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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#851
Massimo Pigliucci
#1004
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Massimo Pigliucci is an Italian-American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education.
Go to Profile#852
Frithjof Schuon
#3178
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Frithjof Schuon was a Swiss metaphysician of German descent, belonging to the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages. He was also a painter and a poet.
Go to Profile#853
Rodolphe Gasché
#5000
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Rodolphe Gasché holds the Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Career Gasché obtained his doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has also taught. Before going to Buffalo he taught at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#854
Oswald Külpe
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Oswald Külpe was a German structural psychologist of the late 19th and early 20th century. Külpe, who is lesser known than his German mentor, Wilhelm Wundt, revolutionized experimental psychology at his time. In his obituary, Aloys Fischer wrote that, “undoubtedly Külpe was the second founder of experimental psychology on German soil; for with every change of base he made it a requirement that an experimental laboratory should be provided.”
Go to Profile#855
Chaerephon
401 BC - 401 BC (0 years)
Chaerephon , of the Athenian deme Sphettus, was an ancient Greek best remembered as a loyal friend and follower of Socrates. He is known only through brief descriptions by classical writers and was "an unusual man by all accounts", though a man of loyal democratic values.
Go to Profile#856
Gregory Vlastos
#8159
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Gregory Vlastos was a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy, and author of many works on Plato and Socrates. He transformed the analysis of classical philosophy by applying techniques of modern analytic philosophy to restate and evaluate the views of Socrates and Plato.
Go to Profile#857
Paolo Virno
#4198
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Paolo Virno is an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurehead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. Virno currently teaches philosophy at the University of Rome.
Go to Profile#858
Robert Spaemann
#6343
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Robert Spaemann was a German Catholic philosopher. He is considered a member of the Ritter School. Spaemann's focus was on Christian ethics. He was known for his work in bioethics, ecology and human rights. Although not yet widely translated into languages other than his native German, Spaemann was internationally known, and his work was highly regarded by Pope Benedict XVI.
Go to Profile#859
Fernando Pessoa
1888 - 1935 (47 years)
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.
Go to Profile#860
Daniel W. Smith
#8095
Overall Influence
Daniel W. Smith is an American philosopher, academic, researcher, and translator. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, where his work is focused on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy.
Go to Profile#861
Sam Harris
#1440
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
Go to Profile#862
Rudolf Eisler
1873 - 1926 (53 years)
Rudolf Eisler was an Austrian philosopher. Biography Rudolf Eisler was born in Vienna to a family of wealthy Jewish merchants. As a student of Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Eisler studied philosophy at Leipzig University and earned his Ph.D. there. In addition to Immanuel Kant, his philosophical writings, particularly those concerning phenomenalism, were largely influenced by Wundt, as well as Hermann Cohen and Edmund Husserl.
Go to Profile#863
Franz Rosenzweig
1886 - 1929 (43 years)
Franz Rosenzweig was a German theologian, philosopher, and translator. Early life and education Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany, to an affluent, minimally observant Jewish family. His father owned a factory for dyestuff and was a city council member. Through his granduncle, Adam Rosenzweig, he came in contact with traditional Judaism and was inspired to request Hebrew lessons when he was around 11 years old. Yet he did not learn of Sabbat eve until after he was in college. He started to study medicine for five semesters in Göttingen, Munich, and Freiburg. In 1907 he changed subje...
Go to Profile#864
Isaac Beeckman
1588 - 1637 (49 years)
Isaac Beeckman was a Dutch philosopher and scientist, who, through his studies and contact with leading natural philosopherss, may have "virtually given birth to modern atomism". Biography Beeckman was born in Middelburg, Zeeland, to a strongly Calvinistic family, which had fled from the Spanish-controlled Southern Netherlands a few years before. He had a strong early education in his home town and went on to study theology, literature and mathematics in Leiden. Upon his return to Middelburg he could not find a position as a minister, due to clashing ideas of his father and the local church, ...
Go to Profile#865
Louis Couturat
1868 - 1914 (46 years)
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist. Couturat was a pioneer of the constructed language Ido. Life and education Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France. In 1887 he entered École Normale Supérieure to study philosophy and mathematics. In 1895 he lectured in philosophy at the University of Toulouse and 1897 lectured in philosophy of mathematics at the University of Caen Normandy, taking a stand in favor of transfinite numbers. After a time in Hanover studying the writings of Leibniz, he became an assistant to Henri-Louis Bergson at the Collège de France i...
Go to Profile#866
William Hasker
#7341
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
R. William Hasker is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University. For many years he was editor of the prestigious journal Faith and Philosophy. He has published many journal articles and books dealing with issues such as the mind–body problem, theodicy, and divine omniscience. He has argued for "open theism" and a view known as "emergentism" regarding the nature of the human person. Hasker regards the soul as an "emergent" substance, dependent upon the body for its existence.
Go to Profile#867
John Milbank
#4912
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alasdair John Milbank is an English Anglo-Catholic theologian and is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he is President of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. Milbank previously taught at the University of Virginia and before that at the University of Cambridge and the University of Lancaster. He is also chairman of the trustees of the think tank ResPublica.
Go to Profile#868
Michael Otsuka
#8867
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Michael H. Otsuka is an American left-libertarian political philosopher and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Career Otsuka earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in politics from Balliol College, Oxford, under the direction of G. A. Cohen, on a Marshall Scholarship, after graduating from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science summa cum laude in 1986.
Go to Profile#869
Jean Guitton
#3947
Overall Influence
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
Jean Guitton was a French Catholic philosopher and theologian. Le Monde called him "the last of the great Catholic philosophers." Biography Born in Saint-Étienne, Loire in August 1901, he was the son of an industrialist. He studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1920. His principal religious and intellectual influence was from a blind priest, Francois Pouget. He finished his philosophical studies in the early 1920s and taught in a number of secondary schools. Guitton was a disciple of philosopher Henri Bergson.
Go to Profile#870
David Pearce
#3147
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
David Pearce is a British transhumanist philosopher. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. Pearce approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.
Go to Profile#871
Louis Farrakhan
#121
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Louis Farrakhan is an American black supremacist and religious leader who heads the Nation of Islam . Prior to joining the NOI, he was a calypso singer who used the stage name Calypso Gene. Earlier in his career, he served as the minister of mosques in Boston and Harlem and was appointed National Representative of the Nation of Islam by then NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. He adopted the name Louis X, before being named Louis Farrakhan.
Go to Profile#872
Jean-Claude Milner
#2792
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis . In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
Go to Profile#873
Harry Binswanger
#6814
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Harry Binswanger is an American professor and author. He is an Objectivist and a board member of the Ayn Rand Institute. He was an associate of Ayn Rand, working with her on The Ayn Rand Lexicon and helping her edit the second edition of Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. He is the author of How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation .
Go to Profile#874
Paul Gottfried
#2099
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.
Go to Profile#875
Solomon ibn Gabirol
1021 - 1058 (37 years)
Solomon ibn Gabirol or Solomon ben Judah was an 11th-century Andalusian poet and Jewish philosopher in the Neo-Platonic tradition. He published over a hundred poems, as well as works of biblical exegesis, philosophy, ethics and satire. One source credits ibn Gabirol with creating a golem, possibly female, for household chores.
Go to Profile#876
David Hull
#5032
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
David Lee Hull was an American philosopher who was most notable for founding the field philosophy of biology. Additionally, Hull is recognized within evolutionary culture studies as contributing heavily in early discussions of the conceptualization of memetics. In addition to his academic prominence, he was well known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers. Hull was partnered with Richard "Dick" Wellman, a Chicago school teacher, until Wellman's passing during the drafting of Science as Process.
Go to Profile#877
Ludvig Holberg
1684 - 1754 (70 years)
Ludvig Holberg, Baron of Holberg was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright born in Bergen, Norway, during the time of the Dano–Norwegian dual monarchy. He was influenced by Humanism, the Enlightenment and the Baroque. Holberg is considered the founder of modern Danish and Norwegian literature. He was also a prominent Neo-Latin author, known across Europe for his writing. He is best known for the comedies he wrote in 1722–1723 for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre in Copenhagen. Holberg's works about natural and common law were widely read by many Danish law students over two hu...
Go to Profile#878
Marin Mersenne
1588 - 1648 (60 years)
Marin Mersenne, OM was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those written in the form for some integer . He also developed Mersenne's laws, which describe the harmonics of a vibrating string , and his seminal work on music theory, Harmonie universelle, for which he is referred to as the "father of acoustics". Mersenne, an ordained Catholic priest, had many contacts in the scientific world and has been called "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of ...
Go to Profile#879
Pausanias
110 - 180 (70 years)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.
Go to Profile#880
Hegesias of Cyrene
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Hegesias of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher. He argued that eudaimonia is impossible to achieve, and that the goal of life should be the avoidance of pain and sorrow. Conventional values such as wealth, poverty, freedom, and slavery are all indifferent and produce no more pleasure than pain. Cicero claims that Hegesias wrote a book called ἀποκαρτερῶν , which persuaded so many people that death is more desirable than life that Hegesias was banned from teaching in Alexandria. It has been thought by some that Hegesias was influenced by Buddhist teachings.
Go to Profile#881
Philip Kitcher
#3188
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#882
Silvia Federici
#4758
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.
Go to Profile#883
Peter Kreeft
#2289
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter John Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King's College. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he is the author of over eighty books on Christian philosophy, theology and apologetics. He also formulated, together with Ronald K. Tacelli, Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics.
Go to Profile#884
Édouard Le Roy
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Édouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Le Roy was a French philosopher and mathematician. Life Le Roy entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1892, and received the agrégation in mathematics in 1895. He became Doctor in Sciences in 1898, taught in several high schools, and became in 1909 professor of mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris.
Go to Profile#885
Morris Raphael Cohen
1880 - 1947 (67 years)
Morris Raphael Cohen was an American judicial philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar who united pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis. This union coalesced into the "objective relativism" fermenting at Columbia University before and during the early twentieth-century interwar period. He was father to Felix S. Cohen and Leonora Cohen Rosenfield.
Go to Profile#886
Albrecht Wellmer
#6490
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Albrecht Wellmer was a German philosopher at the Freie Universität Berlin. Biography He studied mathematics and physics at Berlin and Kiel, then philosophy and sociology at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. He was an assistant to Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt from 1966 to 1970. He has held Professorships at the Universität Konstanz , the New School for Social Research and at the Freie Universität Berlin . He has held guest Professorships at Haverford, Stony Brook, Collège International de Philosophie, the New School of Social Research and the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#887
Sally Haslanger
#9576
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#888
Henry Babcock Veatch
#12272
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Henry Babcock Veatch Jr. was an American philosopher. Life and career Veatch was born September 26, 1911, in Evansville, Indiana. He attended Harvard University, where he received his A.B. and M.A. degrees and obtained his PhD in 1937. Veatch came to the Philosophy Department at Indiana University as an instructor in 1937. He was named assistant professor in 1941 and full professor in 1952. While at Indiana University, Veatch received many awards and honors. In 1954, he became the first recipient of the Frederick Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was popular with his students and was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi "Brown Derby" Award for most popular professor.
Go to Profile#889
Leon Kass
#2731
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Leon Richard Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual. Kass is best known as a proponent of liberal arts education via the "Great Books," as a critic of human cloning, life extension, euthanasia and embryo research, and for his tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."
Go to Profile#890
Brian Barry
#3346
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Brian Barry, was a moral and political philosopher. He was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining the degrees of B.A. and D.Phil. under the direction of H. L. A. Hart. Along with David Braybrooke, Richard E. Flathman, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, he is widely credited with having fused analytic philosophy and political science. Barry also fused political theory and social choice theory and was a persistent critic of public choice theory.
Go to Profile#891
Apuleius
125 - 170 (45 years)
Apuleius was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He was born in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day M'Daourouch, Algeria. He studied Platonism in Athens, travelled to Italy, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the attentions of a wealthy widow. He declaimed and then distributed his own defense before the proconsul and a court of magistrates convened in Sabratha, near Oea . This is known as th...
Go to Profile#892
Cerinthus
100 - 200 (100 years)
Cerinthus was an early Gnostic, who was prominent as a heresiarch in the view of the early Church Fathers. Contrary to the Church Fathers, he used the Gospel of Cerinthus, and denied that the Supreme God made the physical world. In Cerinthus' interpretation, the Christ descended upon Jesus at baptism and guided him in ministry and the performing of miracles, but left him at the crucifixion. Similarly to the Ebionites, he maintained that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but was a mere man, the biological son of Mary and Joseph.
Go to Profile#893
Alison Jaggar
#6274
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Alison Mary Jaggar is an American feminist philosopher born in England. She is College Professor of Distinction in the Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She was one of the first people to introduce feminist concerns in to philosophy.
Go to Profile#894
Michel Aflaq
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Michel Aflaq was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution .
Go to Profile#895
Max More
#1660
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Max More is a philosopher and futurist who writes, speaks, and consults on advanced decision-making about emerging technologies. He is the current Ambassador and President Emeritus after serving almost nine and a half years as president and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Go to Profile#896
Toby Ord
#2652
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Toby David Godfrey Ord is an Australian philosopher. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
Go to Profile#897
Surendranath Dasgupta
1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Surendranath Dasgupta was an Indian scholar of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. Family and education Surendranath Dasgupta was born to a Vaidya family in Kushtia, Bengal , on Sunday, 18 October 1885, corresponding to Dashami Shukla of the month of Āśvin and coinciding with the festivals of Dussehra and Durga Visarjan. His ancestral home was in the village Goila in Barisal District. He studied at Ripon College in Calcutta and graduated with honours in Sanskrit. Later, in 1908, he received his master's degree from Sanskrit College, Calcutta. He got a second master's degree in Western philosophy...
Go to Profile#898
Linda Martín Alcoff
#6700
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#899
Benjamin Tucker
1854 - 1939 (85 years)
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was an American individualist anarchist. Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty . Tucker was a member of the First International, with his publication Liberty represented as the English language organ for the Socialistic-Revolutionary Congress. Tucker described his form of anarchism as "consistent Manchesterism" and stated that "the Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats."
Go to Profile#900
Peter Hallward
#6267
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Peter Hallward is a political philosopher, best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Go to Profile