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,
#6001
Augustin Bonnetty
1798 - 1879 (81 years)
Augustin Bonnetty was a French thinker and writer who founded and edited the Annales de philosophie chrétienne from 1830 until his death. Career In 1815, Bonnetty entered Digne seminary and studied for the priesthood. After completing his philosophical and theological studies, as he was too young to be ordained, he went to Marseilles as a private tutor. He soon felt that his mission was to use science and philosophy in the defense of the Church and to remain a layman.
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Allen Steere
#19875
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Allen Caruthers Steere is an American rheumatologist. He is a professor of rheumatology at Harvard University and previously at Tufts University and Yale University. Steere and his mentor, Stephen Malawista of Yale University, are credited with discovering and naming Lyme disease, and he has published almost 300 scholarly articles on Lyme disease during his more than 40 years of studies of this infection. At a ceremony in Hartford, Connecticut in 1998, Governor John G. Rowland declared September 24 to be "Allen C. Steere Day."
Go to Profile#6003
George Cheyne
1671 - 1743 (72 years)
George Cheyne, M.D. R.C. E.d. R.S.S. , was a pioneering physician, early proto-psychiatrist, philosopher and mathematician. Life George Cheyne was a Newtonian physician and Behmenist, deeply immersed in mysticism. Born in 1672 in Methlick, near Aberdeen in Scotland, he was baptized in Mains of Kelly, Methlick, Aberdeenshire, on 24 February 1673. He died in Bath on April 12, 1743. The books he published during his life show his wide interest which extended from medicine and natural philosophy to religion, metaphysics, astronomy and mathematics. His books were most of the time very successful and as a result they were translated into other languages, e.g.
Go to Profile#6004
Frantz Fanon
#97927
Overall Influence
#6005
Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
1177 - 1274 (97 years)
Sayyid Usman Marwandi, popularly known as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar , was a Sufi saint and poet who is revered in South Asia. Born in Marwand, Sistan, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar eventually settled in Sindh and is revered by the local Sindhi population.
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Ricardo Forster
#74682
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ricardo Forster is an Argentine philosopher, historian of ideas and political critic. He is professor and researcher at Universidad de Buenos Aires and University of Maryland. He is also member of the editorial board of Pensamiento de los Confines magazine. Along with Horacio Verbitsky, Nicolás Casullo and others created Espacio Carta Abierta , a propagandistic group in defense of the Kirchner government, in 2008, after an attempt to raise taxes on agricultural exports led to large street protests.
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Laxmaiah Manchikanti
#64721
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Laxmaiah Manchikanti is an Indian American physician and anesthesiologist specializing in interventional pain management, professor, philanthropist, and author. He is the founder of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians , the Society of Interventional Pain Management Surgery Centers and the Pain Physician, a newspaper owned by his organization, Manchikanti has served as clinical professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. He has served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of ASIPP since 1998. He h...
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Erwin Straus
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus was a German-American phenomenologist and neurologist who helped to pioneer anthropological medicine and psychiatry, a holistic approach to medicine that is critical of mechanistic and reductionistic approaches to understanding and treating human beings.
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Barry A. Franklin
#97988
Overall Influence
#6010
Austin Dacey
#61917
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Austin Dacey is an American philosopher, writer, and human rights activist whose work concerns secularism, religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience. He is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights, and a 2006 New York Times op-ed entitled "Believing in Doubt," which criticized the ethical views of Pope Benedict. He is a representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the creator and director of The Impossible Music Sessions.
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Marek Cichocki
#48056
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Marek Aleksander Cichocki is a Polish philosopher, historian of political thought, journalist, conservative columnist and former advisor to Lech Kaczyński, the late president of Poland. Biography Cichocki graduated in German Studies, and in 1998 he received his PhD degree in philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
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Thomas Attributed Name. Hobbes
#6013
Judith Andre
#76807
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Judith Andre is a philosophy professor and virtue theorist. She earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1979 and has taught courses on ethical issues in global public health, ethics and development, animal welfare, and virtue theory at Old Dominion University and Michigan State University before retiring.
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Ronald Hetzer
#98011
Overall Influence
#6015
Rupert Lodge
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Rupert Clendon Lodge was an Anglo-Canadian philosopher, "the most widely read of all philosophers in Canada". Lodge was born in England, but spent most of his academic career at the University of Manitoba, where he taught from 1920 to 1947. Marshall McLuhan was a student of Lodge in the early 1930s. Lodge's works on Plato remain influential, and were reissued by Routledge in the 2000s and 2010s.
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Burke A. Cunha
#98039
Overall Influence
#6017
Hermann Kretzschmar
1848 - 1924 (76 years)
August Ferdinand Hermann Kretzschmar was a German musicologist and writer, and is considered a founder of hermeneutics in musical interpretation and study. Life and career Born in Olbernhau, Saxony, Kretzschmar was son of the organist and cantor Karl Dankegott Kretzschmar and Karoline Wilhelmine, née Leupold. He was from 1862 a student in the Kreuzschule in Dresden, where from 1867–1868 he was twice Prefect of the Dresdner Kreuzchor. In addition, from 1870 he studied Philology at Leipzig University as well as Music at the Leipzig Conservatory and was awarded his doctorate there. From 1871 he ...
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Zeno Vendler
#49619
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Zeno Vendler was an American philosopher of language, and a founding member and former director of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. His work on lexical aspect, quantifiers, and nominalization has been influential in the field of linguistics.
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Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold
1793 - 1855 (62 years)
Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold was a German philosopher. He was the son of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and grandchild of Christoph Martin Wieland. He at first lectured on philosophy at the University of Kiel, and afterwards was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Jena. His philosophical system resembles Immanuel Kant's.
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Edward Waldo Emerson
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Edward Waldo Emerson was an American physician, writer and lecturer. Biography Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson, and educated at Harvard, where he graduated in 1866. He graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1874, and practiced medicine in Concord until 1882, when he received an inheritance and retired from his practice. He was an instructor in art anatomy at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1885 to 1906. He was also an accomplished equestrian.
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Zumrud Guluzadeh
#85331
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Zumrud Guluzadeh was an Azerbaijani professor of philosophy at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Honored Scholar of the Azerbaijan and Recipients of the Shohrat Order. Zumrud Guluzadeh authored many books on philosophy in the Azerbaijani, Turkish, English, and Russian languages.
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Philip Kantoff
#54600
Overall Influence
Philip W. Kantoff is a medical oncologist. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of Convergent Therapeutics. He served as the Chairman of Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center between 2015 and 2021. He is best known for his contributions to the impact of DNA abnormalities in prostate cancer and the discovery of therapies for metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer.
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Normanh. Ashton
#98077
Overall Influence
#6024
Andrew Brook
#53671
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Andrew Brook is a Canadian philosopher, author and academic particularly known for his writings on Immanuel Kant and the interplay between philosophy and cognitive science. Brook is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Carleton University, former President of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, and former President of the Canadian Philosophical Association.
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Scott Lippman
#76965
Overall Influence
Scott M. Lippman is the former Director of Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego and current Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. His clinical and translational research addresses head and neck and lung cancer, cancer genetics, predictive cancer biomarkers, and molecular targeting for cancer treatment.
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Warren Zapol
#36124
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Warren M. Zapol was the emeritus Anesthetist-in-Chief at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Reginald Jenney Distinguished Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School. From 1994 to 2008, Zapol served as anesthetist-in-chief at MGH and was the director of the MGH Anesthesia Center for Critical Care Research until his death.
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Kiran Musunuru
#18560
Overall Influence
Kiran Musunuru is an American cardiologist who is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He researches the genetics and genomics of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Musunuru is a leading expert in the field of gene-editing.
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Jerome Inglott
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Jerome Inglott was a Maltese philosopher and theologian. His areas of specialisation in philosophy were chiefly metaphysics and ontology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta , and was one of the Philosopher-Rectors at the same university .
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Helga Refsum
#98146
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
#6030
Lars Engebretsen
#98150
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#6031
Vere Claiborne Chappell
#85277
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
#6032
George R. Breese
#98155
Overall Influence
#6033
Anne Monique Nuyt
#28825
Overall Influence
Anne Monique Nuyt is a Canadian paediatrician who is Professor of Neonatology and Canada Research Chair in Prematurity and Developmental Origins of Cardiovascular Health and Diseases at the Université de Montréal. Her research considers how perinatal oxidative stress can alter the structural development and function of the cardiovascular system.
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William Edgar
#34902
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
William "Bill" Edgar is an American apologist and was professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has been called by Charles Colson "one of evangelicalism's most valued scholars and apologists".
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Xiong Shili
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Xiong Shili was a Chinese essayist and philosopher whose major work A New Treatise on Vijñaptimātra is a Confucian critique of the Buddhist Vijñapti-mātra "consciousness-only" theory popularized in China by the Tang-dynasty pilgrim Xuanzang.
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William McNeill
#33866
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
William McNeill is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. Career and work McNeill was educated at the University of Essex, and he is now teaching Heidegger at DePaul University. He is a translator of the work of Martin Heidegger, about whom he has written two books. The Glance of the Eye closely examines the relation between Heidegger's thought and Greek philosophy, in particular his relation to Aristotle. The Time of Life is an examination of the implications of Heidegger's thought for ethics.
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Franciscus Patricius
1529 - 1597 (68 years)
Franciscus Patricius was a philosopher and scientist from the Republic of Venice, originating from Cres. He was known as a defender of Platonism and an opponent of Aristotelianism. His national origin differs in sources, and he is described both as Croatian and as Italian. In Croatia he is mostly referred to as Franjo Petriš or Frane Petrić . His family name in Cres was known as Petris.
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Katharina Grosse
#55058
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Katharina Grosse is a German visual artist. She is known for her large-scale, site-related installations to create immersive visual experiences. Grosse's work employs a use of architecture, sculpture and painting. She has been using an industrial paint-sprayer to apply prismatic swaths of color to a variety of surfaces since the late 1990s, and often uses bright, unmixed sprayed-on acrylic paints to create both large-scale sculptural elements and smaller wall works.
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Al-Jubba'i
849 - 915 (66 years)
Abū 'Alī Muḥammad al-Jubbā'ī was a Mu'tazili influenced theologian and philosopher of the 10th century. Born in Khuzistan, he studied in Basra where he trained Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, who went on to found his own theological tradition, and his son Abū Hāshīm al-Jubbā'ī.
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John Kaag
#78559
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
John Kaag is an American philosopher and Chair and Professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Kaag specializes in American philosophy. His writing has been published in The Paris Review, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine.
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Ofra Magidor
#69588
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ofra Magidor is a philosopher and logician, and current Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at University of Oxford and Fellow of Magdalen College. Biography Magidor received her BSc in mathematics, philosophy, and computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002, and a BPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford in 2004. In 2007 she completed her DPhil, also from the University of Oxford. She has lectured at Oxford since 2005, and in 2016 she became the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, the second woman to hold this position. In 2014, she was ...
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Lawrence Blum
#20893
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Lawrence Alan Blum is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is known for his work in the philosophy of education, moral philosophy, and race.
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Hanne Andersen
#58487
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Hanne Andersen is a Danish philosopher of science. She is a professor of science education at the University of Copenhagen, head of the Department of Science Education, and a member of the research group on history and philosophy of science and science studies.
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Frédéric Paulhan
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Frédéric Paulhan was a French philosopher. He came from a family of merchants of Huguenot ancestry, and was a brilliant student at school in Nîmes. He left without graduating, and spent a few years without a recognised profession, studying and writing and developing an interest in philosophy and Republican political movements. In 1877 Paulhan contributed to the Revue Philosophique of Théodule Ribot. Paulhan became liable for military service when his assigned number was drawn in a lottery, but he was released from serving because of his stutter, which also made it difficult for him to teach.
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Mark Anthony Neal
#12692
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mark Anthony Neal is an American author and academic. He is the Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, and the history of popular music.
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John M. Doris
#91159
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John M. Doris is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Peter L. Dyson Professor of Ethics in Organizations and Life at Cornell University. He is known for his works on moral philosophy.
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Andrew Joseph Galambos
#23901
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Andrew Joseph Galambos was an astrophysicist and philosopher who presented his revolutionary theories of freedom and Volitional Science in oral lectures through his Free Enterprise Institute from 1961 to 1989 in Los Angeles, California. He developed over 117 courses for FEI's curriculum over a period of twenty-eight years. As Galambos' literary executor, William W. Martin completed the all encompassing "Book One" that the professor intended to have published in written form which Martin published under the title Sic Itur Ad Astra . Within Sic Itur Ad Astra is the "roadmap to freedom" Course V-201: The Nature and Protection of Primary Property.
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Robert B. Wallace
#98387
Overall Influence
#6050
Arthur Biram
1878 - 1967 (89 years)
Arthur Yitzhak Biram was a German–Israeli philosopher, philologist, and educator. Biography Biram was born in Bischofswerda in Saxony in 1878 and attended school in Hirschberg, Silesia. He studied languages, including Arabic, at University of Berlin and at University of Leipzig and earned a doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1902, discussing the philosophy of Abu-Rasid al-Nisaburi. In 1904 he concluded the rabbi seminar at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Afterwards he taught languages and literature at the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.
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