The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential female people in Philosophy,
#2301
Susanne Langer
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She was one of the earliest American women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best remembered for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key which was followed by a sequel Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art in 1953. In 1960, Langer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Helena Roerich
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Helena Ivanovna Roerich was a Russian theosophist, writer, and public figure. In the early 20th century, she created, in cooperation with the Teachers of the East, a philosophic teaching of Living Ethics . She was an organizer and participant of cultural activity in the U.S., conducted under the guidance of her husband, Nicholas Roerich. Along with her husband, she took part in expeditions of hard-to-reach and little-investigated regions of Central Asia. She was an Honorary President-Founder of the Institute of Himalayan Studies "Urusvati" in India and co-author of the idea of the International Treaty for Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historical Monuments .
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Maria Ossowska
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Maria Ossowska was a Polish sociologist and social philosopher. Life A student of the philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński, she originally in 1925 received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warsaw with a thesis on Bertrand Russell. In her later work, she focused on the philosophy and sociology of ethics. Ossowska is often mentioned as a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school.
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Rachel Carson
1907 - 1964 (57 years)
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
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Christine Ladd-Franklin
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Christine Ladd-Franklin was an American psychologist, logician, and mathematician. Early life and education Christine Ladd, sometimes known by the nickname "Kitty", was born on December 1, 1847, in Windsor, Connecticut, to Eliphalet, a merchant, and Augusta Ladd. During her early childhood, she lived with her parents and younger brother Henry in New York City. In 1853 the family moved back to Windsor, Connecticut, where her sister Jane Augusta Ladd McCordia was born the following year. Family correspondence shows that Augusta and one of her sisters were both staunch supporters of women's rights.
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Diotima of Mantinea
450 BC - 300 BC (150 years)
Diotima of Mantinea is the name or pseudonym of an ancient Greek character in Plato's dialogue Symposium, possibly an actual historical figure, indicated as having lived circa 440 B.C. Her ideas and doctrine of Eros as reported by the character of Socrates in the dialogue are the origin of the concept today known as Platonic love.
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Aleksandra Ekster
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster , also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer. As a young woman, her studio in Kiev attracted all the city's creative luminaries, and she became a figure of the Paris salons, mixing with Picasso, Braque and others. She is identified with the Russian/Ukrainian avant-garde, as a Cubo-futurist, Constructivist, and influencer of the Art Deco movement.
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Natalie Duddington
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Natalie Duddington was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie . Biography Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, to the author Alexander Ertel. She was Ertel's oldest daughter and considered intelligent as a child. When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904, she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England.
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Émilie du Châtelet
1706 - 1749 (43 years)
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was a French natural philosopher and mathematician from the early 1730s until her death due to complications during childbirth in 1749.
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Andal
800 - 900 (100 years)
Andal , also known as Kothai, Nachiyar, and Godadevi, was the only female Alvar among the twelve Hindu poet-saints of South India. She was posthumously considered an avatar of the goddess Bhudevi. As with the Alvar saints, she was affiliated with the Sri Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. Active in the 8th-century, with some suggesting 7th-century, Andal is credited with two great Tamil works, Tiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumoḻi, which are still recited by devotees during the winter festival season of Margaḻi. Andal is a prominent figure for women in South India and has inspired several women's gro...
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Arete of Cyrene
400 BC - 340 BC (60 years)
Arete of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher who lived in Cyrene, Libya. She was the daughter of Aristippus of Cyrene. Life and teachings Arete learned philosophy from her father, Aristippus, who had himself learned philosophy from Socrates. Arete, in turn, taught philosophy to her son - Aristippus the Younger - and her son was nicknamed "Mother-taught" .
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Valerie Solanas
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist known for the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and for her attempt to murder artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government,...
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Sosipatra
400 - 400 (0 years)
Sosipatra was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic who lived in Ephesus and Pergamon in the first half of the 4th century CE. The story of her life is told in Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists. Biography
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Clémence Royer
1830 - 1902 (72 years)
Clémence Royer was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
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Alice Paul
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.
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Ruth Nanda Anshen
1900 - 2003 (103 years)
Ruth Nanda Anshen was an American philosopher, author and editor. She was the author of several books including The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of An Idea, Morals Equals Manners and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival.
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Louise Michel
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Anna Willess Williams
1857 - 1926 (69 years)
Anna Willess Williams was a teacher and philosophical writer best known as the model for George T. Morgan's silver dollar design, popularly known as the Morgan dollar. Morgan dollar In 1876, George T. Morgan began creating a series of new coin designs at the behest of Director of the Mint, Dr. Henry R. Linderman. Morgan opted to use the profile of an American girl to depict the Goddess of Liberty instead of simply creating an imaginary figure for the obverse of his new design. After he rejected several possible candidates, Morgan's friend, artist Thomas Eakins, recommended Anna Williams of Philadelphia.
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Asclepigenia
500 - 485 (-15 years)
Asclepigenia was an Athenian philosopher and mystic. Biography Asclepigenia was the daughter of Plutarch of Athens. She studied and taught, alongside her brother Hierius, at the Neoplatonic school of Athens. The school contended with the more scientific school in Alexandria. Like other Neoplatonists of the time, she mainly studied Aristotle and Plato, but also her father's own philosophy. She lived in a historical context of turmoil due to the conflict between Neoplatonic metaphysics, which was taught in Plutarch's academy, and Christianity, which had been gaining in popularity at the time.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage
1826 - 1898 (72 years)
Matilda Joslyn Gage was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women's suffrage in the United States but she also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism , and freethought . She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
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Aira Kaal
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Aira Kaal was an Estonian writer. From 1931 to 1940, she studied in Tartu University, focusing on philosophy, but also learning Estonian literature, world literature and English. From 1938 to 1939, she worked in Great Britain, where she met her husband Arthur Robert Hone, with whom she returned to Estonia. From 1945 to 1950, she was a lecturer in the Tartu State University, teaching the foundations of Marxism-Leninism.
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Olive Schreiner
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Olive Schreiner was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm , which has been highly acclaimed. It deals boldly with such contemporary issues as agnosticism, existential independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women, and the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier.
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Melissa
280 BC - 210 BC (70 years)
Melissa was a Pythagorean philosopher. Her name derives from the Greek word melli meaning honey. Nothing is known about her life. She is known only from a letter written to another woman named Cleareta . The letter is written in a Doric Greek dialect dated to around the 3rd century BC. The letter discusses the need for a wife to be modest and virtuous, and stresses that she should obey her husband. The content has led to the suggestion that it was written pseudonymously by a man. On the other hand, the author of the letter does not suggest that a woman is naturally inferior or weak, or that s...
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Jay DeFeo
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”
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Olga Plümacher
1839 - 1895 (56 years)
Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher was a Russian-born Swiss-American philosopher and scholar. She engaged with the philosophies of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, and published three books which contributed to the pessimism controversy in Germany. Her book on the history of philosophical pessimism, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett.
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Phintys
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Phintys was a Pythagorean philosopher, probably from the third century BC. She wrote a work on the correct behaviour of women, two extracts of which are preserved by Stobaeus. According to Stobaeus, Phintys was the daughter of Callicrates, who is otherwise unknown. Holger Thesleff suggests that this Callicrates might be identified with Callicratidas, a Spartan general who died at the Battle of Arginusae. If so, this would make Phintys a Spartan, and date her birth to the late fifth century BC, and her floruit to the fourth century. I. M. Plant considers this emendation "fanciful". Iamblich...
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Anna Brackett
1836 - 1911 (75 years)
Anna Callender Brackett was an American philosopher, translator, feminist, and educator. She translated Karl Rosenkranz's Pedagogics as a System and wrote The Education of American Girls, a response to arguments against the coeducation of males and females.
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Mieko Kamiya
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Mieko Kamiya was a Japanese psychiatrist who treated leprosy patients at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium. She was known for translating books on philosophy. She worked as a medical doctor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo University following World War II. She was said to have greatly helped the Ministry of Education and the General Headquarters, where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers stayed, in her role as an English-speaking secretary, and served as an adviser to Empress Michiko. She wrote many books as a highly educated, multi-lingual person; one of her books, titled On the Me...
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Maria Bezobrazova
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Maria Vladimirovna Bezobrazova was a philosopher, historiographer, educator, journalist and women's rights activist from the Russian Empire. She was "the first among Russian women to receive training in philosophy".
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Oliva Sabuco
1562 - 1622 (60 years)
Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera was a Spanish writer in holistic medical philosophy in the late 16th – early 17th century. She was interested in the interaction between the physical and psychological phenomena; therefore she wrote a collection of medical and psychological treatises that target human nature and explain the effects of emotions on the body and soul. She analyzed theoretical claims of ancient philosophers and wrote an early theory of what is now considered applied psychology.
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Damaris Cudworth Masham
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham was an English writer, philosopher, theologian, and advocate for women's education who is often characterized as a proto-feminist. She overcame some weakness of eyesight and lack of access to formal higher education to win high regard among eminent thinkers of her time. With an extensive correspondence, she published two works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life . She is particularly noted for her long, mutually-influential friendship with the philosopher John Locke.
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Katharine Gilbert
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
Katharine Everett Gilbert , an American philosopher who studied aesthetics, was one of the first women to be president of the American Philosophical Society. She was also the first female professor at Duke University and, during her lifetime, the only female chairman of a liberal arts department.
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Gertrude C. Bussey
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Gertrude Carman Bussey was an American academic philosopher and activist for women's rights, civil liberties, and peace. Education and academic career Gertrude Bussey first attended Barnard College before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1908 from Wellesley College. After graduate study at Columbia University in 1908-1909 and teaching at a private school in Bronxville she went on to do further study at Oxford University during 1912-14. She then went to Northwestern University and became, in 1915, its first student to receive a PhD in philosophy. In the same year Dr. Bussey was appointed as an instructor of philosophy at Goucher College.
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Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
1623 - 1673 (50 years)
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a prolific English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright. In her lifetime she produced more than 12 original literary works, many of which became well known due to her high social status. This high social status allowed Margaret to meet and converse with some of the most important and influential minds of her time.
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Hélène Metzger
1889 - 1944 (55 years)
Hélène Metzger was a French philosopher of science and historian of science. In her writings she focused mainly on the history of chemistry. She was murdered in the Holocaust. Early life and education Hélène Bruhl was born on 26 August 1889 to an upper middle-class Jewish family in Chatou. She was the niece of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, an influential French anthropologist. Her father insisted that she and her sister stop their studies after only three years at university. In 1912, she obtained a diploma in crystallography. She married in 1914, and was widowed only a few months afterwards, after whic...
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Marietta Kies
1853 - 1899 (46 years)
Marietta Kies was an American philosopher and educator who belonged to the St. Louis Hegelians. She was the second American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy, after May Gorslin Preston Slosson , and taught full-time at a university.
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Léontine Zanta
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Léontine Zanta was a French philosopher, feminist and novelist. One of the first two women to gain a doctorate in France, and the first to do so in philosophy, Zanta "was an intellectual celebrity in her day, active in journalism and in the feminist movement of the 1920s."
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Lydia Maria Child
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.
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Catharine Macaulay
1731 - 1791 (60 years)
Catharine Macaulay , was an English Whig republican historian. Early life Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge and his wife Elizabeth Wanley of Olantigh. Sawbridge was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry.
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Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and his only child with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt. Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican Party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Borah.
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Hwang Jini
1506 - 1544 (38 years)
Hwang Jini or Hwang Jin-yi , also known by her gisaeng name Myeongwol , was one of the most famous gisaeng of the Joseon Dynasty. She lived during the reign of King Jungjong. She was noted for her exceptional beauty, charming quick wit, extraordinary intellect, and her assertive and independent nature. She has become an almost myth-like figure in modern Korea, inspiring novels, operas, films, and television series.
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Abella
1400 - Present (626 years)
Abella, often known as Abella of Salerno or Abella of Castellomata, was a physician in the mid fourteenth century. Abella studied and taught at the Salerno School of Medicine. Abella is believed to have been born around 1380, but the exact time of her birth and death is unclear. Abella lectured on standard medical practices, bile, and women's health and nature at the medical school in Salerno. Abella, along with Rebecca de Guarna, specialized in the area of embryology. She published two treatises: De atrabile and De natura seminis humani , neither of which survive today. In Salvatore De Renzi...
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Ingerid Dal
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Ingerid Dal was a Norwegian linguist known for her work and research of German, English and the Nordic languages. Early life and education Dal was born in Drammen, Norway. She attended Kristiana University after moving to Oslo at age 19. Following World War I, she moved to Germany where she attended Heidelberg University and studied philology and philosophy. She then attended the University of Hamburg where she continued her studies and, in 1925, presented her thesis on Lask's Kategorienlehre in relation to Kant's philosophy. In 1930, she finished her thesis at the University of Oslo on the o...
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Ngaire Kerse
Ngaire Margaret Kerse is a New Zealand medical academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 1998 PhD titled 'Health promotion and older people : a general practice intervention study' at the University of Melbourne, Kerse moved to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor. Notable students include Valerie Wright-St Clair.
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Frances Melville
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Frances Helen Melville , was a Scottish suffragist, advocate for higher education for women in Scotland, and one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Edinburgh in 1892. She was president of the British Federation of University Women from 1935 to 1942.
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Damo
600 BC - 500 BC (100 years)
Damo was a Pythagorean philosopher said by many to have been the daughter of Pythagoras and Theano. Early life Tradition relates that she was born in Croton, Magna Graecia, and was the daughter of Pythagoras and Theano. According to Iamblichus, Damo married Meno the Crotonian. Some accounts refer to her as an only daughter, while others indicate that she had two sisters, Arignote and Myia . With her brother Telauges, they became members of the Pythagorean sect founded by their father.
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Park Rehyun
1920 - 1976 (56 years)
Park Rehyun was a Korean painter. She is regarded as a pioneer of modern Korean art during the late Japanese Colonial period and the following decades. Biography Park was born in the city of Jinnampo in South Korea's South Pyongan Province. Graduating from Gyeongseong high school in 1937, she entered the Tokyo Women's School of Fine Arts in 1941 during the Japanese occupation of Korea.
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Ann Baynard
1672 - 1697 (25 years)
Ann Baynard was a British natural philosopher and model of piety. She sought discussions with atheists and non-Christians. Later, during her eulogy, Reverend Prude called her philosophical knowledge of this 20-year-old woman the same size as that of an "old bearded male philosopher"
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Edwina Whitney
1868 - 1970 (102 years)
Edwina Maud Whitney was an American librarian and educator who served as one of the earliest librarians at the Connecticut Agricultural College from 1900 to 1934. She also served as a German instructor from 1901 to 1926 and an assistant professor of German from 1926 to 1934.
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