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,
#501
Michael Hardt
#923
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as dominating contemporary life, such as class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services , have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire was published in August 2004. It outlines an idea first propounded in Empire, which is that of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
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Elliott Sober
#1688
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elliott R. Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sober is noted for his work in philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science.
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Bhikkhu Bodhi
#275
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bhikkhu Bodhi , born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk ordained in Sri Lanka. He teaches in the New York and New Jersey area. He was appointed the second president of the Buddhist Publication Society and has edited and authored several publications grounded in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
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Carneades
214 BC - 129 BC (85 years)
Carneades was a Greek philosopher, perhaps the most prominent head of the Skeptical Academy in ancient Greece. He was born in Cyrene. By the year 159 BC, he had begun to attack many previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism and even the Epicureans, whom previous skeptics had spared.
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Ágnes Heller
#2765
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ágnes Heller was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
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Hunayn ibn Ishaq
808 - 873 (65 years)
Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi Ḥunayn ibn Isḥaq was the most productive translator of Greek medical and scientific treatises in his day. He studied Greek and became known as the "Sheikh of the Translators". He mastered four languages: Arabic, Syriac, Greek and Persian. Hunayn's method was widely followed by later translators. He was originally from al-Hirah, the capital of a pre-Islamic cultured Arab kingdom, but he spent his working life in Baghdad, the center of the great ninth-century Greek-into-Arabic/Syriac translation movement. His fame went far beyond his own community.
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Alex Callinicos
#2177
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and serves as its International Secretary. He is also editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
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Arnold Ruge
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Arnold Ruge was a German philosopher and political writer. He was the older brother of Ludwig Ruge. Studies in university and prison Born in Bergen auf Rügen, he studied in Halle, Jena and Heidelberg. As an advocate of a free and united Germany, he shared in the student agitations of 1821–24, and was jailed from 1824 to 1830 in the fortress of Kolberg, where he studied Plato and the Greek poets. Moving to Halle on his release, he published a number of plays — including Schill und die Seinen, a tragedy — and translations of ancient Greek texts — e.g. Oedipus at Colonus. He became a Privatdo...
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Bruno Bosteels
#2647
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Bruno Bosteels is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his work on Latin American literature and culture and his translations of the work of Alain Badiou . Theory of the Subject appeared in 2009, Bosteels' translation of Badiou's Théorie du sujet .
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Semyon Frank
1877 - 1950 (73 years)
Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank was a Russian philosopher. Born into a Jewish family, he became an Orthodox Christian in 1912. In 1922 he was expelled from Soviet Russia and lived in Berlin. In 1933 he was replaced as head of the Russian Scientific Institute. In 1945, he moved to Britain.
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Robert Paul Wolff
#4011
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Robert Paul Wolff is an American political philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wolff has written widely on topics in political philosophy, including Marxism, tolerance , political justification, and democracy.
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Jonathan Dancy
#3549
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Peter Dancy is a British philosopher, who has written on ethics and epistemology. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin and Research Professor at the University of Reading. He taught previously for many years at the University of Keele.
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Wilhelm Windelband
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
Wilhelm Windelband was a German philosopher of the Baden School. Biography Windelband was born the son of a Prussian official in Potsdam. He studied at Jena, Berlin, and Göttingen. Philosophical work Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who argued against other contemporary neo-Kantians, maintaining that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries,...
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Jean Paul
1763 - 1825 (62 years)
Jean Paul was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories. Life and work Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtel Mountains . His father was an organist at Wunsiedel. In 1765 his father became a pastor at Joditz near Hof and, in 1767 at Schwarzenbach, but he died on 25 April 1779, leaving the family in great poverty. Later in life, Jean Paul noted, "The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity." After attending the Gymnasium at Hof, in 1781 Jean Paul went to the University of Leipzig.
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David Lewis
#3731
Overall Influence
1941 - 2001 (60 years)
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
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John Passmore
#3734
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
John Passmore AC was an Australian philosopher. Life John Passmore was born on 9 September 1914 in Manly, Sydney, where he grew up. He was educated at Sydney Boys High School. He originally aspired to be a school teacher, but the terms of his employment required him to do coursework in philosophy, a discipline which was to absorb him. He subsequently graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours in English literature and philosophy whilst studying with a view to become a secondary-school teacher. In 1934 he accepted the position of assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney, continuing teaching there until 1949.
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Daisaku Ikeda
#190
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher, educator, author, and nuclear disarmament advocate. He served as the third president and then honorary president of the Soka Gakkai, the largest of Japan's new religious movementss. Ikeda is the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International , the world's largest Buddhist lay organization, which claims to have approximately 12 million practitioners in 192 countries and territories, more than 1.5 million of whom reside outside of Japan as of 2012.
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Pericles
494 BC - 429 BC (65 years)
Pericles was a Greek politician and general during the Golden Age of Athens. He was prominent and influential in Ancient Athenian politics, particularly between the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and was acclaimed by Thucydides, a contemporary historian, as "the first citizen of Athens". Pericles turned the Delian League into an Athenian empire and led his countrymen during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War. The period during which he led Athens, roughly from 461 to 429 BC, is sometimes known as the "Age of Pericles", but the period thus denoted can include times as...
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Nuel Belnap
#4327
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. is an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his retirement in 2011.
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Robert T. Pennock
#3863
Overall Influence
Robert T. Pennock is a philosopher working on the Avida digital organism project at Michigan State University where he has been full professor since 2000. Pennock was a witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, and described how intelligent design is an updated form of creationism and not science, pointing out that the arguments were essentially the same as traditional creationist arguments with adjustments to the message to eliminate explicit mention of God and the Bible as well as adopting a postmodern deconstructionist language. ...
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Max Black
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Max Black was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies of the work of philosophers such as Frege. His translation of Frege's published philosophical writing is a classic text.
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Henry M. Sheffer
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Henry Maurice Sheffer was an American logician. Life and career Sheffer was a Polish Jew born in the western Ukraine, who immigrated to the USA in 1892 with his parents and six siblings. He studied at the Boston Latin School before entering Harvard University, learning logic from Josiah Royce, and completing his undergraduate degree in 1905, his master's in 1907, and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1908.
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Władysław Tatarkiewicz
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Władysław Tatarkiewicz was a Polish philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of art, esthetician, and ethicist. Early life and education Tatarkiewicz began his higher education at Warsaw University. When it was closed by the Russian Imperial authorities in 1905, he was forced to continue his education abroad in Marburg, Germany, where he studied from 1907 to 1910.
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Theodor Lipps
1851 - 1914 (63 years)
Theodor Lipps was a German philosopher, famed for his theory regarding aesthetics, creating the framework for the concept of Einfühlung , defined as, "projecting oneself onto the object of perception." This has then led onto opening up a new branch of interdisciplinary research in the overlap between psychology and philosophy.
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Jean Hyppolite
1907 - 1968 (61 years)
Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of G.W.F. Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers. His major works include Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Studies on Marx and Hegel.
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Michel Weber
#2281
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michel Weber is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international scholarly societies and publication projects devoted to Whitehead and the global relevance of process philosophy.
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Ned Block
#1146
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ned Joel Block is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psychology at New York University since 1996.
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William Harvey
1578 - 1657 (79 years)
William Harvey was an English physician who made influential contributions in anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the brain and the rest of the body by the heart, though earlier writers, such as Realdo Colombo, Michael Servetus, and Jacques Dubois, had provided precursors of the theory.
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Alexander Herzen
1812 - 1870 (58 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer and thinker known as the precursor of Russian socialism and one of the main precursors of agrarian populism . With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. He published the important social novel Who is to Blame? . His autobiography, My Past and Thoughts , is often considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature.
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Leon Chwistek
1884 - 1944 (60 years)
Leon Chwistek was a Polish avant-garde painter, theoretician of modern art, literary critic, logician, philosopher and mathematician. Career and philosophy In 1919 he was one of the founders of the Polish Mathematical Society. From 1922, he lectured in mathematics for natural scientists at the Jagiellonian University, where he obtained his habilitation in 1928 in mathematical logic.
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Kai Nielsen
#5311
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Kai Nielsen was an American professor, latterly emeritus, of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He specialized in naturalism, metaphilosophy, ethics, analytic philosophy, social and political philosophy. Nielsen also wrote about philosophy of religion, and was an advocate of contemporary atheism. He was also known for his defense of utilitarianism, writing in response to Bernard Williams's criticism of it.
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Themistius
317 - 388 (71 years)
Themistius , nicknamed Euphrades, , was a statesman, rhetorician, and philosopher. He flourished in the reigns of Constantius II, Julian, Jovian, Valens, Gratian, and Theodosius I; and he enjoyed the favour of all those emperors, notwithstanding their many differences, and the fact that he himself was not a Christian. He was admitted to the senate by Constantius in 355, and he was prefect of Constantinople in 384 on the nomination of Theodosius. Of his many works, thirty-three orations of his have come down to us, as well as various commentaries and epitomes of the works of Aristotle.
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Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
1788 - 1856 (68 years)
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet FRSE was a Scottish metaphysician. He is often referred to as William Stirling Hamilton of Preston, in reference to his mother, Elizabeth Stirling. Early life He was born in rooms at the University of Glasgow, He was from an academic family: his father Professor William Hamilton, had in 1781, on the recommendation of William Hunter, been appointed to succeed his own father, Dr Thomas Hamilton, as Regius Professor of Anatomy, Glasgow; he died in 1790, aged 32. William Hamilton and his younger brother, Thomas Hamilton, were brought up by their mother.
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Jan Narveson
#4212
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Jan Narveson is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An anarcho-capitalist and contractarian, Narveson's ideology is deeply influenced by the thought of Robert Nozick and David Gauthier.
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Jon Barwise
#3939
Overall Influence
1942 - 2000 (58 years)
Kenneth Jon Barwise was an American mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used. Education and career He was born in Independence, Missouri, to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise.
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Will Kymlicka
#2623
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
William Kymlicka is a Canadian political philosopher best known for his work on multiculturalism and animal ethics. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University at Kingston, and Recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. For over 20 years, he has lived a vegan lifestyle, and he is married to the Canadian author and animal rights activist Sue Donaldson.
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Douglas N. Walton
#2394
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Douglas Neil Walton was a Canadian academic and author, known for his books and papers on argumentation, logical fallacies and informal logic. He was a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and before that , he held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor. Walton's work has been used to better prepare legal arguments and to help develop artificial intelligence.
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Richard Price
1721 - 1791 (70 years)
Richard Price was a Welsh moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was also a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions. He was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. According to the historian John Davies, Price was "the greatest Welsh thinker of all time".
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Czesław Lejewski
#4217
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Czesław Lejewski was a Polish philosopher and logician, and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic. He studied under Jan Łukasiewicz and Karl Popper in the London School of Economics, and W. V. O. Quine.
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David Wiggins
#5648
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Wiggins is an English moral philosopher, metaphysician, and philosophical logician working especially on identity and issues in meta-ethics. Biography David Wiggins was born on 8 March 1933 in London, the son of Norman and Diana Wiggins . He attended St Paul's School before reading philosophy at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree. His tutor was J. L. Ackrill.
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Gottlob Ernst Schulze
1761 - 1833 (72 years)
Gottlob Ernst Schulze was a German philosopher, born in Heldrungen . He was the grandfather of the pioneering biochemist Ernst Schulze. Biography Schulze was a professor at Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Göttingen. His most influential book was Aenesidemus , a skeptical polemic against Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Philosophy of the Elements.
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Gary L. Francione
#3512
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American academic in the fields of law and philosophy. He is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia . He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal ethics.
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Lev Shestov
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian existentialist and religious philosopher. He is best known for his critiques of both philosophic rationalism and positivism. His work advocated a movement beyond reason and metaphysics, arguing that these are incapable of conclusively establishing truth about ultimate problems, including the nature of God or existence. Contemporary scholars have associated his work with the label "anti-philosophy."
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Simone Weil
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work.
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Doug Altman
#4321
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Douglas Graham Altman FMedSci was an English statistician best known for his work on improving the reliability and reporting of medical research and for highly cited papers on statistical methodology. He was professor of statistics in medicine at the University of Oxford, founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group, and co-founder of the international Equator Network for health research reliability.
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Edith Stein
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Edith Stein, OCD was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
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Levi Bryant
#5754
Overall Influence
Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. Bryant has written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. His blog, Larval Subjects, was founded in 2006 and had over 2 million hits as of September 2011.
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Gersonides
1288 - 1344 (56 years)
Levi ben Gershon , better known by his Graecized name as Gersonides, or by his Latinized name Magister Leo Hebraeus, or in Hebrew by the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG, was a medieval French Jewish philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, physician and astronomer/astrologer. He was born at Bagnols in Languedoc, France. According to Abraham Zacuto and others, he was the son of Gerson ben Solomon Catalan.
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Stuart Hampshire
#3574
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire was an English philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.
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Jacques Rancière
#1992
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.
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