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,
#13901
Philippe Devaux
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Philippe Devaux was a French-speaking Belgian philosopher and logician, professor at the University of Liège. Through his numerous works and translations , he played a great part in the development of analytic philosophy in French-speaking countries.
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Inoue Enryō
1858 - 1919 (61 years)
Inoue Enryō was a Japanese philosopher, Shin Buddhist priest and reformer, educator, and royalist. A key figure in the reception of Western philosophy, the emergence of modern Buddhism, and the permeation of the imperial ideology during the second half of the Meiji Era. He is the founder of Toyo University and the creator of Tetsugaku-dō Park 哲学堂公園 in Tokyo. Because he studied all kinds of mysterious phenomena and apparitions in order to debunk superstitions, he is sometimes called "Professor Specter" and the "Spook Doctor".
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Enrique Molina Garmendia
1871 - 1964 (93 years)
Enrique Molina Garmendia was a Chilean educator and philosopher who promoted and aided in the development of the decentralization of education in Chile. His greatest achievement was founding the Universidad de Concepción , the third oldest university in Chile and the first to be located outside the capital Santiago. Garmendia is considered the most distinguished pedagogue of his time, as well as one of the most influential Chilean philosophers.
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Max Bernhard Weinstein
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Max Bernhard Weinstein was a German physicist and philosopher. He is best known as an opponent of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and for having written a broad examination of various theological theories, including extensive discussion of pandeism.
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Noah Porter
1811 - 1892 (81 years)
Noah Thomas Porter III was an American Congregational minister, academic, philosopher, author, lexicographer and an outspoken anti-slavery activist. Porter Mountain, of the Adirondack Mountains, was named for him after he was the first to climb it in 1875. He was President of Yale College .
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Metrodorus of Lampsacus
331 BC - 278 BC (53 years)
Metrodorus of Lampsacus was a Greek philosopher of the Epicurean school. Although one of the four major proponents of Epicureanism, only fragments of his works remain. A Metrodorus bust was found in Velia, slightly different modeled to depict Parmenides.
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Étienne Souriau
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Étienne Souriau was a French philosopher, best known for his work in aesthetics. Biography Son of Paul Souriau, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure and received his agrégation of philosophy in 1925. After teaching at the universities of Aix-en-Provence and Lyon he eventually became a professor at the Sorbonne, where he held a chair in aesthetics. He was the editor of the Revue d'esthétique and was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1958. Recently, the works of Bruno Latour have reawoken interests on Souriau's oeuvre, specially his works on ontology and metaph...
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Nikolay Dobrolyubov
1836 - 1861 (25 years)
Nikolay Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov was a Russian poet, literary critic, journalist, and prominent figure of the Russian revolutionary movement. He was a literary hero to both Karl Marx and Lenin. Biography Dobrolyubov was born in Nizhny Novgorod, where his father was a poor priest.
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Michel Pêcheux
1938 - 1983 (45 years)
Michel Pêcheux was a French linguist and philosopher. He is best known for his theoretical, experimental and practical contributions to the field of discourse analysis, starting in the late 1960s. Career Born in Tours in 1938, Pêcheux studied philosophy at École normale supérieure between 1959-1963 under Louis Althusser. In 1966, he started his research career in the Department of Social Psychology of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. While at ENS, Pêcheux became involved with the journal Cahiers pour l'Analyse, where he began developing a Marxist approach to discourse analysis.
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Muhammed Hamdi Yazır
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Muhammed Hamdi Yazır also known as Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır and Elmalılı was a Turkish Maturidi theologian, logician, Qur'an translator, Qur'anic exegesis scholar, Islamic legal academic, philosopher and encyclopedist.
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Francisco Sanches
1550 - 1623 (73 years)
Francisco Sanches was a skeptic, philosopher and physician of Sephardi Jewish origin, born possibly in Tui, Spain or probably in Braga, Portugal . Early life and academic career In the auditorium of the University of Toulouse there is a portrait of Francisco Sánchez, which bears the following inscription: "Francisco Sanchez Lusitanus". Although the investigations carried out by Henry Pierre Cazac at the beginning of the 20th century – he presented, among other documents, an autograph by Sánchez that reads as follows: "Ego, Franciscus Sanctius, Hispanus, natus in civitate Tudensi [...]" – show...
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Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongovius
1764 - 1855 (91 years)
Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongovius was a Protestant pastor, writer, philosopher, distinguished linguist, and translator. Mrongovius was a noted defender of the Polish language in Warmia and Mazury. Biography Mrongovius, son of Bartholomeus, was born in Hohenstein, Kingdom of Prussia . Mrongovius attended a school in Saalfeld , and then studied at the cathedral school in Königsberg. He matriculated on 21 March 1782 at Königsberg University. During his second semester, he attended Immanuel Kant's metaphysics lectures, followed by theology, logic, anthropology and moral philosophy, and physics.
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Joseph Kleutgen
1811 - 1883 (72 years)
Joseph Wilhelm Karl Kleutgen was a German Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He was a member of the Society of Jesus, and contributed significantly to the establishment of Neo-scholasticism. Life Kleutgen was born in Dortmund, Westphalia. He began his studies with the intention of becoming a priest, but owing to the Protestant atmosphere of the school which he attended, his zeal for religion gradually cooled. From 28 April 1830, to 8 January 1831, he studied philology at the University of Munich. He was intensely interested in Plato's philosophy and the Greek tragic poets. As member of the ...
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August Ludwig Hülsen
1765 - 1809 (44 years)
August Ludwig Hülsen , also known by the pseudonym Hegekern, was a German philosopher, writer and pedagogue of early German Romanticism. His thought played a role in the development of German idealism.
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Lin Yutang
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Lin Yutang was a Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator. He had an informal style in both Chinese and English, and he made compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English. Some of his writings criticized the racism and imperialism of the West.
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Friedrich Eduard Beneke
1798 - 1854 (56 years)
Friedrich Eduard Beneke was a German psychologist and post-Kantian philosopher. Life Beneke was born in Berlin. He studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin, and served as a volunteer in the War of 1815. After studying theology under Schleiermacher and de Wette, he turned to pure philosophy, studying English writers and the German modifiers of Kantianism, such as Jacobi, Fries and Schopenhauer. In 1820, he published Erkenntnisslehre, Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens, and his inaugural dissertation De Veris Philosophiae Initiis. His marked opposition to the philosophy o...
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Jacques-André Naigeon
1738 - 1810 (72 years)
Jacques-André Naigeon was a French artist, atheist–materialist philosopher, editor and man of letters best known for his contributions to the Encyclopédie and for reworking Baron d'Holbach's and Diderot's manuscripts.
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Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy
1862 - 1905 (43 years)
Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy was a Russian religious philosopher. He was the son of Prince Nikolai Petrovitch Trubetskoy, co-founder of the Moscow Conservatory, and Sophia Alekseievna Lopouchina, who was a big influence on his religious thought. Trubetskoy and his brother, Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy , continued Vladimir Solovyov's work on developing a modern Christian philosophy of the world. He was also a professor of philosophy at Moscow University and a founding member of the underground discussion circle Beseda.
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Yorick Smythies
1917 - 1980 (63 years)
Yorick Smythies was a student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein known for his notes of the philosopher's lectures. He was also a friend of, and character inspiration for, the novelist Iris Murdoch.
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J. W. Dunne
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
John William Dunne was a British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher. As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War, before becoming a pioneering aeroplane designer in the early years of the 20th century. Dunne worked on automatically stable aircraft, many of which were of tailless swept wing design, to achieve the first aircraft demonstrated to be stable. He later developed a new approach to dry fly fishing before turning to speculative philosophy, where he achieved some prominence and literary influence through his "serialism" theory on the nature of time and consciousness, fi...
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Eudemus of Rhodes
370 BC - 300 BC (70 years)
Eudemus of Rhodes was an ancient Greek philosopher, considered the first historian of science, who lived from c. 370 BCE until c. 300 BCE. He was one of Aristotle's most important pupils, editing his teacher's work and making it more easily accessible. Eudemus' nephew, Pasicles, was also credited with editing Aristotle's works.
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Ibn al-Khammar
942 - Present (1084 years)
Abū al-Khayr al-Ḥasan ibn Suwār ibn Bābā ibn Bahnām, called Ibn al-Khammār , was an East Syriac Christian philosopher and physician who taught and worked in Baghdad. He was a prolific translator from Syriac into Arabic and also wrote original works of philosophy, ethics, theology, medicine and meteorology.
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Anioł Dowgird
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Anioł Dowgird was a philosopher of Polish Enlightenment and Lithuanian Enlightenment. Dowgird studied in Jesuit and Piarist schools, then joined the Piarist Order and took holy orders. Subsequently, he taught at Piarist schools and for a time was a professor of logic and ethics at Vilnius University.
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Julie Favre
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Julie Velten Favre , sometimes called Madame Jules Favre, was a French philosopher and educator. She is known for her work educating young women and for advancing a moral philosophy that advocated living a virtuous life, rather than one based on rules and punishment.
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Isidore of Alexandria
450 - 520 (70 years)
Isidore of Alexandria was a Greek philosopher and one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He lived in Athens and Alexandria toward the end of the 5th century AD. He became head of the school in Athens in succession to Marinus, who followed Proclus.
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A. J. Muste
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Abraham Johannes Muste , usually cited as A. J. Muste, was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, antiwar movement, and civil rights movement.
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Alexis Kagame
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet and Catholic priest. His main contributions were in the fields of ethnohistory and "ethnophilosophy" . As a professor of theology, he carried out wide research into the oral history, traditions and literature of Rwanda, and wrote several books on the subject, both in French and Kinyarwanda. He also wrote poetry, which was also published.
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Henryk Struve
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Henryk Struve was a Polish philosopher. He has been called "perhaps the most remarkable person in logic in Warsaw in the 19th century". Struve taught philosophy at Warsaw University from 1862 to 1903. He wrote works in Polish, German and Russian.
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Samuel Hahnemann
1755 - 1843 (88 years)
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician, best known for creating the pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine called homeopathy. Early life Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born in Meissen, Saxony, near Dresden. His father Christian Gottfried Hahnemann was a painter and designer of porcelain, for which the town of Meissen is famous.
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Samuel Morse
1791 - 1872 (81 years)
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of Morse code in 1837 and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
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Pavel Kopnin
1922 - 1971 (49 years)
Pavel Vasilyevich Kopnin was a Soviet philosopher, epistemologist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.
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Borden Parker Bowne
1847 - 1910 (63 years)
Borden Parker Bowne was an American Christian philosopher, Methodist minister and theologian. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. Life Bowne was born on January 14, 1847, near Leonardville in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In 1876 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he taught for more than thirty years. He later served as the first dean of the graduate school. Bowne was an acute critic of mechanistic determinism, positivism, and naturalism. He categorized his views as Kantianizedianized Berkeleyanismanism, transcendental empiricism, and, fi...
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Thomas Young
1773 - 1829 (56 years)
Thomas Young FRS was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
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Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
1744 - 1811 (67 years)
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was a Spanish neoclassical statesman, author, philosopher and a major figure of the Age of Enlightenment in Spain. Life and influence of his works Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was born at Gijón in Asturias, Spain. Selecting law as his profession, he studied at Oviedo, Ávila, and the University of Alcalá, before becoming a criminal judge at Seville in 1767.
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Antoine Destutt de Tracy
1754 - 1836 (82 years)
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". Biography The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born in Paris. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France in 1420 and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army and when the French Revolution broke out he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais.
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Rudolf Seydel
1835 - 1892 (57 years)
Rudolf Seydel was a German philosopher and theologian born in Dresden. In 1860 he received his habilitation at the University of Leipzig, where in 1867 he became an associate professor of philosophy. He was a disciple of Christian Hermann Weisse , and is remembered for his studies involving parallels between Buddhism and Christianity. Seydel died in Leipzig on December 8, 1892.
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Étienne de La Boétie
1530 - 1563 (33 years)
Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie was a French magistrate, classicist, writer, poet and political theorist, best remembered for his intense and intimate friendship with essayist Michel de Montaigne. His early political treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was posthumously adopted by the Huguenot movement and is sometimes seen as an early influence on modern anti-statist, utopian and civil disobedience thought.
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Theon of Smyrna
70 - 135 (65 years)
Theon of Smyrna was a Greek philosopher and mathematician, whose works were strongly influenced by the Pythagorean school of thought. His surviving On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato is an introductory survey of Greek mathematics.
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Edward Bullough
1880 - 1934 (54 years)
Edward Bullough was an English aesthetician and scholar of modern languages, who worked at the University of Cambridge. He did experimental work on the perception of colours, and in his theoretical work introduced the concept of psychical distance: that which "appears to lie between our own self and its affections" in aesthetic experience. In languages, Bullough was a dedicated teacher who published little. He came to concentrate on Italian, and was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in 1933.
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Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari
838 - 870 (32 years)
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari , was a Persian Muslim scholar, physician and psychologist, who produced one of the first Islamic encyclopedia of medicine titled Firdaws al-Hikmah . Ali ibn Sahl spoke Syriac and Greek, the two sources of the medical tradition of Antiquity which had been lost by medieval Europe, and transcribed in meticulous calligraphy. His most famous student was the physician and alchemist Abu Bakr al-Razi . Al-Tabari wrote the first encyclopedic work on medicine. He lived for over 70 years and interacted with important figures of the time, such as Muslim caliphs, governors, and eminent scholars.
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George Derwent Thomson
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
George Derwent Thomson was an English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language. Classical scholar Thomson studied Classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he attained First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos and subsequently won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin. At TCD he worked on his first book, Greek Lyric Metre, and began visiting Na Blascaodaí in the early nineteen-twenties. He became lecturer and then Professor of Greek at University College Galway.
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Zaki al-Arsuzi
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Zaki al-Arsuzi was a Syrian philosopher, philologist, sociologist, historian, and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement. He published several books during his lifetime, most notably The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue .
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Scott Buchanan
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Scott Buchanan was an American philosopher, educator, and foundation consultant. He is best known as the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College, at Annapolis, Maryland. Buchanan's various projects and writings may be understood as an ambitious program of social and cultural reform based on the insight that many crucial problems arise from the uncritical use of symbolism. In this sense, his program was similar to and competed with a number of contemporary movements such as Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, Otto Neurath's "Unity of Science" project, the semiotics of Charles Morris and the "orthological" projects of Charles Kay Ogden.
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Albert Schweitzer
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by faith as secondary.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
1809 - 1894 (85 years)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. Grouped among the fireside poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table . He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to his work as an author and poet, Holmes also served as a physician, professor, lecturer, inventor, and, although he never practiced it, he received formal training in law.
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Alexander Campbell Fraser
1819 - 1914 (95 years)
Alexander Campbell Fraser was a Scottish theologian and philosopher. Life He was born in the manse at Ardchattan, Argyll, the son of the parish minister, Rev Hugh Fraser, and his wife, Maria Helen Campbell. He was the eldest of twelve children.
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Timaeus of Locri
500 BC - 500 BC (0 years)
Timaeus of Locri is a character in two of Plato's dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. In both, he appears as a philosopher of the Pythagorean school. If there ever existed a historical Timaeus of Locri, he would have lived in the fifth century BC, but his historicity is dubious since he only appears as a literary figure in Plato's works; all other ancient sources are either based on Plato or are fictional accounts.
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Haridas Chaudhuri
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Haridas Chaudhuri was an Indian integral philosopher. He was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo and the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies . Early life and career He was born in May 1913 in Shyamagram in East Bengal . He studied at the Scottish Church College and later at the University of Calcutta from where he earned his doctorate in Indian philosophy. He became a professor and later the chair of philosophy at the Krishnagar College, then a constituent college of the University of Calcutta.
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Edvard Westermarck
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. Biography Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off Lutheran family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsinki as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there, obtaining his first degree in philosophy in 1886, but developing also an interest in anthropology and reading the works of Charles Darwin. His thesis, The History of...
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Johann Heinrich Abicht
1762 - 1816 (54 years)
Johann Heinrich Abicht was a German philosopher. Biography Abicht was born at . His grandfather was teacher and organist in Wilmersdorf, Gehren, and his father was a teacher in Volkstedt. Johann Abicht himself finished the college in Rudolstadt and visited the University of Erlangen in 1781. In 1784 he became controller at the house of chief equerry von Schall in Öhringen. Abicht made his magister in 1786 and his doctor in philosophy in 1790. In the same year, he was appointed adjunct and then extraordinary professor in the philosophical faculty. He became regular professor in 1796. On 4 Aug...
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