent pupils. Therefore, he is best read through the works of his most influential students:

Plato:

Xenophon:

Find out where Socrates among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

Find out where Plato among philosophy’s major branches and subdisciplines.

2.Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government.

Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.

Key Contributions

Selected Works

*There is limited consensus about the exact publication date for each of these works. Dates below should be seen as approximations.

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3.Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere “forms of intuition” which structure all experience, and therefore that while “things-in-themselves” exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere “appearances”, and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.

In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses. Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant’s views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.

Key Contributions

Selected Works

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4.René Descartes (1596–1650)

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.

Many elements of Descartes’s philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic “as if no one had written on these matters before.” His best known philosophical statement is ”cogito, ergo sum″ (“I think, therefore I am”; French: Je pense, donc je suis), found in Discourse on the Method (1637; in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy (1644, in Latin).

Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention given to epistemology in the 17th century.

Key Contributions

Selected Works

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5.Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Key Contributions

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6.Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum.

His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital. Marx’s political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

Key Contributions

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7.Avicenna (980–1037)

Ibn Sina, also known as Abu Ali Sina , Pur Sina , and often known in the West as Avicenna , was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna “arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era”. He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine.

His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine, a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna’s corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and works of poetry.

Key Contributions

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8.David Hume (1711–1776)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley, as a British Empiricist.

Key Contributions

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9.Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. In Heidegger’s fundamental text Being and Time (1927), “Dasein” is introduced as a term for the specific type of being that humans possess.[15] Dasein has been translated as “being there”. Heidegger believes that Dasein already has a “pre-ontological” and non-abstract understanding that shapes how it lives. This mode of being he terms “being-in-the-world”.

Commentators have noted that Dasein and “being-in-the-world” are unitary concepts in contrast with the “subject/object” view of rationalist philosophy since at least René Descartes. Heidegger uses an analysis of Dasein to approach the question of the meaning of being, which Heidegger scholar Michael Wheeler describes as “concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings”. Heidegger’s later work includes criticism of the view, common in the Western tradition, that all of nature is a “standing reserve” on call, as if it were a part of industrial inventory. Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.

*Indeed, because of Heidegger’s connection to Nazism, we consider his inclusion on this list controversial. However, his performance using our Ranking Analytics made this inclusion unavoidable. For more on the sometimes overlapping phenomena of influence and infamy, take a look at our discussion on the undeniable influence of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Key Contributions

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10.Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the relatively slim 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise) (1921) which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

His only other published works were an article, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (1929), a book review, and a children’s dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations. A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations.”

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11.John Locke (1632–1704)

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

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12.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and an important figure in German idealism. He is considered one of the fundamental figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from aesthetics to ontology to politics, both in the analytic and continental tradition. Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome.

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13.Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the and the . The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism; of which he argued that reason is found in God. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy developed or opposed his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.

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14.Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian Andersen were all “understood” far too quickly by “scholars”.

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15.Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl’s thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.

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16.Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. Russell was also a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.

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17.Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines.

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18.Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

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19.Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

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20.Averroes (1126–1198)

Ibn Rushd (full name in Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد, romanized: Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd;) often Latinized as Averroes was a Muslim Andalusian polymath and jurist of Berber descent who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the western world as The Commentator and Father of Rationalism. Ibn Rushd also served as a chief judge and a court physician for the Almohad Caliphate. Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna.

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21.John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

John Stuart Mill , usually cited as J. S. Mill, was an English philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

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22.William James (1842–1910)

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the “Father of American psychology”. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James’s reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism.

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23.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a prominent German polymath and one of the most important logicians, mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment. As a representative of the seventeenth-century tradition of rationalism, Leibniz developed, as his most prominent accomplishment, the ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton’s contemporaneous developments. Mathematical works have consistently favored Leibniz’s notation as the conventional expression of calculus. It was only in the 20th century that Leibniz’s law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity found mathematical implementation.

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24.Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)

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25.John Dewey (1859–1952)

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He is regarded as one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey’s works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.” Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology.

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