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,
#651
C. West Churchman
#647
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Charles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research, system analysis and ethics.
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Ivor Grattan-Guinness
#2286
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Ivor Owen Grattan-Guinness was a historian of mathematics and logic. Life Grattan-Guinness was born in Bakewell, England; his father was a mathematics teacher and educational administrator. He gained his bachelor degree as a Mathematics Scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and an MSc in Mathematical Logic and the Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics in 1966. He gained both the doctorate in 1969, and higher doctorate in 1978, in the History of Science at the University of London. He was Emeritus Professor of the History of Mathematics and Logic at Middlesex University, and...
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Enrique Dussel
#3589
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini was an Argentine-Mexican academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014.
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J. Anthony Blair
#3458
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Anthony Blair is a Canadian philosopher. Along with his colleague Ralph Johnson, he has been credited as one of the founding members of the informal logic movement in North America. The two co-published one of the movement's most influential texts, "Logical Self-Defense". Blair is also co-founder of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric, co-founder of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation , and a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation .
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Étienne Balibar
#2766
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
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Jiddu Krishnamurti
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher, speaker, writer, and spiritual figure. Adopted by members of the Theosophical tradition as a child, he was raised to fill the advanced role of World Teacher, but in adulthood he rejected this mantle and distanced himself from the related religious movement. He spent the rest of his life speaking to groups and individuals around the world; many of these talks have been published. He also wrote many books, among them The First and Last Freedom and Commentaries on Living . His last public talk was in January 1986, a month before his death at his hom...
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Charles Kay Ogden
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Charles Kay Ogden was an English linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language. He is typically defined as a linguistic psychologist, and is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English.
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Kiyoshi Miki
1897 - 1945 (48 years)
Kiyoshi Miki was a Japanese philosopher, literary critic, scholar and university professor. He was an esteemed student of Nishida Kitarō and a prominent member of the Kyoto School. Miki was a prolific academic and social critic of his time. He also had tense relations with both and the Imperial government at various stages of his career.
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Paul Valéry
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction , his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.
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Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
700 - 700 (0 years)
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa was a Hindu philosopher and a scholar of Mimamsa school of philosophy from early medieval India. He is famous for many of his various theses on Mimamsa, such as Mimamsaslokavarttika. Bhaṭṭa was a staunch believer in the supreme validity of Vedic injunction, a champion of Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā and a confirmed ritualist. The Varttika is mainly written as a subcommentary of Sabara's commentary on Jaimini's Purva Mimamsa Sutras. His philosophy is classified by some scholars as existential realism.
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Evandro Agazzi
#6576
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Evandro Agazzi is an Italian philosopher and professor at the University of Genoa. His fields of interest are ethics of science and technology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, and systems theory.
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Bernard Lonergan
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology , as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. The projected 25-volume Collected Works with the University of Toronto Press is now complete. Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome; Regis College, T...
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Stanley Hauerwas
#2321
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stanley Martin Hauerwas is an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas originally taught at the University of Notre Dame before moving to Duke University. Hauerwas was a longtime professor at Duke University, serving as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. In the fall of 2014, he also assumed a chair in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one of the world's most influential living theologians and was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001.
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Jean-Yves Girard
#2961
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Yves Girard is a French logician working in proof theory. He is a research director at the mathematical institute of University of Aix-Marseille, at Luminy. Biography Jean-Yves Girard is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.
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Torbjörn Tännsjö
#5727
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ulf Torbjörn Harald Tännsjö is a Swedish professor of philosophy and public intellectual. He has held a chair in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University since 2002 and he is Affiliated Professor of Medical Ethics at Karolinska Institute. Tännsjö was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University from 1976 to 1993 and Research Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Swedish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences between 1993 and 1995. Thereafter, he was a professor of Practical Philosophy at Göteborg University 1995–2001.
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Bruce L. Benson
#2891
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bruce L. Benson is an American academic economist who is recognized as an authority on law and economics and a major exponent of anarcho-capitalist legal theory. He is chair of the department of economics, DeVoe L. Moore Professor, distinguished research professor and courtesy professor of law at Florida State University and the recipient of the 2006 Adam Smith Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and has recently been a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Czech Republic, visiting professor at t...
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Gaudapada
550 - Present (1474 years)
Gauḍapāda , also referred as Gauḍapādācārya , was an early medieval era Hindu philosopher and scholar of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy. While details of his biography are uncertain, his ideas inspired others such as Adi Shankara who called him a Paramaguru .
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Manuel DeLanda
#3291
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Manuel DeLanda is a Mexican-American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches courses on the philosophy of urban history and the dynamics of cities as historical actors with an emphasis on the importance of self-organization and material culture in the understanding of a city. DeLanda also teaches architectural theory as an adjunct professor of architecture and urban design at the Pratt Institute and serves as the Gilles Deleuze Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School.
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Robert M. Pirsig
#2775
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Robert Maynard Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher. He was the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals , and he co-authored On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings along with his wife and editor, Wendy Pirsig.
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Will Durant
1885 - 1981 (96 years)
William James Durant was an American historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy , described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
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Sergei Bulgakov
1871 - 1944 (73 years)
Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, and economist. Orthodox writer and scholar David Bentley Hart has said that Bulgakov was "the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century." Father Sergei Bulgakov also served as a spiritual father and confessor to Mother Maria Skobtsova .
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Carl Mitcham
#3381
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Carl Mitcham is a philosopher of engineering and technology, Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines and Visiting International Professor of Philosophy of Technology at Renmin University of China.
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Xun Kuang
313 BC - 238 BC (75 years)
#674
Johann Eduard Erdmann
1805 - 1892 (87 years)
Johann Eduard Erdmann was a German religious pastor, historian of philosophy, and philosopher of religion, of which he wrote on the mediation of faith and knowledge. He was known to be a follower of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he studied under August Carlblom , and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he regarded as his mentor. Erdmann also studied the works of Karl Daub. Historians of philosophy usually include Erdmann as a member of the Right Wing of the Hegelian movement, a group of thinkers who were also referred to variously as the Right Hegelians , the Hegelian Right , and/or as the O...
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Timothy Morton
#5225
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Timothy Bloxam Morton is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Morton's use of the term 'hyperobjects' was inspired by Björk's 1996 single 'Hyperballad', although the term 'Hyper-objects' has also been used in computer science since 1967. Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam. Their recent book Humankind: So...
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Joseph Fletcher
#5314
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Joseph Francis Fletcher was an American professor who founded the theory of situational ethics in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in the field of bioethics. Fletcher was a leading academic proponent of the potential benefits of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, and cloning. Ordained as an Episcopal priest, he later identified himself as an atheist.
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Hazel Barnes
#4956
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hazel Estella Barnes was an American philosopher, author, and translator. Best known for her popularization of existentialism in America, Barnes translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as writing original works on the subject. After earning her Ph.D. in Classics from Yale in 1941, she spent much of her career at the University of Colorado. In 1979, Barnes became the first woman to be named Distinguished Professor at CU-Boulder. In recognition of her long tenure and service to the University, in 1991 CU established the Hazel Barnes Prize for faculty who best embody "the enriching int...
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Eduard Zeller
1814 - 1908 (94 years)
Eduard Gottlob Zeller was a German philosopher and Protestant theologian of the Tübingen School of theology. He was well known for his writings on Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Pre-Socratic Philosophy, and most of all for his celebrated, multi-volume historical treatise The Philosophy of Greeks in their Historical Development . Zeller was also a central figure in the revival of neo-Kantianism.
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Aloysius Martinich
#6128
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Aloysius Patrick Martinich , usually cited as A. P. Martinich, is an American analytic philosopher. He is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language ; the history of political thinking and Thomas Hobbes.
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Monroe Beardsley
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Monroe Curtis Beardsley was an American philosopher of art. Biography Beardsley was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University , where he received the John Addison Porter Prize. He taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Mount Holyoke College and Yale University, but most of his career was spent at Swarthmore College and Temple University . His wife and occasional coauthor, Elizabeth Lane Beardsley, was also a philosopher at Temple.
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James Hayden Tufts
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
James Hayden Tufts , an influential American philosopher, was a professor of the then newly founded Chicago University. Tufts was also a member of the Board of Arbitration, and the chairman of a committee of the social agencies of Chicago. The work Ethics in 1908 was a collaboration of Tufts and John Dewey. Tufts believed in a conception of mutual influences which he saw as opposed in both Marxism and idealism.
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Joseph Dietzgen
1828 - 1888 (60 years)
Peter Josef Dietzgen was a German socialist philosopher, Marxist and journalist. Dietzgen was born in Blankenberg in the Rhine Province of Prussia. He was the first of five children of father Johann Gottfried Anno Dietzgen and mother Anna Margaretha Lückerath . He was, like his father, a tanner by profession; inheriting his uncle's business in Siegburg. Entirely self-educated, he developed the notion of dialectical materialism independently from Marx and Engels as an independent philosopher of socialist theory. He had one son, Eugene Dietzgen.
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Loren Lomasky
Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, formerly the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. Biography Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.
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Paul Lorenzen
#3462
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Paul Lorenzen was a German philosopher and mathematician, founder of the Erlangen School and inventor of game semantics . Biography Lorenzen studied at the University of Göttingen until he earned his PhD there in 1938 under Helmut Hasse with a thesis titled Zur Abstrakten Begründung der multiplikativen Idealtheorie. In 1933, he joined the SA and the German Nazionalist Studenti Union , while, four years later, he became a member of the Nazi Party. In early 1940 he was drafted into the Army. Through Hasse's mediation, Lorenzen worked with Wilhelm Tranow from July 1940 to April 1941 on the Bavy...
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Wesley C. Salmon
#4974
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Wesley Charles Salmon was an American philosopher of science renowned for his work on the nature of scientific explanation. He also worked on confirmation theory, trying to explicate how probability theory via inductive logic might help confirm and choose hypotheses. Yet most prominently, Salmon was a realist about causality in scientific explanation, although his realist explanation of causality drew ample criticism. Still, his books on scientific explanation itself were landmarks of the 20th century's philosophy of science, and solidified recognition of causality's important roles in sci...
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Amos Bronson Alcott
1799 - 1888 (89 years)
Amos Bronson Alcott was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a plant-based diet. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights.
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Abdolkarim Soroush
#1379
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Abdolkarim Soroush , born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh , is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University. He is arguably the most influential figure in the religious intellectual movement of Iran. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He was also affiliated with other institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
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Vincent F. Hendricks
#5427
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Vincent Fella Rune Møller Hendricks is a Danish philosopher and logician. He holds a doctoral degree and a habilitation in philosophy and is Professor of Formal Philosophy and Director of the Center for Information and Bubble Studies at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was previously Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is member of IIP, the Institut International de Philosophie in Paris.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah
#1551
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#690
Kenneth Burke
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."
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Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
#1307
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor of the book series, Analecta Husserliana. She had a thirty-two-year friendship and occasional academic collaboration with Pope John Paul II.
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Keith Lehrer
#6997
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Keith Lehrer is Emeritus Regent's Professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona and a research professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where he spends half of each academic year. Education and career Lehrer received his PhD in philosophy from Brown University where he studied under Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. He joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1973, where he helped build a major graduate program. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Rochester.
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Albrecht Dürer
1471 - 1528 (57 years)
Albrecht Dürer , sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
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Pierre Hadot
#5655
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy specializing in ancient philosophy, particularly Epicureanism and Stoicism. Life In 1944, Hadot was ordained, but following Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis left the priesthood. He studied at the Sorbonne between 1946–1947. In 1961, he graduated from the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1964, he was appointed a Director of Studies at EPHE, initially occupying a chair in Latin Patristics, before his chair was renamed "Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity" in 1972. He became profe...
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William of Moerbeke
1215 - 1286 (71 years)
William of Moerbeke, O.P. , was a prolific medieval translator of philosophical, medical, and scientific texts from Greek into Latin, enabled by the period of Latin rule of the Byzantine Empire. His translations were influential in his day, when few competing translations were available, and are still respected by modern scholars.
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The Buddha
563 BC - 483 BC (80 years)
<noinclude></noinclude> Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha , was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism.
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Georg Friedrich Meier
1718 - 1777 (59 years)
Georg Friedrich Meier was a German philosopher and aesthetician. A follower of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, he reformed the philosophy of Christian Wolff by introducing elements of John Locke's empiricist theory of knowledge.
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Brian Massumi
#3052
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy. His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains. He is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de Montréal.
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Thiruvalluvar
#1171
Overall Influence
Thiruvalluvar, commonly known as Valluvar, was an Indian poet and philosopher. He is best known as the author of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, a collection of couplets on ethics, political and economic matters, and love. The text is considered an exceptional and widely cherished work of Tamil literature.
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George Stout
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
George Frederick Stout , usually cited as G. F. Stout, was a leading English philosopher and psychologist. Biography Born in South Shields on 6 January 1860, Stout studied psychology at the University of Cambridge under James Ward. Like Ward, Stout employed a philosophical approach to psychology and opposed the theory of associationism.
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