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,
#901
Joel Feinberg
#3355
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Joel Feinberg was an American political and legal philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy as well as individual rights and the authority of the state. Feinberg was one of the most influential figures in American jurisprudence of the last fifty years.
Go to Profile#902
Miguel A. De La Torre
#4094
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Miguel A. De La Torre is a professor of Social Ethics and Latino Studies at Iliff School of Theology, author, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister. Biography Born in Cuba months before the Castro Revolution, De La Torre and his family migrated to the United States as refugees when he was an infant. For a while the U.S. government considered him and his family as "illegal aliens". On 6 June 1960, De La Torre received an order from Immigration and Naturalization Service to "self-deport." He attended Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic elementary school in Queens, New York, and was baptized and confirmed by the Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#903
Magnus Hirschfeld
1868 - 1935 (67 years)
Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#904
Donald A. Gillies
#5744
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donald Angus Gillies is a British philosopher and historian of science and mathematics. He is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Career After undergraduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, Gillies became a graduate student of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics, where he completed a PhD on the foundations of probability.
Go to Profile#905
Douglas B. Rasmussen
#10038
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Douglas B. Rasmussen is professor of philosophy at St. John's University, where he has taught since 1981. Biography Rasmussen earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University. Rasmussen's areas of scholarly interest include Political Philosophy, Ethics, Ontology, Epistemology, Business Ethics, and Political Economy.
Go to Profile#906
Hans Sluga
#7563
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Hans D. Sluga is a German philosopher who spent most of his career as professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Sluga teaches and writes on topics in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of continental philosophy, as well as on political theory, and ancient philosophy in Greece and China. He has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.
Go to Profile#907
Michael A. Smith
#10221
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Andrew Smith is an Australian philosopher who teaches at Princeton University . He taught previously at the University of Oxford, Monash University, and was a member of the Philosophy Program at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is the author of a number of important books and articles in moral philosophy. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#908
Afrikan Spir
1837 - 1890 (53 years)
Afrikan Aleksandrovich Spir was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher of German-Greek descent who wrote primarily in German, but also French. His book Denken und Wirklichkeit had a significant influence on several eminent philosophers, scholars and writers such as Hans Vaihinger, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Leo Tolstoy and Rudolf Steiner.
Go to Profile#909
Vincenzo Gioberti
1801 - 1852 (51 years)
Vincenzo Gioberti was an Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, publicist and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Sardinia from 1848 to 1849. He was a prominent spokesman for liberal Catholicism.
Go to Profile#910
Richard Tarnas
#3055
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Theodore Tarnas is a cultural historian and astrologer known for his books The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Tarnas is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is the founding director of its graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.
Go to Profile#911
Sidney Morgenbesser
#5949
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Sidney Morgenbesser was a Jewish American philosopher and professor at Columbia University. He wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms. Life and career Sidney Morgenbesser was born on September 22, 1921, in New York City and raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Go to Profile#912
Deepak Chopra
#399
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American author and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterised as technobabble – "incoherent babbling strewn with scientific terms" which drives those who actually understand physics "crazy" and as "redefining Wrong".
Go to Profile#913
Roger T. Ames
#8732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roger T. Ames is a Canadian-born philosopher, translator, and author. He is Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing, China, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a Berggruen Fellow. He has made significant contributions to the study of Chinese and comparative philosophy, in which he emphasizes the importance of understanding Chinese philosophy on its own terms rather than through the lens of Western philosophy.
Go to Profile#914
Kurt Grelling
1886 - 1942 (56 years)
Kurt Grelling was a German logician and philosopher, member of the Berlin Circle. Life and work Kurt Grelling was born on 2 March 1886 in Berlin. His father, the Doctor of Jurisprudence Richard Grelling, and his mother, Margarethe , were Jewish. Shortly after his arrival in 1905 at University of Göttingen, Grelling began a collaboration with philosopher Leonard Nelson, with whom he tried to solve Russell's paradox, which had shaken the foundations of mathematics when it was announced in 1903. Their 1908 paper included new paradoxes, including a semantic paradox that was named the Grelling–Ne...
Go to Profile#915
André Gorz
#2214
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
André Gorz , more commonly known by his pen names Gérard Horst and Michel Bosquet , was an Austrian and French social philosopher and journalist and critic of work. He co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology.
Go to Profile#916
Nader El-Bizri
#4776
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Nader El-Bizri is the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. He served before as a tenured longstanding full Professor of philosophy and civilization studies at the American University of Beirut, where he also acted as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of the General Education program. El-Bizri specializes in phenomenology, Islamic science and philosophy, and architectural theory. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger .
Go to Profile#917
Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus
1796 - 1862 (66 years)
Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus was a German philosopher best known for his exegetical work on philosophy, such as his characterisation of Hegel's dialectic as a triad of "thesis–antithesis–synthesis."
Go to Profile#918
Leonardo Boff
#1953
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Leonardo Boff , born as Genézio Darci Boff , is a Brazilian theologian, philosopher writer, and former Catholic priest known for his active support for Latin American liberation theology. He is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the Rio de Janeiro State University. In 2001, he received the Right Livelihood Award for "his inspiring insights and practical work to help people realise the links between human spirituality, social justice and environmental stewardship."
Go to Profile#919
David Kaplan
#6218
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Benjamin Kaplan is an American philosopher. He is the Hans Reichenbach Professor of Scientific Philosophy at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. His philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of Frege and Russell. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, propositions, and reference in intensional contexts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
Go to Profile#920
Eugène Delacroix
1798 - 1863 (65 years)
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.
Go to Profile#921
Abhinavagupta
950 - 1020 (70 years)
Abhinavagupta was a philosopher, mystic and aesthetician from Kashmir. He was also considered an influential musician, poet, dramatist, exegete, theologian, and logician – a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture.
Go to Profile#922
Virginia Held
#9199
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Virginia Potter Held is an American moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and critiques of the traditional roles of women in society.
Go to Profile#923
Christopher Norris
#5643
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Christopher Charles Norris is a British philosopher and literary critic. Career Norris completed his PhD in English at University College London in 1975. After an early career in literary and music criticism , Norris moved in 1991 to the Cardiff Philosophy Department. In 1997, he was awarded the title of Distinguished Research Professor in the Cardiff School of English, Communication & Philosophy. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, the City University of New York, Aarhus University, and Dartmou...
Go to Profile#924
Evald Ilyenkov
1924 - 1979 (55 years)
Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov was a Marxist author and Soviet philosopher. Biography Evald Ilyenkov did original work on the materialist development of Hegel's dialectics, notable for his account of concrete universals. His works include Dialectical Logic , Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism and The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital . Ilyenkov committed suicide in 1979.
Go to Profile#925
Arthur Koestler
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Arthur Koestler, was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism.
Go to Profile#926
Janet Radcliffe Richards
#11785
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist , Philosophical Problems of Equality , Human Nature after Darwin , and The Ethics of Transplants .
Go to Profile#927
Maurice de Gandillac
#6010
Overall Influence
1906 - 2006 (100 years)
Maurice de Gandillac was a French philosopher. He was born in Koléa, French Algeria and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. He wrote his thesis under Étienne Gilson on the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. In 1946 he was appointed professor in the history of medieval and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne. He supervised the doctoral dissertations of numerous students, including Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Go to Profile#928
George Henry Lewes
1817 - 1878 (61 years)
George Henry Lewes was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theatre. He was also an amateur physiologist. American feminist Margaret Fuller called Lewes a "witty, French, flippant sort of man". He became part of the mid-Victorian ferment of ideas which encouraged discussion of Darwinism, positivism, and religious skepticism. However, he is perhaps best known today for having openly lived with Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, as soulmates whose lives and writings were enriched by their relationship, though they never married each other.
Go to Profile#929
Daniel M. Hausman
#5081
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Daniel M. Hausman is an American philosopher. His research has focused primarily on methodological, metaphysical, and ethical issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy. He is currently Herbert A. Simon Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#930
Jean-Marie Guyau
1854 - 1888 (34 years)
Jean-Marie Guyau was a French philosopher and poet. Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry and literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.
Go to Profile#931
John Austin
1790 - 1859 (69 years)
John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.
Go to Profile#932
Léon Brunschvicg
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Léon Brunschvicg was a French Idealist philosopher. He co-founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale with Xavier Léon and Élie Halévy in 1893. Life He was born into a Jewish family. From 1895 to 1900 he taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. In 1897 he completed his thesis under the title . In 1909 he became professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was married to Cécile Kahn, a major campaigner for women's suffrage in France, with whom he had four children.
Go to Profile#933
Gustav Shpet
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Gustav Gustavovich Shpet was a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, psychologist, art theoretician, and interpreter of German-Polish descent. He was a student of a well-known Russian psychologist and philosopher George Chelpanov, a follower of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, who introduced Husserlian phenomenology to Russia, modifying the phenomenology which he found in Husserl. Shpet was a Vice president of the Russian State Academy of Arts in Moscow . Shpet is an author of many books, including his famous A View on the History of Russian philosophy and The Hermeneutics and its pr...
Go to Profile#934
Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa
770 - 830 (60 years)
was an Indian philosopher known for his radical skepticism who most likely flourished between 800-840 probably in southern India. He was the author of one of the most extraordinary philosophical works in Indian history, the Tattvopaplavasiṃha in which he professed radical skepticism, which posits the impossibility of knowledge. In his work, he attempts to show the contradictions of various philosophical positions as well as the counter positions. He is loosely affiliated to the materialist Cārvāka/Lokāyata school of philosophy but his affiliation with charvaka is disputed among scholars. H...
Go to Profile#935
Speusippus
407 BC - 339 BC (68 years)
Speusippus was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, c. 348 BC, Speusippus inherited the Academy, near age 60, and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, Speusippus frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimate principle, Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to h...
Go to Profile#936
Arrian
89 - 175 (86 years)
Arrian of Nicomedia was a Greek historian, public servant, military commander, and philosopher of the Roman period. The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian is considered the best source on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Scholars have generally preferred Arrian to other extant primary sources, though this attitude has changed somewhat in light of modern studies into Arrian's method.
Go to Profile#937
Jonathan Schaffer
#10659
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and also working in epistemology, mind, and language. He is best known for his work on grounding and his development of monism, and is also a notable proponent of contrastivism.
Go to Profile#938
Paul Virilio
#1791
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military. Virilio was a prolific creator of neologisms, most notably his concept of "Dromology", the all-around, pervasive inscription of speed in every aspect of life.
Go to Profile#939
Nino Cocchiarella
#12318
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Nino Cocchiarella is an American philosopher who is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. He is best known for his work in formal logic and ontology. Among his important articles are:"Nominalism and Conceptualism as Predicative Second Order Theories of Predication", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 21 "Richard Montague and the Logical Analysis of Language", in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol. 2, Philosophy of Language/Philosophical Logic, G. Fløistad, ed., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague "The Development of the Theory of Logical Types and the Notion of a Logical Subject in Russell's Early Philosophy", Synthese, vol.
Go to Profile#940
Barbara Cassin
#5113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida. In 2006 she succeeded Jonathan Barnes to the directorship of the leading centre of excellence in Ancient philosophy, Centre Leon-Robin, at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#941
Nae Ionescu
1890 - 1940 (50 years)
Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.
Go to Profile#942
Maurice Solovine
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Maurice Solovine was a Romanian philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his association with Albert Einstein. Biography Solovine was born in Iași, a university city in eastern Romania, near the border with Moldova. As a young student of philosophy in Bern, Solovine applied to study physics with Albert Einstein in response to an advertisement. The two men struck up a close relationship and Einstein was said to say to Solovine a few days after meeting him: "It is not necessary to give you lessons in physics. The discussion about the problems which we face in physics today is much more interesting; simply come to me when you wish.
Go to Profile#943
Jonathan Glover
#5884
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jonathan Glover is a British philosopher known for his books and studies on ethics. He currently teaches ethics at King's College London. Glover is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in the United States, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Go to Profile#944
Colin Wilson
#1147
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Colin Henry Wilson was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".
Go to Profile#945
Alan Gewirth
#8148
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Alan Gewirth was an American philosopher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and author of Reason and Morality , Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications , The Community of Rights , Self-Fulfillment , and numerous other writings in moral philosophy and political philosophy.
Go to Profile#946
Cato the Younger
95 BC - 46 BC (49 years)
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , also known as Cato the Younger , was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. His conservative principles were focused on the preservation of what he saw as old Roman values in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a powerful political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day.
Go to Profile#947
Jennifer Hornsby
#11296
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jennifer Hornsby, FBA is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.
Go to Profile#948
Theodor W. Adorno
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...
Go to Profile#949
Cornelio Fabro
#6747
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Cornelio Fabro CSS was an Italian Catholic priest of the Stigmatine Order and a scholastic Thomist philosopher. He was the founder of the Institute for Higher Studies on Unbelief, Religion and Cultures.
Go to Profile#950
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez
#5095
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez was a Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, writer and professor born in Algeciras, Andalucia. Biography After studying philosophy at the University of Madrid, Vázquez emigrated to Mexico in 1939 with thousands of other intellectuals, scientists and artists following the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, in which he participated as editor of the central publication of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas “Ahora”. Sánchez was appointed a full-time professor of philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1959, becoming a professor emeritus of the university in 1985.
Go to Profile