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 people in Philosophy,
#51
Hans Jonas
#401
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Hans Jonas was a German-born American Jewish philosopher, from 1955 to 1976 the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Biography Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach, on 10 May 1903. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Freiburg, the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg, and finally earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1928 from the University of Marburg with a thesis on Gnosticism entitled Der Begriff der Gnosis and directed by Martin Heidegger. During his study years his academic advisors included Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann.
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David Malet Armstrong
#754
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, was an Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
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Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#268
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas , senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
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Slavoj Žižek
#206
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
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Bruno Latour
#134
Overall Influence
1947 - 2022 (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Actor Network Theory, Social Theory Bruno Latour is an anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tours. Soon after graduating, he became interested in anthropology, and set out on a study of race and decolonization in Ivory Coast. He is best known for his work, Nous n’avons jamais ete modernes: Essais d’anthropologie symetrique (translated: We Have Never Been Modern). This theme, of challenging methods and findings of scientific inquiry, is revisited in his later work, Pandora’s Hope. His work in Science, Technology and Modernity has been provocative, to say the least.
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Anthony Kenny
#531
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is a British philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein of whose literary estate he is an executor. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in the style of analytic philosophy. He is a former president of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
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Paul Ricœur
#273
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."
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Hubert Dreyfus
#184
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".
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Timothy Williamson
#1089
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#60
Nel Noddings
#656
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Nel Noddings was an American feminist, educator, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. Biography Noddings received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State University in New Jersey, a master's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a PhD in education from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
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William Alston
#1271
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
William Payne Alston was an American philosopher. He is widely considered to be one of the most important epistemologists and philosophers of religion of the twentieth century, and is also known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His views on foundationalism, internalism and externalism, speech acts, and the epistemic value of mystical experience, among many other topics, have been very influential. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, and Syracuse University.
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Maurice Blanchot
#276
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
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Richard Swinburne
#575
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Richard Granville Swinburne is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years, Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
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Robert Merrihew Adams
#1324
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Merrihew Adams is an American analytic philosopher, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of early modern philosophy. Life and career Adams was born on September 8, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to Yale University in the early 1990s as the Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. As chairman, he helped revive the philosophy department after its near-collapse due to personal and scholarly conflicts between analytical and Continental philosophers.
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Mortimer J. Adler
#412
Overall Influence
1902 - 2001 (99 years)
Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica board of editors, and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.
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Jean-Luc Nancy
#375
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope and L'Impératif catégorique on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix on Martin Heidegger.
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Alvin Goldman
#1134
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alvin Ira Goldman is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
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Leszek Kołakowski
#481
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, such as in his three-volume history of Marxist philosophy Main Currents of Marxism . In his later work, Kołakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "we learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are".
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Jaegwon Kim
#989
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Jaegwon Kim was one of the most influential philosophers during his lifetime. His work has had a profound impact on a wide range of fields, including philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. Kim was also a highly respected thinker within the Korean philosophical tradition.
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Stanley Cavell
#797
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
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Graham Harman
#1327
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#72
Antonio Negri
#296
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Antonio "Toni" Negri is an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire and his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness".
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G. A. Cohen
#1153
Overall Influence
1941 - 2009 (68 years)
Gerald Allan Cohen, was a Canadian political philosopher who held the positions of Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford. He was known for his work on Marxism, and later, egalitarianism and distributive justice in normative political philosophy.
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Robert C. Solomon
#1010
Overall Influence
1942 - 2007 (65 years)
Robert C. Solomon was a philosopher and business ethicist, notable author, and "Distinguished Teaching Professor of Business and Philosophy" at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held a named chair and taught for more than 30 years, authoring The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life and more than 45 other books and editions. Critical of the narrow focus of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which he thought denied human nature and abdicated the important questions of life, he instead wrote analytically in response to the continental discourses of phenomenology and existentia...
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H. L. A. Hart
#181
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was an English legal philosopher. He was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. His most famous work is The Concept of Law, which has been hailed as "the most important work of legal philosophy written in the twentieth century". He is considered one of the world's foremost legal philosophers in the twentieth century.
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Georg Henrik von Wright
#927
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher. Biography G. H. von Wright was born in Helsinki on 14 June 1916 to Tor von Wright and his wife Ragni Elisabeth Alfthan. On the retirement of Ludwig Wittgenstein as professor at the University of Cambridge in 1948, von Wright succeeded him. He published in English, Finnish, German, and Swedish, belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Von Wright was of both Finnish and 17th-century Scottish ancestry, and the family was raised to nobility in 1772.
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Julia Kristeva
#105
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend...
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Robert Brandom
#1540
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Boyce Brandom is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use , thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."
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Roderick Chisholm
#1372
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarks that he "is widely regarded as one of the most creative, productive, and influential American philosophers of the 20th Century."
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Frederick Copleston
#1205
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Frederick Charles Copleston was an English Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy . Copleston achieved a degree of popularity in the media for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer.
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Karl-Otto Apel
#763
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Karl-Otto Apel was a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He specialized on the philosophy of language and was thus considered a communication theorist. He developed a distinctive philosophical approach which he called "transcendental pragmatics."
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Georges Canguilhem
#411
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science . Life and work Canguilhem entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924 as part of a class that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan. He aggregated in 1927 and then taught in lycées throughout France, taking up the study of medicine while teaching in Toulouse. He took up a post at the Clermont-Ferrand based University of Strasbourg in 1941, and received his medical doctorate in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Using the pseudonym "Lafont" Canguilhem be...
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Carol Gilligan
#560
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
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Joseph Raz
#249
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
#85
Ian Hacking
#614
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Ian MacDougall Hacking was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and was a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.
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Tom Beauchamp
#1475
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Tom Lamar Beauchamp is an American philosopher specializing in the work of David Hume, moral philosophy, bioethics, and animal ethics. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University, where he was Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.
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Nick Bostrom
#186
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
#88
Sandra Harding
#1035
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science .
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14th Dalai Lama
#10
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
The 14th Dalai Lama , known to the Tibetan people as Gyalwa Rinpoche, is, as the incumbent Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader and head of Tibet. He is considered a living Bodhisattva; specifically, an emanation of Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit, and Chenrezig in Tibetan. He is also the leader and a monk of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa. The central government of Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, invested the Dalai Lama with temporal duties until his exile in 1959.
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Simon Critchley
#1046
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#91
William L. Rowe
#1886
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
William Leonard Rowe was a professor of philosophy at Purdue University who specialized in the philosophy of religion. His work played a leading role in the "remarkable revival of analytic philosophy of religion since the 1970s". He was noted for his formulation of the evidential argument from evil.
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Ray Brassier
#1408
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
#93
Steven Best
#885
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Steven Best is an American philosopher, writer, speaker and activist. His concerns include animal rights, species extinction, human overpopulation, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media and culture, globalization, and capitalist domination. He is Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has published 13 books and over 200 articles and reviews.
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John D. Caputo
#1021
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.
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Antony Flew
#869
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.
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Leonard Peikoff
#1256
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Leonard Sylvan Peikoff is a Canadian American philosopher. He is an Objectivist and was a close associate of Ayn Rand, who designated him heir to her estate. He is a former professor of philosophy and host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show. He co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985 and is the author of several books on philosophy.
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David Chalmers
#652
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
#98
Donna Haraway
#257
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
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Michael Walzer
#604
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic.
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Ernest Sosa
#2201
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. Since 2007 he has been Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, but he spent most of his career at Brown University.
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