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.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#13701
Teodoro de Almeida
1722 - 1804 (82 years)
Teodoro de Almeida was a Portuguese Catholic priest, member of the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, a writer and philosopher, and a leading personage of the Portuguese Enlightenment.
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Johann Friedrich Flatt
1759 - 1821 (62 years)
Johann Friedrich Flatt was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher. Life Johann Friedrich Flatt was born in Tübingen. His brother, Karl Christian Flatt , was also a theologian. He studied philosophy and theology in Tübingen, afterwards continuing his education in Göttingen. In 1785 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where in 1792 he was appointed an associate professor of theology. In 1798 he succeeded Gottlob Christian Storr as a full professor of theology at Tübingen.
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Hendrik van Eikema Hommes
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Hendrik Jan van Eikema Hommes was a noted Dutch legal scholar and successor to Herman Dooyeweerd in the post of philosopher and judicial scholar at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Van Eikema Hommes wrote an Introduction to the Philosophy of Dooyeweerd, along with numerous legal studies. He was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.
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Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen
1663 - 1727 (64 years)
Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen was a 17th-century German philologist. Biography He received his master's degree from the University of Leipzig in 1685. His dissertation, titled Disputationem Moralem de Divortiis Secundum Jus Naturae , was written under the direction of his father in law and advisor Otto Mencke. He was from 1692 until the time of his death a professor of Near Eastern languages and university librarian at the University of Wittenberg, and gave courses there in Philosophy and Hebrew.
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Oliva Sabuco
1562 - 1622 (60 years)
Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera was a Spanish writer in holistic medical philosophy in the late 16th – early 17th century. She was interested in the interaction between the physical and psychological phenomena; therefore she wrote a collection of medical and psychological treatises that target human nature and explain the effects of emotions on the body and soul. She analyzed theoretical claims of ancient philosophers and wrote an early theory of what is now considered applied psychology.
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Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff
1782 - 1863 (81 years)
Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff was a German philosopher and theologian. Life He was born in Berlin. The son of a musician, from the age of twelve Trahndorff attended the school in Oels , where his father had been appointed chapel director by the Prinz von Brunswick-Lüneburg, Frederick August I. From 1801 he studied theology and philology in Königsberg, and on completion of his studies he began a career as a high-school teacher, mostly at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin but with several years in Białystok .
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Alton Ochsner
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Alton Ochsner Sr. was an American surgeon and medical researcher who worked at Tulane University and other New Orleans hospitals before he established The Ochsner Clinic. Now known as Ochsner Medical Center, the clinic is the flagship hospital of Ochsner Health System. Among its many services are heart transplants.
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Giuseppe Rensi
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Giuseppe Rensi was an Italian philosopher. Early life and education Giuseppe Rensi's father Gaetano was a doctor; his mother was Emilia Wallner, and he also had a sister, Teresa. He attended high school in Verona, then studied law, first in Padua and then in Rome, where he graduated in 1893. As a young man he began to collaborate on socialist-inspired periodicals, for example the Rivista popolare, directed by Napoleone Colajanni, and the Critica Sociale, directed by Filippo Turati. At Turati's invitation he moved to Milan where he began regularly to frequent socialist circles. He also worked...
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Damaris Cudworth Masham
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham was an English writer, philosopher, theologian, and advocate for women's education who is often characterized as a proto-feminist. She overcame some weakness of eyesight and lack of access to formal higher education to win high regard among eminent thinkers of her time. With an extensive correspondence, she published two works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life . She is particularly noted for her long, mutually-influential friendship with the philosopher John Locke.
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Brian Houghton Hodgson
1800 - 1894 (94 years)
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.
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Francesco Robortello
1516 - 1567 (51 years)
Francesco Robortello was a Renaissance humanist, nicknamed Canis grammaticus for his confrontational and demanding manner. As scholar Robortello, who was born in Udine, was an editor of rediscovered works of Antiquity, who taught philosophy and rhetoric, as well as ethics , and Latin and Greek, roving from Padua through universities at Lucca, Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna before finally returning to Padua in 1560.
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C. E. M. Joad
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was an English philosopher, author, teacher and broadcasting personality. He appeared on The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio wartime discussion programme. He popularised philosophy and became a celebrity, before his downfall in a scandal over an unpaid train fare in 1948.
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Khalifa Abdul Hakim
1893 - 1959 (66 years)
Khalifa Abdul Hakeem was a Pakistani philosopher, poet, critic, researcher, philologist, translator, and former professor of philosophy at Osmania University. He was the former director of Islamic Culture Institute, Lahore.
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Bolus of Mendes
300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)
Bolus of Mendes was a philosopher, a neopythagorean writer of works of esoterica and medicine, in Ptolemaic Egypt. Both the Suda, and a later work mistakenly attributed to Eudokia Makrembolitissa—; Bed of Violets, probably a 16th-century forgery by Constantine Paleocappa—write of a Pythagorean philosopher of Mendes in Egypt. He is described as one who wrote on marvels, potent remedies, and astronomical phenomena. The Suda, however, also describes a separate Bolus who was a philosopher of the school of Democritus, who wrote Inquiry, and Medical Art, containing "natural medical remedies from so...
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Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet
1707 - 1782 (75 years)
Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet was a British physician who has been called the "father of military medicine" . Biography Youth and early career John Pringle was the youngest son of Sir John Pringle, 2nd Baronet, of Stichill, Roxburghshire , by his spouse Magdalen , daughter of Sir Gilbert Eliott, 3rd Baronet, of Stobs.
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Miura Baien
1723 - 1789 (66 years)
In Japanese names here, surname is first. "Baien" was a pen-name, "plum garden". was a Japanese philosopher and scholar of the Tokugawa era. Life Born as Miura Susumu into the family of a village physician in the present Ōita Prefecture on the island of Kyūshū, he became himself a physician and declined invitations to take office in the service of a local feudal lord. Complex and enigmatic, his philosophical work fell into obscurity after his death until the two volumes of Baien Zenshū were published in 1912. They received little attention apart from the 1953 publication of Saegusa Hiroto...
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Ernst Marcus
1856 - 1928 (72 years)
Ernst Moses Marcus was a German lawyer and philosopher. He developed a theory of aether based on Immanuel Kant's posthumous work Opus Postumum, however sharply disagreeing with Erich Adickes interpretation. He used this to mount a criticism of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. He was a major influence on Salomo Friedlaender.
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Roberto Bernabei
#13719
Gómez Pereira
1500 - 1567 (67 years)
Gómez Pereira was a Spanish philosopher, doctor, and natural humanist from Medina del Campo. Pereira worked hard to dispel medieval concepts of medicine and proposed the application of empirical methods; as for his philosophy, it is of the standard direction and his reasonings are a clear precedent of René Descartes. He was the first to propose the famous "Cogito ergo sum", in 1554, commonly attributed to Descartes. He was famous for his practice of medicine, although he had many diverse occupations, such as owning businesses, engineering, and philosophy.
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Hendrik Verwoerd
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd , also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, scholar, and newspaper editor who served as Prime Minister of South Africa and is commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid. Verwoerd played a significant role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies, as Minister of Native Affairs and then as prime minister . Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership.
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Hermann Conring
1606 - 1681 (75 years)
Hermann Conring was a German intellectual. He made significant contributions to the study of medicine, politics and law. Descended from Lutheran clergy on both sides of his family, second-youngest of ten children, Conring showed early promise as a student. During his life as a professor in North Germany, Conring addressed himself first to medicine, producing significant studies on blood circulation, and later in his career addressed himself to politics.
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Tafazzul Husain Kashmiri
1727 - 1801 (74 years)
Tafazzul Husain Khan Kashmiri , also known as Khan-e-Allama, was a Twelver Shia scholar, physicist, and philosopher. He produced an Arabic translation of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia. Some of his descendants who are currently living in Lucknow are Husain Abbas, Asher Husain, Muntazir Abbas, Amaan Ali Abbas, Ali Jafar, Rahbar Abbas, Wasif Abbas, Furqan Abbas, Salman Abbas, Nadeem Abbas, etc.
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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
1783 - 1840 (57 years)
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz was a French 19th-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a young man in the United States, ultimately settling in Ohio in 1815, where he made notable contributions to botany, zoology, and the study of prehistoric earthworks in North America. He also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics, in addition to work he had already completed in Europe.
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Arulenus Rusticus
35 - 93 (58 years)
Quintus Junius Arulenus Rusticus was a Roman Senator and a friend and follower of Thrasea Paetus, and like him an ardent admirer of Stoic philosophy. Arulenus Rusticus attained a suffect consulship in the nundinium of September to December 92 with Gaius Julius Silanus as his colleague. He was one of a group of Stoics who opposed the perceived tyranny and autocratic tendencies of certain emperors, known today as the Stoic Opposition.
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Christopher John Bulpitt
#13726
Katharine Gilbert
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
Katharine Everett Gilbert , an American philosopher who studied aesthetics, was one of the first women to be president of the American Philosophical Society. She was also the first female professor at Duke University and, during her lifetime, the only female chairman of a liberal arts department.
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Heber C. Kimball
1801 - 1868 (67 years)
Heber Chase Kimball was a leader in the early Latter Day Saint movement. He served as one of the original twelve apostles in the early Church of the Latter Day Saints, and as first counselor to Brigham Young in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for more than two decades, from 1847 until his death.
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Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi
1236 - 1311 (75 years)
Qotb al-Din Mahmoud b. Zia al-Din Mas'ud b. Mosleh Shirazi was a 13th-century Persian polymath and poet who made contributions to astronomy, mathematics, medicine, physics, music theory, philosophy and Sufism.
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Joseph Škoda
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Joseph Škoda was an Austrian physician, medical professor and dermatologist. Together with Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, he was the founder of the Modern Medical School of Vienna. Life Škoda was born in Pilsen, Kingdom of Bohemia, Austrian Empire, as the second son of a locksmith. He attended the gymnasium at Pilsen, entered the University of Vienna in 1825, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine on 10 July 1831.
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Pierre Lemonnier
1675 - 1757 (82 years)
Pierre Lemonnier was a French astronomer, a professor of Physics and Philosophy at the Collège d'Harcourt , and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Lemonnier published the 6-volume Latin university textbook Cursus philosophicus ad scholarum usum accommodatus which consisted of the following volumes :Volume 1 - LogicaVolume 2 - MetaphysicaVolume 3 - Physica Generalis including mechanics and geometryVolume 4 - Physica Particularis including astronomy , optics, chemistry, gravity, and Newtonian versus Cartesian dynamicsVolume 5 - Physica Particularis including fluid mechanics, human ...
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Irving Thalberg Jr.
1930 - 1987 (57 years)
Irving Grant Thalberg Jr. was an author and the son of 1930s Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and Academy Award-winning actress Norma Shearer. Thalberg was six years old when his father died from pneumonia at the age of 37. He was educated at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and attended Stanford University. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago until he died of cancer on August 21, 1987, four days before his 57th birthday. He left a wife and three daughters. Prior to the University of Illinois, he was briefly a professor at the University of Washington.
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William H. Welch
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Henry Welch was an American physician, pathologist, bacteriologist, and medical-school administrator. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and was also the founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country. Welch was more known for his cogent summations of current scientific work, than his own scientific research. The Johns Hopkins medical school library is also named after Welch. In his lifetime, he was called the "...
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Robert Steele
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Robert Steele was a British scholar, best known for editing between c. 1905 and 1941 the 16-volume Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Bacon. Early in his life Steele was a disciple of William Morris, who was apparently influential in directing young Steele's attention towards studying medieval writings, and also attracted Steele's political views towards socialism. After studying chemistry, Steele was for a brief time a teacher of this subject at Bedford School. He soon abandoned this job and moved to London where he worked as a freelance journalist, writing for various literary and socialist publications.
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Víctor Li-Carrillo Chía
1929 - 1988 (59 years)
Víctor Li-Carrillo Chía was a Peruvian philosopher. Education and influences He studied at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, then in France and Germany . On these trips he met Victor Goldschmidt and Martin Heidegger, among other famous names in philosophy and world culture. In this first part of his life his philosophical interests were focused on ancient Greek philosophy and language, as well as being heavily influenced by Heidegger, whom he recognizes as a teacher.
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Franz Xaver Winterhalter
1805 - 1873 (68 years)
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a German painter and lithographer, known for his flattering portraits of royalty and upper-class society in the mid-19th century. His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture. Among his best known works are Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting and the portraits he made of Empress Elisabeth of Austria .
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Dominique Parodi
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Dominique Parodi was a French philosopher and educational administrator. Dominique Parodi was born in Genoa. He was the son of Margarita and Dominique-Alexandre Parodi; his father was a poet and dramatist of Graeco-Italian background. A member of the group around Émile Durkheim, he was a contributor to their journal, L'Année Sociologique. Between 1919 and 1934 he was General Inspector of Public Instruction. He succeeded Xavier Léon as editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, editing it from 1935 to 1955.
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Charles Secrétan
1815 - 1895 (80 years)
Charles Secretan was a Swiss philosopher. He was born on 19 January 1815 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he also died on 21 January 1895. Educated in his native town and later under Friedrich Schelling in Munich, he became a professor of philosophy at Lausanne , and later at Neuchâtel. In 1866 he returned to his old position at Lausanne.
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Wylie J. Dodds
#13739
Friedrich Theodor Vischer
1807 - 1887 (80 years)
Friedrich Theodor Vischer was a German novelist, poet, playwright, and writer on the philosophy of art. Today, he is mainly remembered as the author of the novel Auch Einer, in which he developed the concept of , a comic theory that inanimate objects conspire against humans.
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Zhang Xuecheng
1738 - 1801 (63 years)
Zhang Xuecheng was a Chinese historian and philosopher during the Qing dynasty. His father and his grandfather had been government officials, but, although Zhang achieved the highest civil service examination degree in 1778, he never held high office. Zhang's ideas about the historical process were revolutionary in many ways and he became one of the most enlightened historical theorists of the Qing dynasty, but he spent much of his life in near poverty without the support of a patron and, in 1801, he died, poor and with few friends. It was not until the late 19th century that Chinese scholars began to accept the validity of Zhang's ideas.
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Gyula Pikler
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Gyula Pikler Hungarian philosopher of law, university professor, member of the Society for Social Sciences. He was one of the most prominent and influential representatives of positivist philosophy of law and state, and was also known abroad. It was under his influence and around his person that the Galileo Circle was founded in Budapest in 1908, which was joined primarily by progressive young intellectual people.
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Johann Reinhold Forster
1729 - 1798 (69 years)
Johann Reinhold Forster was a German Reformed pastor and naturalist of partially Scottish descent who made contributions to the early ornithology of Europe and North America. He is best known as the naturalist on James Cook's second Pacific voyage, where he was accompanied by his son Georg Forster. These expeditions promoted the career of Johann Reinhold Forster and the findings became the bedrock of colonial professionalism and helped set the stage for the future development of anthropology and ethnology. They also laid the framework for general concern about the impact that alteration of t...
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Athenodorus of Soli
300 BC - 360 BC (-60 years)
Athenodorus of Soli was a Stoic philosopher, and disciple of Zeno of Citium, who lived in the 3rd century BC. He was the son of Athenodorus, and was born in the town of Soli, Cilicia, and was the compatriot of another disciple of Zeno, Chrysippus. Athenodorus was the brother of the poet Aratus of Soli, the author of the long didactic poem, Phaenomena. Both brothers followed the teachings of Zeno.
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Robert Oliver Cunningham
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Robert Oliver Cunningham was a Scottish naturalist. Birth and early life Cunningham was born on 27 March 1841, in Prestonpans, the second son of the Rev. William Bruce Cunningham , Free Church of Scotland minister in Prestonpans, and Cecilia Margaret Douglas , daughter of David Douglas, Lord Reston , the heir of Adam Smith. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy , and graduated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1864. He gained a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh with a thesis on the Solan Goose.
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Edward Abramowski
1868 - 1918 (50 years)
Edward Józef Abramowski was a Polish philosopher, libertarian socialist, anarchist, psychologist, ethician, and supporter of cooperatives. Abramowski is also one of the best known activists of classical anarchism in Poland.
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Karl Gustav Fellerer
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Karl Gustav Fellerer was a German musicologist. His works include more than 600 scientific publications on catholic church music, Italian music from 1600 to the beginning of the 20th century, and music history of the 19th century. He wrote monographs on Palestrina, Handel, Mozart, and Max Bruch and was editor of several musical journals. He published the Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch for 46 years, from 1930 until 1976. Fellerer was president of several musicology societies, including 16 years of the Joseph Haas Society.
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William of Heytesbury
1313 - 1372 (59 years)
William of Heytesbury, or William Heytesbury, called in Latin Guglielmus Hentisberus or Tisberus , was an English philosopher and logician, best known as one of the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, Oxford, where he was a fellow.
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Henry Fox Talbot
1800 - 1877 (77 years)
William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE FRAS was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent that affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He ...
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Malcolm W. Greaves
#13750
Izrail Agol
1891 - 1937 (46 years)
Izrail Iossofovich Agol was a Soviet geneticist and philosopher. He was a member of the USSR Academy of Science, worked briefly in the United States of America, and took an interest in radiation induced mutagenesis. As a Marxist philosopher, he also studied vitalist and mechanist views in biology and their relation to Marxism. He was killed in the aftermath of Trofim Lysenko's rise in the Stalin regime.
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