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,
#601
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory . This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today.
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Julian Huxley
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London , the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society , and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
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Peter Sloterdijk
#1689
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.
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Allan Bloom
#1429
Overall Influence
1930 - 1992 (62 years)
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Chicago.
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Abram Deborin
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Abram Moiseyevich Deborin was a Soviet Marxist philosopher and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . Deborin oscillated between The Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, before settling with the Bolsheviks and enjoying a long career as a philosopher in the Soviet Union. Although this career suffered under Stalin, he lived to see his works republished when the Soviet Union was led by Nikita Khrushchev.
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Ray Monk
#3692
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ray Monk is a British biographer who is renowned for his biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he taught in various capacities from 1992 to 2018.
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Galvano Della Volpe
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Galvano Della Volpe was an Italian professor of philosophy and Marxist theorist. Life Born on 24 September 1895 in Imola, in the then province of Bologna, Della Volpe served in the First World War and afterwards completed his studies at the University of Bologna. Della Volpe taught history and philosophy in a liceo in Ravenna and at the University of Bologna from 1925 to 1938, when he became chair of history and philosophy at the University of Messina, a post he held until his retirement in 1965. Della Volpe died on 13 July 1968 in Rome.
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Richard J. Bernstein
#4172
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Richard Jacob Bernstein was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for Social Research, where he was Vera List Professor of Philosophy. Bernstein wrote extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics.
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Onora O'Neill
#3081
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. Early life and education Onora Sylvia O'Neill was born on 23 August 1941 in Aughafatten. The daughter of Sir Con O'Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul's Girls' School, London, before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Somerville College, Oxford. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor.
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David Pears
#5321
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
David Francis Pears, FBA was a British philosopher renowned for his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein. An Old Boy of Westminster School, he was in the Royal Artillery during World War II, and was seriously injured in a practice gas attack. After leaving the army he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and was then for many years a Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
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Georgy Chelpanov
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Georgy Ivanovich Chelpanov was a Ukrainian and Soviet psychologist, philosopher and logician. Biography Chelpanov was born in Mariupol in to an upper-class family. Chelpanov received his primary education in Mariupol at the local parish school, and then studied at the Gymnasium Alexandrinum , graduating in 1883 with a gold medal. After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of the Novorossiysk University in Odessa and graduated in 1887 with a Ph.D.
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Philip Pettit
#3139
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.
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Morton White
#4526
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Morton White was an American philosopher and historian of ideas. He was a proponent of a doctrine he called holistic pragmatism and also a noted scholar of American intellectual history. He was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard from 1953 to 1970. He was Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where he served as Professor in the School of Historical Studies from 1970 until he retired in 1987.
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Paul Guyer
#4992
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics. Since 2012, he has been Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University. Education and career Guyer grew up on Long Island, New York, and attended public schools there, graduating from Lynbrook High School in 1965. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1969, where he studied in the Departments of Philosophy and German; his Ph.D. in Philosophy was also taken at Harvard University, with a dissertation directed by Stanley Cavell. Guyer joined the University ...
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John Lennox
#2098
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Carson Lennox is an Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian philosopher. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God , and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
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Paul Thagard
#2087
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Richard Thagard is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He is a writer, and has contributed to research in analogy and creativity, inference, cognition in the history of science, and the role of emotion in cognition.
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Henry More
1614 - 1687 (73 years)
Henry More was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school. Biography Henry was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire on 12 October 1614. He was the seventh son of Alexander More, mayor of Grantham, and Anne More . Both his parents were Calvinists but he himself "could never swallow that hard doctrine."
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Carl Linnaeus
1707 - 1778 (71 years)
Carl Linnaeus , also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as .
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Swaminarayan
1781 - 1830 (49 years)
Swaminarayan , also known as Sahajanand Swami, was a yogi and ascetic, who is believed by followers to be a manifestation of Krishna, or as the highest manifestation of Purushottama, and around whom the Swaminarayan Sampradaya developed.
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Ruth Millikan
#5197
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ruth Garrett Millikan is a leading American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language. Millikan has spent most of her career at the University of Connecticut, where she is now Professor Emerita of Philosophy.
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Viktor Frankl
#254
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.
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David Papineau
#5802
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Papineau is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught for several years at Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of Robinson College.
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Nick Land
#2387
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nick Land is an English philosopher, theorist, short story writer and blogger. He has been described as "the father of accelerationism", and his work has been tied to the development of speculative realism. He was a leader of the 1990s "theory-fiction" collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit after its original founder cyberfeminist theorist Sadie Plant departed from it. His work departs from the formal conventions of academic writing and embraces a wide range of influences, as well as exploring unorthodox and "dark" philosophical interests.
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John Cottingham
#3869
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#625
Carl von Clausewitz
1780 - 1831 (51 years)
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" and political aspects of waging war. His most notable work, , though unfinished at his death, is considered a seminal treatise on military strategy and science.
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Mario Perniola
#3802
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Mario Perniola was an Italian philosopher, professor of aesthetics and author. Many of his works have been published in English. Biography Mario Perniola was born in Asti, Piedmont. He studied philosophy under Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin where he graduated in 1965. While he was reading philosophy in Turin, he met Gianni Vattimo and Umberto Eco, who all became prominent scholars of Pareyson's school. From 1966 to 1969 he was connected to the avant-garde Situationist International movement founded by Guy Debord with whom he kept on friendly terms for several years. He became a ful...
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Ullin Place
#5554
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Ullin Thomas Place , usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. After several years at the University of Adelaide, he taught for some years in the Department of Philosophy in the University of Leeds.
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Georges Cuvier
1769 - 1832 (63 years)
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier , was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.
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Samuel Clarke
1675 - 1729 (54 years)
Samuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican cleric. He is considered the major British figure in philosophy between John Locke and George Berkeley. Clarke's altered, Nontrinitarian revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer continues to influence worship among modern Unitarians.
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Raphael von Koeber
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Raphael von Koeber was a notable Russian-German teacher of philosophy and musician at the Tokyo Imperial University in Japan. Early life Raphael von Koeber was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire, his father was ethnic German, his mother was ethnic Russian, she died when he was one year old, and he was raised by his grandmother, a daughter of a priest and tutor to Tsar Alexander II’s wife. She taught young Raphael the piano at the age of 6, and greatly influenced him in his habits and studies. As an ethnic German, he was uncomfortable at school, which he therefore attended only irregularly.
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Mou Zongsan
#5162
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Mou Zongsan was a Chinese philosopher and translator. He was born in Shandong province and graduated from Peking University. In 1949 he moved to Taiwan and later to Hong Kong, and he remained outside of mainland China for the rest of his life. His thought was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, whose three Critiques he translated from English, possibly first, into Chinese, and above all by Tiantai Buddhist philosophy.
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Peter Kropotkin
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France and England. While in exile, he gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. Kropotkin returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, ...
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Maximus the Confessor
580 - 662 (82 years)
Maximus the Confessor , also spelled Maximos, otherwise known as Maximus the Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople , was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar. In his early life, Maximus was a civil servant, and an aide to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He gave up this life in the political sphere to enter the monastic life. Maximus had studied diverse schools of philosophy, and certainly what was common for his time, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Aristotle, and numerous later Platonic commentators on Aristotle and Plato, like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. When o...
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Nicholas of Autrecourt
1299 - 1369 (70 years)
Nicholas of Autrecourt was a French medieval philosopher and Scholastic theologian. Life and thought Born in Autrecourt, near Verdun, he was educated at Paris and earned bachelor's degrees in theology and law and a master's degree in arts. Nicholas is known principally for developing skepticism to extreme logical conclusions. He is sometimes considered the sole genuinely skeptic philosopher of medieval times. Nicholas founded his skeptical position on arguments that knowledge claims were not "reducible to the first principle," that is, that it was not contradictory to deny them. His views hav...
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Marcia Baron
#6216
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marcia Baron is an American philosopher and the Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Her main research interests include moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophical issues in criminal law. Baron is an associate editor of Inquiry, a member of the editorial board of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, a series editor for New Directions in Ethics, and a member of the editorial board of the North American Kant Studies in Philosophy.
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Francisco de Vitoria
1480 - 1546 (66 years)
Francisco de Vitoria was a Spanish Roman Catholic philosopher, theologian, and jurist of Renaissance Spain. He is the founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca, noted especially for his concept of just war and international law. He has in the past been described by scholars as the "father of international law", along with Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, though some contemporary academics have suggested that such a description is anachronistic, since the concept of postmodern international law did not truly develop until much later. American jurist Arthur Nussbaum noted Vitoria's influence on international law as it pertained to the right to trade overseas.
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Hajime Tanabe
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
was a Japanese philosopher of science, particularly of mathematics and physics. His work brought together elements of Buddhism, scientific thought, Western philosophy, Christianity, and Marxism. In the postwar years, Tanabe coined the concept of metanoetics, proposing that the limits of speculative philosophy and reason must be surpassed by metanoia.
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Luis de Molina
1535 - 1600 (65 years)
Luis de Molina was a Spanish Jesuit priest and scholastic, a staunch defender of free will in the controversy over human liberty and God's grace. His theology is known as Molinism. Life From 1551 to 1562, Molina studied law in Salamanca, philosophy in Alcalá de Henares, and theology in Coimbra. After 1563, he became a professor at the University of Coimbra, and afterward taught at the University of Évora, Portugal. From this post he was called, at the end of twenty years, to the chair of moral theology in Madrid, where he died.
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Cornel West
#789
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#640
Nicole Oresme
1323 - 1382 (59 years)
Nicole Oresme , also known as Nicolas Oresme, Nicholas Oresme, or Nicolas d'Oresme, was a French philosopher of the later Middle Ages. He wrote influential works on economics, mathematics, physics, astrology, astronomy, philosophy, and theology; was Bishop of Lisieux, a translator, a counselor of King Charles V of France, and one of the most original thinkers of 14th-century Europe.
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Keith DeRose
#7287
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Keith DeRose is an American philosopher teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is currently Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy. He taught previously at New York University and Rice University. His primary interests include epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and history of modern philosophy. He is best known for his work on contextualism in epistemology, especially as a response to the traditional problem of skepticism.
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Nicomachus
301 BC - 400 BC (-99 years)
Nicomachus was the son of Aristotle. The Suda states that Nicomachus was from Stageira, was a philosopher, a pupil of Theophrastus, and, according to Aristippus, his lover. He may have written a commentary on his father's lectures in physics. Nicomachus was born to the slave Herpyllis, and his father's will commended his care as a boy to several tutors, then to his adopted son, Nicanor. Historians think the Nicomachean Ethics, a compilation of Aristotle's lecture notes, was probably named after or dedicated to Aristotle's son. However, Nicomachus is also believed to be the name of Aristotle's father.
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Elizabeth S. Anderson
#3004
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.
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Cora Diamond
#5692
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.
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Robert P. George
#1874
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#646
Robert Rauschenberg
#360
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines , a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
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Joseph Agassi
#2650
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Joseph Agassi was an Israeli academic with contributions in logic, scientific method, and philosophy. He studied under Karl Popper and taught at the London School of Economics. Agassi taught in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Hong Kong from 1960 to 1963. He later taught at the University of Illinois, Boston University, and York University in Canada. He had dual appointments in the last positions with Tel Aviv University.
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Benedetto Croce
1866 - 1952 (86 years)
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, historian, and politician who wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, historiography, and aesthetics. A political liberal in most regards, he formulated a distinction between liberalism and "liberism" . Croce had considerable influence on other Italian intellectuals, from Marxists to Italian fascists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile, respectively.
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Douglas Kellner
#2358
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Douglas Kellner is an American academic who works at the intersection of "third-generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible. He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Miranda Fricker
#6414
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Miranda Fricker, FBA FAAS is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield. Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone "specifically in their capacity as a knower", and explored the concept in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice.
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