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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Philosophy,
#2351
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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Marie Laurencin
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d'Or. Biography Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at the Académie Humbert, where she changed her focus to oil painting. During the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde. A member of both the circle of Pablo P...
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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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Dora Carrington
1893 - 1932 (39 years)
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
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Olga Freidenberg
1890 - 1955 (65 years)
Olga Freidenberg was a Russian and Soviet classical philologist, one of the pioneers of cultural studies in Russia. She is also known as the cousin of the famous writer Boris Pasternak; their correspondence has been published and studied.
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Albína Dratvová
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Albína Dratvová was a Czech philosopher, associate professor of philosophy at Charles University, one of the first few women to be habilitated during the First Czechoslovak Republic. She devoted herself to natural philosophy and methodology, the relationship between natural sciences and positivism. She also contributed significantly with her positions to the emancipation movement of modern women.
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Saint Lucy
283 - 304 (21 years)
Lucia of Syracuse , also called Saint Lucia was a Roman Christian martyr who died during the Diocletianic Persecution. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox churches. She is one of eight women explicitly commemorated by Catholics in the Canon of the Mass. Her traditional feast day, known in Europe as Saint Lucy's Day, is observed by Western Christians on 13 December. Lucia of Syracuse was honored in the Middle Ages and remained a well-known saint in early modern England. She is one of the best known virgin martyrs, along with Agatha of Sicily,...
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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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Belle da Costa Greene
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Belle da Costa Greene was an American librarian who managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan's death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Despite being born to Black parents, Greene spent her professional career passing for white.
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Sophia Jex-Blake
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher, and feminist. She led the campaign to secure women access to a university education, when six other women and she, collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. She was the first practising female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; a leading campaigner for medical education for women, she was involved in founding two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh, at a time when no other medical schools were...
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Susan Taubes
1928 - 1969 (41 years)
Susan Taubes was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual. Taubes was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann was the head of the Conservative or "Status Quo" branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest, and her father Sándor Feldmann was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school, though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.
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Judith K. Ockene
#2380
Minnie Earl Sears
1873 - 1933 (60 years)
Minnie Earl Sears formulated the Sears List of Subject Headings, a simplification of the Library of Congress Subject Headings. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century."
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Lady Mary Shepherd
1777 - 1847 (70 years)
Lady Mary Shepherd, née Primrose was a Scottish philosopher who published two philosophical books, one in 1824 and one in 1827. According to Robert Blakey, in her entry in his History of the Philosophy of the Mind, she exercised considerable influence over the Edinburgh philosophy of her day.
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Ban Zhao
45 - 116 (71 years)
Ban Zhao , courtesy name Huiban , was a Chinese historian, philosopher, and politician. She was the first known female Chinese historian and, along with Pamphile of Epidaurus, one of the first known female historians. She completed her brother Ban Gu's work on the history of the Western Han, the Book of Han. She also wrote Lessons for Women, an influential work on women's conduct. She also had great interest in astronomy and mathematics and wrote poems, commemorative writings, argumentations, commentaries, essays and several longer works, not all of which survive. She became China's most famous female scholar and an instructor of Taoist sexual practices for the imperial family.
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Constance Naden
1858 - 1889 (31 years)
Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden was an English writer, poet and philosopher. She studied, wrote and lectured on philosophy and science, alongside publishing two volumes of poetry. Several collected works were published following her death at the young age of 31. In her honour, Robert Lewins established the Constance Naden Medal and had a bust of her installed at Mason Science College . William Ewart Gladstone considered her one of the nineteenth century's foremost female poets.
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M. F. Cleugh
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
M.F. Cleugh was a philosopher and educationalist. For many years she worked at the University of London in their Education department. On retirement she went to live in Shropshire. She is most known for her 1936 PhD work The problem of time, with special reference to its importance for modern thought also at the University of London, which was published in 1937 by Methuen and which has been reprinted several times. Her later work took a psychological slant on the education of those with particular difficulties... the old, the mature or the "slow" learners. She led a one-year course for teach...
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Juana Inés de la Cruz
1651 - 1695 (44 years)
Juana de Asuaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , was a colonial Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, as well as a Hieronymite nun, nicknamed "The Tenth Muse" and "The Phoenix of America" by her contemporary critics. As a Spanish-criolla from the New Spain, she was among the main American-born contributors to the Spanish Golden Age, alongside Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Garcilaso de la Vega "el Inca", and presently considered one of the most important female authors in Spanish language and Mexico's literary history.
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Johanna Charlotte Unzer
1725 - 1782 (57 years)
Johanna Charlotte Unzer , was a German writer and philosopher, famed for her progressive views on women's education. She was awarded the imperial Dichterkrone in 1753. She is known for her anacreontic poetry.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Nicarete of Megara
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Nicarete or Nicareta of Megara was a philosopher of the Megarian school, who flourished around . She is stated by Athenaeus to have been a hetaera of good family and education, and to have been a disciple of Stilpo. Diogenes Laërtius states that she was Stilpo's mistress, though he had a wife.
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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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Elizabeth Bass
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Mary Elizabeth Bass was an American physician, educator and suffragist. She was the first of two women to become faculty members at the medical school of Tulane University along with Edith Ballard. Bass worked to promote the efforts of women as physicians. She worked at Tulane for thirty years.
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Eliza Haywood
1693 - 1756 (63 years)
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
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Grace C. Bibb
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Grace C. Bibb was a feminist and philosopher. She was part of the push for equality between the sexes, as well as an advocate for women's rights, access to higher education, expansion in employment opportunities, a right to equal pay, and a woman's right to vote. She was appointed Dean at the Normal school despite the fact that women were not at that time allowed to attend the College. In her position at the Normal school, Bibb pushed that women be allowed into the College of Education. She later pushed for women to be allowed into all other University departments.
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Rebecca Lee Crumpler
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born Rebecca Davis, , was an American physician, nurse and author. After studying at the New England Female Medical College, in 1864 she became the first African American woman to become a doctor of medicine in the United States. Crumpler was also one of the first female physician authors in the nineteenth century. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses. The book has two parts that cover the prevention and cure of infantile bowel complaints, and the life and growth of human beings. Dedicated to nurses and mothers, it focuses on maternal and pediatric medical ...
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Etta Lemon
1860 - 1953 (93 years)
Margaretta "Etta" Louisa Lemon was an English bird conservationist and a founding member of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers. She founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk with Eliza Phillips in Croydon in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Manchester-based Society for the Protection of Birds , also founded in 1889. The new or...
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Sarah Hackett Stevenson
1841 - 1909 (68 years)
Sarah Ann Hackett Stevenson was an American physician in Illinois, and the first female member of the American Medical Association , as an Illinois State Medical Society delegate in 1876. She was a leader and advocate for the emancipation of women and for the equal treatment of men and women.
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Elsie Inglis
1864 - 1917 (53 years)
Eliza Maud "Elsie" Inglis was a Scottish medical doctor, surgeon, teacher, suffragist, and founder of the Scottish Women's Hospitals. She was the first woman to hold the Serbian Order of the White Eagle.
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Julia Gulliver
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Julia Henrietta Gulliver was an American philosopher, educator and college president. She was only the second woman in America to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a tireless advocate for increased female representation in higher education.
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