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,
#13851
Jean-Marie Guyau
1854 - 1888 (34 years)
Jean-Marie Guyau was a French philosopher and poet. Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry and literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.
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John Austin
1790 - 1859 (69 years)
John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.
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Gustav Shpet
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Gustav Gustavovich Shpet was a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, psychologist, art theoretician, and interpreter of German-Polish descent. He was a student of a well-known Russian psychologist and philosopher George Chelpanov, a follower of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, who introduced Husserlian phenomenology to Russia, modifying the phenomenology which he found in Husserl. Shpet was a Vice president of the Russian State Academy of Arts in Moscow . Shpet is an author of many books, including his famous A View on the History of Russian philosophy and The Hermeneutics and its pr...
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Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa
770 - 830 (60 years)
was an Indian philosopher known for his radical skepticism who most likely flourished between 800-840 probably in southern India. He was the author of one of the most extraordinary philosophical works in Indian history, the Tattvopaplavasiṃha in which he professed radical skepticism, which posits the impossibility of knowledge. In his work, he attempts to show the contradictions of various philosophical positions as well as the counter positions. He is loosely affiliated to the materialist Cārvāka/Lokāyata school of philosophy but his affiliation with charvaka is disputed among scholars. H...
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Speusippus
407 BC - 339 BC (68 years)
Speusippus was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, c. 348 BC, Speusippus inherited the Academy, near age 60, and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, Speusippus frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimate principle, Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to h...
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Arrian
89 - 175 (86 years)
Arrian of Nicomedia was a Greek historian, public servant, military commander, and philosopher of the Roman period. The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian is considered the best source on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Scholars have generally preferred Arrian to other extant primary sources, though this attitude has changed somewhat in light of modern studies into Arrian's method.
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Nae Ionescu
1890 - 1940 (50 years)
Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.
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Maurice Solovine
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Maurice Solovine was a Romanian philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his association with Albert Einstein. Biography Solovine was born in Iași, a university city in eastern Romania, near the border with Moldova. As a young student of philosophy in Bern, Solovine applied to study physics with Albert Einstein in response to an advertisement. The two men struck up a close relationship and Einstein was said to say to Solovine a few days after meeting him: "It is not necessary to give you lessons in physics. The discussion about the problems which we face in physics today is much more interesting; simply come to me when you wish.
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Cato the Younger
95 BC - 46 BC (49 years)
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , also known as Cato the Younger , was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. His conservative principles were focused on the preservation of what he saw as old Roman values in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a powerful political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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James Burnham
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis . Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics.
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Ernst Laas
1837 - 1885 (48 years)
Ernst Laas was a German positivist philosopher. Biography Laas was born in Fürstenwalde, Brandenburg, Prussia. He studied theology and philosophy under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg at the University of Berlin. In 1859, he completed a doctorate at Berlin with a thesis titled Das Moral-Prinzip des Aristoteles.
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Georges Braque
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
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Peter Wessel Zapffe
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Peter Wessel Zapffe was a Norwegian philosopher, author, artist, lawyer and mountaineer. He is often noted for his philosophically pessimistic and fatalistic view of human existence. His system of philosophy was inspired by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as his firm advocacy of antinatalism. His thoughts regarding the error of human life are presented in the essay "The Last Messiah" . This essay is a shorter version of his best-known and untranslated work, the philosophical treatise On the Tragic .
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Jacob Klein
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Jacob Klein was a Russian-American philosopher and interpreter of Plato, who worked extensively on the nature and historical origin of modern symbolic mathematics. Biography Klein was born in Libava, Russian Empire. He studied at Berlin and Marburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1922. A student of Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, he later taught at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland from 1938 until his death. He served as dean from 1949 to 1958.
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Arnold Geulincx
1624 - 1669 (45 years)
Arnold Geulincx , also known by his pseudonym Philaretus, was a Flemish philosopher, metaphysician, and logician. He was one of the followers of René Descartes who tried to work out more detailed versions of a generally Cartesian philosophy. Samuel Beckett cited Geulincx as a key influence and interlocutor because of Geulincx's emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition.
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Carlos Astrada
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Carlos Astrada was an Argentine philosopher. Astrada was born in Córdoba. He completed his secondary school studies at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat in Córdoba, and his university studies in law at the National University of Córdoba. His 1926 essay "The Epistemological Problem in Philosophy", earned an Astrada scholarship to Germany. He studied at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Freiburg, under Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Oskar Becker during his four years there.
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Martial Gueroult
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Martial Gueroult was a French philosopher. His primary areas of research were in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy as well as the history of philosophy. Biography Gueroult was born on 15 December 1891 in the city of Le Havre in northwestern France. A veteran of both the First and Second World Wars, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur [Legion of Honour] and twice with the Croix de Guerre [Cross of War]. It was during his time as a prisoner of war in Germany that Gueroult began drafting his first philosophical work on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, later to become L’Évolution et la structure de la doc...
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Dietrich Tiedemann
1748 - 1803 (55 years)
Dietrich Tiedemann was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy born in Bremervörde. He was father to physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann . Biography He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, and later was a professor at Collegium Carolinum in Kassel and at the University of Marburg .
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Adam Weishaupt
1748 - 1830 (82 years)
Johann Adam Weishaupt was a German philosopher, professor of civil law and later canon law, and founder of the Illuminati. Early life Adam Weishaupt was born on 6 February 1748 in Ingolstadt in the Electorate of Bavaria. Weishaupt's father Johann Georg Weishaupt died when Adam was five years old. After his father's death he came under the tutelage of his godfather Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt who, like his father, was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Ickstatt was a proponent of the philosophy of Christian Wolff and of the Enlightenment, and he influenced the young Weishaupt with his rationalism.
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Anton Wilhelm Amo
1703 - 1759 (56 years)
Anton Wilhelm Amo or Anthony William Amo was a Nzema philosopher from Axim, Dutch Gold Coast . Amo was a professor at the universities of Halle and Jena in Germany after studying there. He was brought to Germany by the Dutch West India Company in 1707 and was presented as a gift to Dukes Augustus William and Ludwig Rudolf of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, being treated as a member of the family by their father Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In 2020, Oxford University Press published a translation of his Latin works from the early 1730s.
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Vasily Rozanov
1856 - 1919 (63 years)
Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov was one of the most controversial Russian writers and important philosophers in the symbolists' of the pre-revolutionaryary epoch. Views Rozanov tried to reconcile Christian teachings with ideas of healthy sex and family life, but as his adversary Nikolai Berdyaev put it, he "set up sex in opposition to the Word". His interest in these matters, as in matters of religion, brought Rozanov close to Russian Symbolism. Because of references to the phallus in Rozanov's writings, Klaus von Beyme called him the Rasputin of the Russian intelligentsia.
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Jean Beaufret
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Jean Beaufret was a French philosopher and Germanist tremendously influential in the reception of Martin Heidegger's work in France. Life After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure and completing military service Beaufret passed his agrégation de philosophie in 1933 and undertook a career teaching as a lycée philosophy instructor. His early philosophical interests were in 19th century German philosophy, particularly GWF Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Karl Marx. In the period before the Second World War, he came to know Paul Éluard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, and Paul Valéry.
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Ammonius Hermiae
440 - 523 (83 years)
Ammonius Hermiae was a Greek philosopher from Alexandria in the eastern Roman empire during Late Antiquity. A Neoplatonist, he was the son of the philosophers Hermias and Aedesia, the brother of Heliodorus of Alexandria and the grandson of Syrianus. Ammonius was a pupil of Proclus in Roman Athens, and taught at Alexandria for most of his life, having obtained a public chair in the 470s.
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Gerolamo Cardano
1501 - 1576 (75 years)
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian polymath whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler. He became one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance and one of the key figures in the foundation of probability; he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the Western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.
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François de La Mothe Le Vayer
1588 - 1672 (84 years)
François de La Mothe Le Vayer , was a French writer who was known to use the pseudonym Orosius Tubero. He was admitted to the Académie française in 1639, and was the tutor of Louis XIV. Early years Le Vayer was born and died in Paris, a member of a noble family of Maine. His father was an avocat at the parlement of Paris and author of a curious treatise on the functions of ambassadors, entitled Legatus, seu De legatorum privilegiis, officio et munere libellus and illustrated mainly from ancient history. Francois succeeded his father at the parlement, but gave up his post about 1647 and devote...
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Liang Shuming
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Liang Shuming , born Liang Huanding , courtesy name Shouming , was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer in the Rural Reconstruction Movement during the late Qing dynasty and early Republican eras of Chinese history.
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