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 people in Philosophy,
#51
G. E. Moore
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
George Edward Moore was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began deemphasizing the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk later dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".
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Adi Shankara
788 - 820 (32 years)
Adi Shankara, also called Adi Shankaracharya , was an 8th-century Indian Vedic scholar and teacher . His works present a harmonizing reading of the sastras, with liberating knowledge of the self at its core, synthesizing the Advaita Vedanta teachings of his time.
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Jeremy Bentham
1749 - 1832 (83 years)
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.
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Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim , Inge Neumann , and Erica Sherover . In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represen...
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Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1762 - 1814 (52 years)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant before him, Fichte was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness.
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Alvin Plantinga
#116
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Alvin Plantinga currently holds the title of the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin University. Previously, Plantinga has taught at Wayne State University and the University of Notre Dame. Additionally, Plantinga was the president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division from 1981 to 1982. As an undergraduate, Plantinga studied at Jamestown College, Calvin College, and Harvard University. Plantinga went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Michigan, before transferring to Yale University in 1955 and earning his PhD there in 1958. Plantinga is o...
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Herbert Spencer
1820 - 1903 (83 years)
Herbert Spencer was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
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Democritus
460 BC - 360 BC (100 years)
Democritus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Abdera, primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe. None of his work has survived. Life Although many anecdotes about Democritus' life survive, their authenticity cannot be verified and modern scholars doubt their accuracy. Democritus was said to be born in the city of Abdera in Thrace, an Ionian colony of Teos. Ancient accounts of his life have claimed that he lived to a very old age, with some writers claiming that he was over a hundred years old at the time of his death.
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Robert Nozick
#73
Overall Influence
1938 - 2002 (64 years)
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice , in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into, and Philosophical Explanations , which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism . His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turne...
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Averroes
1126 - 1198 (72 years)
Ibn Rushd , often Latinized as Averroes , was an Andalusian polymath and jurist 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.
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Alonzo Church
#30
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, and philosopher who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, the Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem , the Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language . Alongside his doctoral student Alan Turing, Church is considered one of the founders of computer science.
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Henri Bergson
1859 - 1941 (82 years)
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher, who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
1775 - 1854 (79 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his one-time university roommate, early friend, and later rival. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is regarded as difficult because of its evolving nature.
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Emmanuel Levinas
#95
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.
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Michel Foucault
1926 - 1984 (58 years)
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships 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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Thomas Kuhn
#39
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
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Boethius
480 - 525 (45 years)
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known as Boethius , was a Roman senator, consul, magister officiorum, historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the translation of the Greek classics into Latin, a precursor to the Scholastic movement, and, along with Cassiodorus, one of the two leading Christian scholars of the 6th century. The local cult of Boethius in the Diocese of Pavia was sanctioned by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1883, confirming the diocese's custom of honouring him on the 23 October.
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Duns Scotus
1265 - 1308 (43 years)
John Duns Scotus was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher and theologian. He is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and William of Ockham.
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Auguste Comte
1798 - 1857 (59 years)
Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher, mathematician and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology; indeed, he invented the term and treated that discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.
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Plutarch
40 - 120 (80 years)
Plutarch was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus .
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Hannah Arendt
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Hannah Arendt was a German-born American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theoristss of the 20th century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of ev...
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Max Horkheimer
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...
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Thomas Nagel
#122
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#75
Mahatma Gandhi
1869 - 1948 (79 years)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā , first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world.
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Alain Badiou
#99
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#77
Martha Nussbaum
#52
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#78
Hans-Georg Gadamer
1900 - 2002 (102 years)
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method , on hermeneutics. Life Family and early life Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer , a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian. Gadamer resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and became more and more interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Geiese died of diabetes while Hans-Georg was four years ...
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Galen
200 - 300 (100 years)
Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , often anglicized as Galen or Galen of Pergamon, was a Roman Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.
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Jean Piaget
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
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Sextus Empiricus
200 - 300 (100 years)
Sextus Empiricus was a Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher and Empiric school physician with Roman citizenship. His philosophical works are the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman Pyrrhonism, and because of the arguments they contain against the other Hellenistic philosophies, they are also a major source of information about those philosophies.
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Jan Łukasiewicz
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Jan Łukasiewicz was a Polish logician and philosopher who is best known for Polish notation and Łukasiewicz logic. His work centred on philosophical logic, mathematical logic and history of logic. He thought innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle, offering one of the earliest systems of many-valued logic. Contemporary research on Aristotelian logic also builds on innovative works by Łukasiewicz, which applied methods from modern logic to the formalization of Aristotle's syllogistic.
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Gilbert Ryle
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosopherss who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems.
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Lucretius
94 BC - 55 BC (39 years)
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which usually is translated into English as On the Nature of Things—and somewhat less often as On the Nature of the Universe. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised in 1836 by C. J. Thomsen.
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Marcus Aurelius
121 - 180 (59 years)
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Ralph Waldo Emerson , who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master".
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R. M. Hare
#425
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Richard Mervyn Hare , usually cited as R. M. Hare, was a British moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.
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Henry Sidgwick
1838 - 1900 (62 years)
Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1883 until his death, and is best known in philosophy for his utilitarian treatise The Methods of Ethics. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research and a member of the Metaphysical Society and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence. In 1875, with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, he co-founded Newnham College, a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge.
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Dante Alighieri
1265 - 1321 (56 years)
Dante Alighieri , most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
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Pyrrho
360 BC - 270 BC (90 years)
Pyrrho of Elis , born in Elis, Greece, was a Greek philosopher of Classical antiquity, credited as being the first Greek skeptic philosopher and founder of Pyrrhonism. Life Pyrrho of Elis is estimated to have lived from around 365/360 until 275/270 BCE. Pyrrho was from Elis, on the Ionian Sea. He was likely a member of the Klytidiai, a clan of seers in Elis who interpreted the oracles of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia where Pyrrho served as a high priest. The Klytidiai were descendants of Klytios, who was the son of Alcmaeon and the grandson of Amphiaraus. In the Python, Pyrrho's student Tim...
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Anaximander
610 BC - 547 BC (63 years)
Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia . He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and, arguably, Pythagoras amongst his pupils.
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Isaiah Berlin
#89
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.
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Nelson Goodman
#243
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics. Life and career Goodman was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah Elizabeth and Henry Lewis Goodman. He was of Jewish origins. He graduated from Harvard University, AB, magna cum laude . During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying for a Harvard PhD in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy.
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John Stuart Mill
1806 - 1873 (67 years)
John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, political economist, politician 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" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.
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Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 - 1527 (58 years)
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince , written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
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Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662 (39 years)
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on conic sections; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines , establishing him as one of the first two...
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Michael Dummett
#328
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter of Frege, and made original contributions particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped to popularize.
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Carl Gustav Hempel
#284
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. Hempel articulated the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the raven paradox .
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Paul Feyerabend
#168
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol ; afterwards, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades . At various points in his life, he held joint appointments at the University College London , the London School of Economics , the FU Berlin , Yale University , the University of Auckland , the University of Sussex , and, finally, the ETH Zurich . He gave lectures and lecture series at the Uni...
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Epictetus
50 - 138 (88 years)
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he spent the rest of his life. His teachings were written down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses and Enchiridion.
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