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,
#1251
Karl Haushofer
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Karl Ernst Haushofer was a German general, professor, geographer, and diplomat. Haushofer's concept of Geopolitik influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler. Rudolf Hess was also a student of Haushofer, and during Hess and Hitler's incarceration by the Weimar Republic after the Beer Hall Putsch, Haushofer visited Landsberg prison to teach and mentor both Hess and Hitler. Haushofer also coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler also used to justify both crimes against peace and genocide. At the same time, however, Gen. Haushofer's half-Jewish wife and their children were categorized as Mischlinge under the Nuremberg Laws.
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Ali Akbar Rashad
#11116
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ali Akbar Rashad is an Iranian philosopher and Islamic scholar who pioneered the Ibtina Theory, a theory for explaining the process and mechanism of "religious knowledge" formation. He is currently a professor at the Islamic Research Institute for Culture and Thought as well as a member of the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council . He is also the founder and chair of Imam Reza Islamic seminary. The has presented articles and delivered speeches at conferences and scientific and philosophical conventions and conferences in different countries including Germany, the United States, the United Arab...
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François Regnault
#6236
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
François Regnault is a French philosopher, playwright and dramaturg. Also a university instructor and teacher, Regnault was maître de conférences at Paris VIII before his retirement. Among his various writings he is the author, with Jean-Claude Milner, of the seminal Dire le vers and of Conférences d'esthétique lacanienne.
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Dewitt H. Parker
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Dewitt H. Parker was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Appointed department chair in 1929, Parker published works on metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. Publications Books The Self and Nature The Principles of Aesthetics The Analysis of Art Human Values Experience and Substance The Philosophy of Value
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Howard Caygill
#12980
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Howard Caygill is a British philosopher. He has held the position of Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Kingston University since 2011. Previously he had taught at University of East Anglia and Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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Robert Crumb
#641
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Dennis Crumb is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
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Rubem Alves
#4310
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Rubem Azevedo Alves was a Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, writer and psychoanalyst. Alves was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. Life Alves was born on 15 September 1933, in Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He obtained his Bachelor of Theology degree at the Presbyterian Seminary in Campinas, Brazil, in 1957. He went on to obtain a Master of Theology from the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, United States, in 1964. After completing this degree, Alves returned to Brazil amidst a US-sponsored military coup against the democratically elected Brazilian government.
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Ahmad Sirhindi
1564 - 1624 (60 years)
Aḥmad al-Fārūqī al-Sirhindī , also known as Imam Rabbani and Mujadid Alf-e-Sani , was an Indian Islamic scholar, Hanafi jurist, and member of the Naqshbandī Sufi order. He has been described by some followers as a Mujaddid, meaning a “reviver", for his work in rejuvenating Islam and opposing Din-i Ilahi and other policies of Mughal emperor Akbar. While early South Asian scholarship credited him for contributing to conservative trends in Indian Islam, more recent works, notably by ter Haar, Friedman, and Buehler, have pointed to Sirhindi's significant contributions to Sufi epistemology and prac...
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Larry Laudan
#3831
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Larry Laudan was an American philosopher of science and epistemologist. He strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he defended a view of science as a privileged and progressive institution against popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as an important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs".
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Carl Ginet
#12068
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Carl Ginet is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. His work is primarily in action theory, moral responsibility, free will, and epistemology. Ginet received his BA from Occidental College in 1954, and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1960 with a dissertation titled "Reasons, Causes, and Free Will". He joined the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell in 1971 and retired in 1999. Before Cornell, Ginet was a faculty member of various universities, including Ohio State University, University of Michigan, and University of Rochester.
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Tara Smith
#12079
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Tara A. Smith is an American philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy, the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism, and the Anthem Foundation Fellow for the Study of Objectivism at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Jose Maria Sison
#1814
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Jose Maria Canlas Sison , also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer, poet and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy – which would be known as national democracy. He applied the theory of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to the history and current circumstances of the Philippines.
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Geoffrey Warnock
#10418
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Sir Geoffrey James Warnock was an English philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood , he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock. Life Warnock was born at Neville House, Chapel Allerton, Leeds, West Yorkshire, to James Warnock , OBE, a general practitioner from Northern Ireland who had been a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Kathleen . The Warnocks later lived at Grade II-listed Pull Croft, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire .
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René Magritte
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
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Romano Guardini
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Romano Guardini was an Italian, naturalized German Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian. Life Romano Michele Antonio Maria Guardini was born in Verona in 1885 and was baptized in the Church of San Nicolò all'Arena. His father Romano Tullo was a poultry wholesaler. Guardini had three younger brothers. The family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life. He attended the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium. Guardini wrote that as a young man he was “always anxious and very scrupulous.”
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Alessandro Padoa
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
Alessandro Padoa was an Italian mathematician and logician, a contributor to the school of Giuseppe Peano. He is remembered for a method for deciding whether, given some formal theory, a new primitive notion is truly independent of the other primitive notions. There is an analogous problem in axiomatic theories, namely deciding whether a given axiom is independent of the other axioms.
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Menachem Mendel Schneerson
#968
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Menachem Mendel Schneerson , known to adherents of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as the Lubavitcher Rebbe or simply the Rebbe, was an Orthodox rabbi and the most recent Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
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Eric Gutkind
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Eric Gutkind was a German Jewish philosopher, born in Berlin. Life His parents were Hermann Gutkind and Elise Weinberg . Eric Gutkind was born in Berlin and educated at the Humanistic Gymnasium and the University of Berlin. He studied anthropology with J. J. Bachofen, and also worked in philosophy, mathematics, the sciences and the history of art. Starting with a vision of history having something in common with ancient Gnosticism, he became increasingly interested in Jewish philosophy and formulated his ideas in terms of concepts drawn from the Kabbala.
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David Pinsent
1891 - 1918 (27 years)
David Hume Pinsent was a collaborator and an alleged lover of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is dedicated to Pinsent's memory. Early life Pinsent, a descendant of philosopher David Hume's brother, John Home, was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham. He gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, where he was described by George Thomson, future master of Corpus Christi College as "the most brilliant man of my year, among the most brilliant I have ever met". Pinsent then studied law.
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Axel Hägerström
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström was a Swedish philosopher. Born in Vireda, Jönköping County, Sweden, he was the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. As student at Uppsala University, he gave up theology for a career in philosophy. Teaching there from 1893 until his retirement in 1933, he attacked the then dominant philosophical idealism of the followers of Christopher Jacob Boström . He is best known as a founder of the positivistic Uppsala school of philosophy—the Swedish counterpart of the Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy as well as of the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle—and as the...
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František Kupka
1871 - 1957 (86 years)
František Kupka , also known as Frank Kupka or François Kupka, was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic Cubism . Kupka's abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstract art.
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Maria Ossowska
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Maria Ossowska was a Polish sociologist and social philosopher. Life A student of the philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński, she originally in 1925 received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warsaw with a thesis on Bertrand Russell. In her later work, she focused on the philosophy and sociology of ethics. Ossowska is often mentioned as a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school.
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J. M. W. Turner
1775 - 1851 (76 years)
Joseph Mallord William Turner , known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. He left behind more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.
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John Wisdom
#13045
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom , usually cited as John Wisdom, was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician. He was influenced by G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work.
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Jean Bethke Elshtain
#4489
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Jean Paulette Bethke Elshtain was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School with a joint appointment in the department of political science.
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McKenzie Wark
#6239
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
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Alastair Norcross
#14562
Overall Influence
Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy. He is a defender of utilitarianism.
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Michel Onfray
#5226
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michel Onfray is a French writer and philosopher with a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist worldview. A highly-prolific author on philosophy, he has written over 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism. He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traité d'athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique , Politique du rebelle: traité de résistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzchéen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which...
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Aspasius
80 - 150 (70 years)
Aspasius was a Peripatetic philosopher. Boethius, who frequently refers to his works, says that Aspasius wrote commentaries on most of the works of Aristotle. The following commentaries are expressly mentioned: on De Interpretatione, the Physica, Metaphysica, Categoriae, and the Nicomachean Ethics. A portion of the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is extant. The Greek text of this commentary has been published as Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca vol. 19.1, and David Konstan has published an English translation. It is notable as the earliest extant commentary on any of Aristotle's works.
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Judah Folkman
#4085
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Moses Judah Folkman was an American biologist and pediatric surgeon best known for his research on tumor angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor attracts blood vessels to nourish itself and sustain its existence. He founded the field of angiogenesis research, which has led to the discovery of a number of therapies based on inhibiting or stimulating neovascularization.
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Josef Breuer
1842 - 1925 (83 years)
Josef Breuer was an Austrian physician who made discoveries in neurophysiology, and whose work during the 1880s with his patient Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., developed the talking cure which was used as the basis of psychoanalysis as developed by his protégé Sigmund Freud.
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David Sedley
#12183
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Neil Sedley FBA is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University. Early life Sedley was educated at Trinity College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1969. He was awarded a PhD in 1974 by University College London for a text, translation and commentary on Book XXVIII of Epicurus' On Nature.
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Keith Campbell
#16690
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Keith Campbell is an Australian philosopher working in metaphysics. Biography With D. M. Armstrong, Campbell is one of the founders of so-called Australian materialism and, within it, of a variety of trope theory. He also has a distinctive view of concrete and abstract objects: the former can exist by themselves, and the latter are incapable of independent existence.
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Dorothy Emmet
#16025
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Dorothy Mary Emmet was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years. With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers. She was the doctoral advisor of Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Austin Markus. Emmet was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, where she took first-class honours in 1927.
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Adam Schaff
#13307
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Adam Schaff was a Polish Marxist philosopher. Life Of Jewish origin, Schaff was born in Lemberg into a lawyer's family. Schaff studied economics at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques et Economiques in Paris, and philosophy in Poland, specializing in epistemology. In 1945 he received a philosophy degree at Moscow University, and in 1948 he returned to Warsaw University. He was considered the official ideologue of the Polish United Workers' Party, especially during its Stalinist period.
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Jean de La Bruyère
1645 - 1696 (51 years)
Jean de La Bruyère was a French philosopher and moralist, who was noted for his satire. Early years Jean de La Bruyère was born in Paris, in today's Essonne département, in 1645. His family was middle class, and his reference to a certain "Geoffroy de La Bruyère", a crusader, is only a satirical illustration of a method of self-ennoblement then common in France, as in some other countries. As such, he signed his surname as Delabruyère in one word, as evidence of this disdain.
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Tomonobu Imamichi
#14555
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Tomonobu Imamichi was a Japanese philosopher who studied Chinese philosophy. Life Imamichi taught in Europe as well as in Japan . Beginning in 1979 he was the president of the Centre International pour l'Étude Comparée de Philosophie et d'Esthétique and after 1997 of the International Institute of Philosophy. In 1976 he founded the journal Aesthetics.
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William Lloyd Garrison
1805 - 1879 (74 years)
William Lloyd Garrison was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
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Michael Devitt
#13637
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Devitt is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City. His primary interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His current work involves the philosophy of linguistics, foundational issues in semantics, the semantics of definite descriptions and demonstratives, semantic externalism, and scientific realism.
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Phillip Blond
#5657
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Phillip Blond is an English political philosopher, Anglican theologian, and director of the ResPublica think tank. Early life Born in Liverpool and educated at Pensby High School for Boys, Blond went on to study philosophy and politics at the University of Hull, continental philosophy at the University of Warwick, and theology at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge. At Peterhouse, he was a student of John Milbank, founder of the radical orthodoxy theological movement and a noted critic of liberalism, philosophically understood. Blond's first work, Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philos...
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Pierre Bonnard
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took pr...
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Gideon Rosen
#14054
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Gideon Rosen is an American philosopher. He is a Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, and ethics. Education and career Rosen graduated from Columbia University in 1984 and obtained his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1992, under the supervision of Paul Benacerraf. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for several years before joining the Princeton faculty in 1993. He has served as chair of Princeton's Council of the Humanities and director of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows.
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Matti Häyry
#11873
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Matti Häyry is Professor of Philosophy at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. In 2004-2013, he was Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law at the University of Manchester in England, and before that he held professorships in philosophy and moral philosophy at the universities of Central Lancashire and Kuopio.
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Pamfil Yurkevich
1826 - 1874 (48 years)
Pamfil Danilovich Yurkevich was a Ukrainian philosopher and teacher of philosophy at the Imperial University of Moscow. Yurkevich in 1851–1861 was a professor of philosophy at the Kyiv Theological Academy, also taught at the Academy of the German language, was an assistant inspector of the Academy. In 1861, he was transferred from Kyiv to Moscow and was appointed a professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow though his training previous to this position was mostly from Orthodox theological schools. Specifically the Poltava Seminary and the Kyiv Theological Academy. Yurkevich was remembered for his critical stance against materialism in specific modern materialism.
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James F. Conant
#9587
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
James Ferguson Conant is an American philosopher at the University of Chicago who has written extensively on topics in philosophy of language, ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is perhaps best known for his writings on Wittgenstein, and his association with the New Wittgenstein school of Wittgenstein interpretation initiated by Cora Diamond.
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Abraham Joshua Heschel
1907 - 1972 (65 years)
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was a leader in the civil rights movement.
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Augusto Del Noce
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Augusto Del Noce was an Italian philosopher and political thinker. He is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers after the Second World War in Italy. Life and works Del Noce was born in Tuscany but he grew up and studied in Turin, which between the two World Wars was one of the main centers of secular and anti-Fascist culture in Italy. He completed his degree in Philosophy in 1932 at the University of Turin, with a dissertation on Malebranche under the direction of Adolfo Faggi. Between 1934 and 1943 he published a series of essays on early modern philosophy tha...
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George Emil Palade
#707
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
George Emil Palade was a Romanian-American cell biologist. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine along with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology, the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum – which he first described in 1955.
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Joseph B. Soloveitchik
#3675
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was a major American Orthodox rabbi, Talmudist, and modern Jewish philosopher. He was a scion of the Lithuanian Jewish Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. As a rosh yeshiva of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York City, The Rav, as he was known, ordained close to 2,000 rabbis over the course of almost half a century. Rabbinic literature sometimes refers to him as הגרי"ד, short for "The great Rabbi Yosef Dov".
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Dan Zahavi
#8632
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Dan Zahavi is a Danish philosopher. He is currently a professor of philosophy at University of Copenhagen. Biography Dan Zahavi was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Israeli father and a Danish mother. He initially studied phenomenology at the University of Copenhagen. He obtained his PhD in 1994 from the Husserl Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium, with Rudolf Bernet as his doctoral supervisor. In 1999 he defended his Danish Disputats at the University of Copenhagen. In 2002, at the age of 34, he became Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen.
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