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,
#951
T. H. Green
1836 - 1882 (46 years)
Thomas Hill Green , known as T. H. Green, was an English philosopher, political radical and temperance reformer, and a member of the British idealism movement. Like all the British idealists, Green was influenced by the metaphysical historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. He was one of the thinkers behind the philosophy of social liberalism.
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John Haugeland
#3386
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
John Haugeland was a professor of philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, and Heidegger. He spent most of his career at the University of Pittsburgh, followed by the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World.
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Nicholas Maxwell
#4769
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Nicholas Maxwell is a British philosopher. Maxwell taught philosophy of science at University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader. In 2003 he founded Friends of Wisdom. He has published fifteen books. He has published over eighty papers in scientific and philosophical journals on problems that range from consciousness, free will, value, and art to the rationality of science, simplicity, scientific realism, explanation, time and quantum theory.
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Samuel Scheffler
#8231
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Samuel Ira Scheffler is a moral and political philosopher, who is University Professor of Philosophy and Law in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University. Education and career Before moving to NYU in 2008, Scheffler taught for 31 years at the University of California, Berkeley. Scheffler received his PhD from Princeton University, where he was a student of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
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Mary Daly
#1807
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Once a practicing Roman Catholic, she had disavowed Christianity by the early 1970s. Daly retired from Boston College in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes. She allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.
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Paul Farmer
#868
Overall Influence
1959 - 2022 (63 years)
Paul Edward Farmer was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he was a University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health , an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He was professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equ...
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Fernand Léger
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art.
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Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
1150 - 1210 (60 years)
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī or Fakhruddin Razi , often known by the sobriquet Sultan of the Theologians, was an influential Muslim polymath, scientist and one of the pioneers of inductive logic. He wrote various works in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, literature, theology, ontology, philosophy, history and jurisprudence. He was one of the earliest proponents and skeptics that came up with the concept of multiverse, and compared it with the astronomical teachings of Quran. A rejector of the geocentric model and the Aristotelian notions of a single universe revolvin...
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Hadi Sabzavari
1797 - 1873 (76 years)
Hadi Sabzavari or Hajj Molla Hadi Sabzavari was an Iranian philosopher, mystic theologian and poet. Historical background Molla Hadi lived in the Qajar period. According to his description, this period was along with descend of Hikmah; he also complained of his period for the sake of lacking knowledge and philosophy. This kind of thinking was common among Islamic philosophers. There was an intellectual and spiritual turmoil in the Qajar period. In fact, in this period, Iranian encountered with new European thought and revival of traditional thinking; also in this period we can see the divers...
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Thomas Jay Oord
#4268
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and multidisciplinary scholar who directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He formerly taught for sixteen years as a tenured professor at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho and before that a philosophy professor at Eastern Nazarene College. Oord is the author or editor of more than thirty books and hundreds of articles. He is known for his contributions to research on love, open theism, process theism, open and relational theology, postmodernism, the relationship betwe...
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Piero Martinetti
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Piero Martinetti was an Italian philosopher. Martinetti was professor of theoretical and moral philosophy. He was one of the few university professors, as well as the only Italian academic philosopher, to refuse to swear an oath of allegiance to the Fascist Party.
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John Dee
1527 - 1608 (81 years)
John Dee was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated the foundation of English colonies in the New World to form a "British Empire", a term he is credited with coining.
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Gaunilo of Marmoutiers
994 - 1083 (89 years)
Gaunilo or Gaunillon was a Benedictine monk of Marmoutier Abbey in Tours, France. He is best known for his contemporary criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God which appeared in St Anselm's Proslogion. In his work In Behalf of the Fool, Gaunilo contends that St Anselm's ontological argument fails because logic of the same kind would force one to conclude many things exist which certainly do not. An empiricist, Gaunilo thought that the human intellect is only able to comprehend information provided by the senses.
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Willem de Kooning
#618
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
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Newton da Costa
#4201
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions.
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Agrippa the Skeptic
100 - 100 (0 years)
Agrippa was a Pyrrhonist philosopher who probably lived towards the end of the 1st century CE. He is regarded as the author of "The Five Tropes of Agrippa", which are purported to establish the necessity of suspending judgment . Agrippa's arguments form the basis of the Agrippan trilemma.
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Deborah Mayo
#6806
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Deborah G. Mayo is an American philosopher of science and author. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech and holds a visiting appointment at the Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics.
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Ernst Mally
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Ernst Mally was an Austrian analytic philosopher, initially affiliated with Alexius Meinong's Graz School of object theory. Mally was one of the founders of deontic logic and is mainly known for his contributions in that field of research. In metaphysics, he is known for introducing a distinction between two kinds of predication, better known as the dual predication approach.
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Bodhidharma
483 - 540 (57 years)
Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary Buddhist monk who lived during the 5th or 6th century CE. He is traditionally credited as the transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, and is regarded as its first Chinese patriarch. According to a 17th-century apocryphal story found in a manual called Yijin Jing, he began the physical training of the monks of Shaolin Monastery that led to the creation of Shaolin kungfu. He is known as Dámó in China and as Daruma in Japan. His name means "dharma of awakening " in Sanskrit.
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Ivan Ilyin
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin or Il'in was a Russian jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and conservative monarchist. He perceived the February Revolution as a "temporary disorder" and the October Revolution as a "national catastrophe", and actively joined the struggle against the Bolshevik regime. He became a white émigré journalist, a Slavophile, and an ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union, which believed that force was the only means by which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
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Alfred Edward Taylor
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Alfred Edward Taylor , usually cited as A. E. Taylor, was a British idealist philosopher most famous for his contributions to the philosophy of idealism in his writings on metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and the scholarship of Plato. He was a fellow of the British Academy and president of the Aristotelian Society from 1928 to 1929. At Oxford he was made an honorary fellow of New College in 1931. In an age of universal upheaval and strife, he was a notable defender of Idealism in the Anglophone world.
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Adolf Reinach
1883 - 1917 (34 years)
Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach was a German philosopher, phenomenologist and law theorist. Life and work Adolf Reinach was born into a prominent Jewish family in Mainz, Germany, on 23 December 1883.
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Jonathan Edwards
1703 - 1758 (55 years)
Jonathan Edwards was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian. A leading figure of the American Enlightenment, Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians. Edwards' theological work is broad in scope but rooted in the paedobaptist Puritan heritage as exemplified in the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central the Age of Enlightenment was to his mindset.
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John Hawthorne
#12231
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.
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Léon Robin
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Léon Robin was a French philosopher and scholar of Greek philosophy, professor of history of ancient philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1924 to 1936. Robin, the son of a merchant, began teaching in the Faculty of Letters at Paris in 1913. In 1924 he took up the chair of history of ancient philosophy, which had lapsed after the death of Louis Rodier in 1913. In 1927 he was visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. On his retirement from the Paris chair, his successor was Pierre-Maxime Schuhl. Robin subsequently served as Director of the International Institute of Philosophy.
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John Sallis
#7136
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Sallis is an American philosopher well known for his work in the tradition of phenomenology. Since 2005, he has been the Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has previously taught at Pennsylvania State University , Vanderbilt University , Loyola University of Chicago , Duquesne University and the University of the South .
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Vallabha
1479 - 1531 (52 years)
Vallabhacharya Mahaprabhu , also known as Vallabha, Mahaprabhuji and Vishnuswami, or Vallabha Acharya, was an Indian saint and philosopher. He founded the Krishna-centered Pushtimarg sect of Vaishnavism in the Braj region of India, and propounded the philosophy of Śuddhādvaita.
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Hasdai Crescas
1340 - 1410 (70 years)
Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas was a Spanish-Jewish philosopher and a renowned halakhist . Along with Maimonides , Gersonides , and Joseph Albo, he is known as one of the major practitioners of the rationalist approach to Jewish philosophy.
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Stephen Neale
#7640
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York .
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Timothy Sprigge
#11188
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge , usually cited as T. L. S. Sprigge, was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and latterly an Emeritus Fellow.
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Samuel von Pufendorf
1632 - 1694 (62 years)
Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist and historian. He was born Samuel Pufendorf and ennobled in 1694; he was made a baron by Charles XI of Sweden a few months before his death at age 62. Among his achievements are his commentaries and revisions of the natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.
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John Lemmon
1930 - 1966 (36 years)
Edward John Lemmon was a British logician and philosopher born in Sheffield, England. He is most well known for his work on modal logic, particularly his joint text with Dana Scott published posthumously .
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Thomas Molnar
#6628
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Thomas Steven Molnar was a Catholic philosopher, historian and political theorist. Life Molnar completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Brussels in Belgium and received his Ph.D. in philosophy and history from Columbia University in New York City.
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Peter Boghossian
#3910
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Peter Gregory Boghossian is an American philosopher and pedagogue. Born in Boston, he was a non-tenure track assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for ten years, and his areas of academic focus include atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists and How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
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Michael Psellos
1018 - 1078 (60 years)
Michael Psellos or Psellus was a Byzantine Greek monk, savant, writer, philosopher, imperial courtier, historian and music theorist. He was born in 1017 or 1018, and is believed to have died in 1078, although it has also been maintained that he remained alive until 1096. He served as a high ranking advisor to several Byzantine emperors and was instrumental in the re-positioning of power of those emperors.
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Alain Finkielkraut
#1625
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alain Luc Finkielkraut is a French essayist and public intellectual. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, many on the ideas of tradition and identitary nonviolence, including Jewish identity and antisemitism, French colonialism, the mission of the French education system in immigrant assimilation, and the Yugoslav Wars. He often appears on French television.
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Frank Ankersmit
#5763
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen. Ankersmit, member of the family of textile manufacturers Ankersmit, initially studied physics and mathematics in Leiden for three years and then did his military service. He next studied both history and philosophy at the University of Groningen. In 1981 he took his doctoral degree at that same University with a dissertation entitled Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. In 1986 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences .
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Stephen Law
#4756
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Stephen Law is an English philosopher. He is currently Director of the Certificate in Higher and Education and Director of Philosophy at The Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Law was previously Reader in Philosophy and Head of Department of Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, until its closure in June 2018. He also edits the philosophical journal Think, which is sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and published by the Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce and in 2008 became the provost of the...
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Herophilos
335 BC - 280 BC (55 years)
Herophilos , sometimes Latinised Herophilus, was a Greek physician regarded as one of the earliest anatomists. Born in Chalcedon, he spent the majority of his life in Alexandria. He was the first scientist to systematically perform scientific dissections of human cadavers. He recorded his findings in over nine works, which are now all lost. The early Christian author Tertullian states that Herophilos vivisected at least 600 live prisoners; however, this account has been disputed by many historians. He is often seen as the father of anatomy.
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Eleonore Stump
#10398
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eleonore Stump is an American philosopher and the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. Biography Eleonore Stump received her first degree, a B.A. in classical languages from Grinnell College in 1969. She was class valedictorian and received the Archibald Prize for scholarship. She has an M.A. in biblical studies from Harvard University , and an M.A. and Ph.D. in medieval studies from Cornell University . Before coming to Saint Louis University, she taught at Oberlin College, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and University of Notre Dame.
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Roger Crisp
#11730
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Roger Stephen Crisp is fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford. He holds the university posts of Professor of Moral Philosophy and Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy. His work falls principally within the field of ethics, in particular metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. In addition, he is chairman of the Management Committee of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
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Walter Terence Stace
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Walter Terence Stace was a British civil servant, educator, public philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, mysticism, and moral relativism. He worked with the Ceylon Civil Service from 1910 to 1932, and from 1932 to 1955 he was employed by Princeton University in the Department of Philosophy. He is most renowned for his work in the philosophy of mysticism, and for books like Mysticism and Philosophy and Teachings of the Mystics . These works have been influential in the study of mysticism, but they have also been severely criticised for their lack of methodological rigor and thei...
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Vincent Descombes
#7749
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Vincent Descombes is a French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Philosophical work Descombes is particularly noted for a lengthy critique in two volumes of the project he calls cognitivism, and which is, roughly, the view current in philosophy of mind that mental and psychological facts can ultimately be treated as, or reduced to, physical facts about the brain.
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Peter Suber
#3813
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Peter Dain Suber is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project . Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access movement, and as the creator of the game Nomic.
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Carl Gustav Carus
1789 - 1869 (80 years)
Carl Gustav Carus was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played various roles during the Romantic era. A friend of the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist, a psychologist, and a landscape painter who studied under Caspar David Friedrich.
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R. B. Braithwaite
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Richard Bevan Braithwaite was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Life Braithwaite was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, son of the historian of early Quaker history, William Charles Braithwaite. He was educated at Sidcot School, Somerset , and Bootham School, York, 1914–18. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he served in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.
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Rushworth Kidder
#8631
Overall Influence
1944 - 2012 (68 years)
Rushworth Moulton Kidder was an American author, ethicist, and professor. Kidder founded the Institute for Global Ethics in 1990, and is the author of Moral Courage and How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living. He was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. He worked as a columnist and editor for The Christian Science Monitor. Kidder died in 2012 of natural causes in Naples, Florida at the age of 67. Kidder earned a doctorate from Columbia University in English and comparative literature and wrote the foreword to Compassion Wins, by Godfrey John. He wrote an award ...
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David M. Rosenthal
#10247
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Rosenthal is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly in the area of consciousness and related topics. He is professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He was educated at the University of Chicago and then Princeton University. Rosenthal also has research interests in cognitive science, and is Coordinator of the CUNY Graduate Center's Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science. And he has done work in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and 17th-centur...
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Andreas Kinneging
#5751
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Andreas Antonius Maria Kinneging is Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Leiden, and a conservative philosopher in the Netherlands. Background Kinneging was raised in a Catholic family in the Dutch province of Zeeland. He studied political science at the Catholic University of Nijmegen , graduating with the highest honours.
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Émile Boutroux
1845 - 1921 (76 years)
Étienne Émile Marie Boutroux was an eminent 19th-century French philosopher of science and religion, and a historian of philosophy. He was a firm opponent of materialism in science. He was a spiritual philosopher who defended the idea that religion and science are compatible at a time when the power of science was rising inexorably. His work is overshadowed in the English-speaking world by that of the more celebrated Henri Bergson. He was elected membership of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1898 and in 1912 to the Académie française.
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