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 …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#101
Roger Penrose
#26
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
#102
Frank Cameron Jackson
#1056
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Frank Cameron Jackson is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University where he had spent most of the latter part of his career. His primary research interests include epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind. In the latter field he is best known for the "Mary's room" knowledge argument, a thought experiment that is one of the most discussed challenges to physicalism.
Go to Profile#103
Jaakko Hintikka
#1694
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. Life and career Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta .
Go to Profile#104
Arthur Danto
#970
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Arthur Coleman Danto was an American art critic, philosopher, and professor at Columbia University. He was best known for having been a long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action. His interests included thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Go to Profile#105
Rosalind Hursthouse
#2552
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rosalind Hursthouse is a British-born New Zealand moral philosopher noted for her work on virtue ethics. She is one of the leading exponents of contemporary virtue ethics, though she has also written extensively on philosophy of action, history of philosophy, moral psychology, and biomedical ethics. Hursthouse is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Auckland and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Go to Profile#106
Graham Priest
#1744
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#107
Gilbert Harman
#1288
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.
Go to Profile#108
Scott Soames
#2630
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#109
Giorgio Agamben
#310
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life homo sacer, and indifference. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings.
Go to Profile#110
Robert Audi
#1257
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert N. Audi is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics , rationality and the theory of action. He is O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and previously held a chair in the business school there. His 2005 book, The Good in the Right, updates and strengthens Rossian intuitionism and develops the epistemology of ethics. He has also written important works of political philosophy, particularly on the relationship between church and state. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Society of Christi...
Go to Profile#111
Luciano Floridi
#983
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#112
Jan Woleński
#1549
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jan Hertrich-Woleński is a Polish philosopher specializing in the history of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his academic career at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he is currently professor emeritus. His main fields of research are logic, epistemology, and the history of philosophy in Poland.
Go to Profile#113
J. J. C. Smart
#1498
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
John Jamieson Carswell Smart was a British-Australian philosopher who was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote several entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#114
Crispin Wright
#1749
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Crispin James Garth Wright is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity. He is Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling, and taught previously at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, New York University, Princeton University and University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#115
Paul Benacerraf
#1699
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf is a French-born American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who taught at Princeton University his entire career, from 1960 until his retirement in 2007. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and retired as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy.
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Józef Maria Bocheński
#1861
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Józef Maria Bocheński or Innocentius Bochenski was a Polish Dominican, logician and philosopher. Biography Born on 30 August 1902 in Czuszów, then part of the Russian Empire, to a family with patriotic and pro-independence traditions. His predecessors had fought in the Napoleonic wars and various national uprisings. His father, Adolf Józef Bocheński , who greatly developed the family estate, was a landowning activist, volunteer in the 1920 war and a doctor of agricultural sciences; his interest in economic history influenced Józef’s own reflections on economic doctrine and his personal aversion to Marxism.
Go to Profile#117
John Finnis
#512
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#118
Martin Gardner
#47
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century".
Go to Profile#119
Quentin Meillassoux
#1944
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#120
Ken Wilber
#280
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience.
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Paulo Freire
#83
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and marxist philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences according to Google Scholar.
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John Hick
#953
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
John Harwood Hick was a philosopher of religion and theologian born in England who taught in the United States for the larger part of his career. In philosophical theology, he made contributions in the areas of theodicy, eschatology, and Christology, and in the philosophy of religion he contributed to the areas of epistemology of religion and religious pluralism.
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Harry Frankfurt
#1721
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Harry Gordon Frankfurt was an American philosopher. He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002. Frankfurt also taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.
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Geoffrey Bennington
#986
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Geoffrey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is a literary critic and philosopher, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Bennington has translated many of Derrida's works into English.
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Nicholas Wolterstorff
#2130
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on aesthetics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of education. In Faith and Rationality, Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, and William Alston developed and expanded upon a view of religious epistemology that has come to be known as Reformed epistemology. He also helped to establish the ...
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Bernard Stiegler
#578
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation , which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of "politicised researchers" His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
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Mary Midgley
#1076
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man , when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter , Wickedness , The Ethical Primate , Evolution as a Religion , and Science as Salvation . She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.
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Arne Næss
#919
Overall Influence
1912 - 2009 (97 years)
Arne Dekke Eide Næss was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term "deep ecology", an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth century, and a prolific writer on many other philosophical issues. Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action.
Go to Profile#129
Paul Churchland
#1469
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#130
Christine Korsgaard
#2713
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Christine Marion Korsgaard, is an American philosopher who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University. Her main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general.
Go to Profile#131
Zygmunt Bauman
#623
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-born sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
Go to Profile#132
James Rachels
#2872
Overall Influence
1941 - 2003 (62 years)
James Webster Rachels was an American philosopher who specialized in ethics and animal rights. Biography Rachels was born in Columbus, Georgia, and graduated from Mercer University in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying under W. D. Falk and E. M. Adams. He taught at the University of Richmond, New York University, the University of Miami, Duke University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he spent the last twenty-six years of his career. He married Carol Williams in 1962, and they had two sons, David and Stuart.
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David Kelley
#1952
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Christopher Kelley is an American philosopher. He is a professed Objectivist, though his position that Objectivism can be revised and influenced by other schools of thought has prompted disagreements with other Objectivists. Kelley is also an author of several books on philosophy and the founder of The Atlas Society, an institution he established in 1990 after permanently dissociating with Leonard Peikoff and the Ayn Rand Institute.
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Jonathan Barnes
#2243
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan Barnes, FBA is an English scholar of Aristotelian and ancient philosophy. Education and career He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford University. He taught for 25 years at Oxford University before moving to the University of Geneva. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, 1968–78; a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, 1978–94, and has been Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College since 1994.
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Peter Vallentyne
#3214
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Vallentyne is Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. Biography Vallentyne received his B.A. from McGill University in 1978 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, under the direction of David Gauthier and with significant help from Shelly Kagan. He formerly taught at the University of Western Ontario and Virginia Commonwealth University .
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Ruth Barcan Marcus
#2104
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Ruth Barcan Marcus was an American academic philosopher and logician best known for her work in modal and philosophical logic. She developed the first formal systems of quantified modal logic and in so doing introduced the schema or principle known as the Barcan formula. Marcus, who originally published as Ruth C. Barcan, was, as Don Garrett notes "one of the twentieth century's most important and influential philosopher-logicians". Timothy Williamson, in a 2008 celebration of Marcus' long career, states that many of her "main ideas are not just original, and clever, and beautiful, and fasci...
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Axel Honneth
#1337
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.
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Jean-Luc Marion
#1345
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Roman Catholic theologian. Marion is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. Much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, but also religion. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida.
Go to Profile#139
Jason Josephson Storm
#742
Overall Influence
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American academic, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is currently Professor and chair in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. He also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Storm's research focuses on Japanese religions, European intellectual history from 1600 to the present, and theory in religious studies. His more recent work has discussed disenchantment and philosophy of social science.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#819
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar. He is University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in Iran and the United States, earning a bachelor's degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's in geology and geophysics, and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University. He returned to his homeland in 1958, turning down teaching positions at MIT and Harvard, and was appointed a professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University. H...
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John Searle
#1167
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.
Go to Profile#142
Michael Huemer
#2679
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has defended ethical intuitionism, direct realism, libertarianism, veganism, the repugnant conclusion, and philosophical anarchism.
Go to Profile#143
David Gauthier
#2661
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
David Gauthier was a Canadian philosopher best known for his neo-Hobbesian social contract theory of morality, as developed in his 1986 book Morals by Agreement. Life and career David Gauthier was born in Toronto on 10 September 1932. He was educated at the University of Toronto , Harvard University , and the University of Oxford .
Go to Profile#144
Helga Kuhse
#2726
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist. Kuhse was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to Australia in 1962. From the 1970s, she was one of the first philosophers to address the ethical implications of the developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. With Peter Singer, she founded the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in 1980, one of the first research centres in the world devoted entirely to bioethics. She served as Director of the Centre until June 1999. Her ideas on the end of life, the right to die, and assisted death, have prompted controv...
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Colin Murray Turbayne
#2400
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Colin Murray Turbayne was an Australian philosopher and an internationally recognized authority on the writings of George Berkeley. He spent most of his thirty five year academic career at the University of Rochester and was noted as the author of the book The Myth of Metaphor.
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Peter Winch
#3547
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Peter Guy Winch was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of social science, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Winch is perhaps most famous for his early book, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy , an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
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Robert Anton Wilson
#239
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
Go to Profile#148
Bernard Rollin
#2839
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Bernard Elliot Rollin was an American philosopher, who was emeritus professor of philosophy, animal sciences, and biomedical sciences at Colorado State University. He was considered to be the "father of veterinary medical ethics".
Go to Profile#149
Ted Honderich
#2558
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ted Honderich is a Canadian-born British professor of philosophy, who was Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London. Biography Honderich was born Edgar Dawn Ross Honderich on 30 January 1933 in Baden, Ontario, Canada, the younger brother of Beland Honderich, who became publisher of the Toronto Star. An undergraduate at the University of Toronto, qualifying as B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature, he came to University College London to study under the logical positivist and Grote Professor A. J. Ayer, graduating with a PhD in 1968. He has since lived in England and become a British citizen.
Go to Profile#150
Patrick Suppes
#1404
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Patrick Colonel Suppes was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.
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