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,
#14001
Hanawa Hokiichi
1746 - 1821 (75 years)
Hanawa Hokiichi was a Japanese blind kokugaku scholar of the Edo period. Biography Hanawa was born in Hokino Village, Musashi Province to a farming family. His childhood name was Toranosuke. From an early age he had a weak constitution and at the age of five suffered from a sickness which caused great eye pain and his vision gradually diminished. He was advised that his eyes would not be cured unless he changed both his birth year and his name. Although changed his name to Tatsunosuke and subtracted two years, his vision never returned. A precocious child with a prodigious memory, he was later tonsured and took the Buddhist name of Tamonbo.
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Josias Weitbrecht
1702 - 1747 (45 years)
Josias Weitbrecht was a German professor of medicine and anatomy in Russia. Life and career After his studies at the University of Tübingen initially Josias Weitbrecht acquired the academic degree for a magister of philosophy. By the medium of Dr Duvernoy in the year 1721 he came to the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied medicine, physiology and anatomy, his main subject, which he taught students from the academic grammar school, associated with the Russian Academy of Science. This academy accepted him as a member in 1725. Later, on 22 January 1730, he was appointed ordinary profe...
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Hagiwara Hiromichi
1815 - 1863 (48 years)
Hagiwara Hiromichi was a scholar of literature, philology, and nativist studies as well as an author, translator, and poet active in late-Edo period Japan. He is best known for the innovative commentary and literary analysis of The Tale of Genji found in his work titled Genji monogatari hyōshaku published in two installments in 1854 and 1861.
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Julius Wagner-Jauregg
1857 - 1940 (83 years)
Julius Wagner-Jauregg was an Austrian physician, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1927, and is the first psychiatrist to have done so. His Nobel award was "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of malaria inoculation in the treatment of dementia paralytica".
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Cornelia Johanna de Vogel
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Cornelia Johanna de Vogel was a Dutch classicist, philosopher and theologian. She was a “distinguished Dutch Plato scholar”, and a prolific author of ancient philosophy and patristic theology. She was the professor of the history of classical and medieval philosophy at the state university of Utrecht .
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João Cruz Costa
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
João da Cruz Costa , was a Brazilian philosopher, "first student" of the Philosophy Faculty at Universidade de São Paulo, later becoming full professor at the same institution. His intellectual work addressed different knowledge areas, especially about the development of philosophy in Brazil, "aiming to establish connections between thinking and the country's social, political and economic reality throughout its history. Essay writer, critic, sociologist, biographer, besides being philosopher, which showed the diversity of his knowledge. He would spread it by teaching and via articles written in simple language and published at the most important newspapers of his time: O Estado de S.
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Johann Sturm
1635 - 1703 (68 years)
Johann Christoph Sturm was a German philosopher, professor at University of Altdorf and founder of a short-lived scientific academy known as the Collegium Curiosum, based on the model of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento. He edited two volumes of the academy's proceedings under the title Collegium Experimentale . In 1670, he translated the works of Archimedes into German.
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Ralph Monroe Eaton
1892 - 1932 (40 years)
Ralph Monroe Eaton was an American philosopher of Harvard University whose career was cut short at the age of 39. He specialized in the theory of knowledge and logic but later became interested in psychoanalysis. He served in the United States Army during the First World War and wrote an unpublished memoir of his experiences.
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Guido Adler
1855 - 1941 (86 years)
Guido Adler was a Bohemian-Austrian musicologist and writer. Biography Early life and education Adler was born at Eibenschütz in Moravia in 1855. He moved with his family to Vienna nine years later. His father Joachim, a physician, died of typhoid fever in 1857. Joachim contracted the illness from a patient, and therefore told his wife Franciska to "never allow any of the children to become a doctor".
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Ledger Wood
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Ledger Wood was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Life and career Wood received his doctorate from Cornell University in 1926 and was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University in 1927. He remained a member of the Princeton Philosophy Department for 43 years, serving as departmental chair from 1952 to 1960. After his retirement in 1970, he was appointed McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus.
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Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves was an Italian philosopher and historian of law. He was noted for his scholarship on political thought, particularly in the mediaeval and early modern period, and natural law theory.
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John Hawkins
1719 - 1789 (70 years)
Sir John Hawkins was an English author and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole. He was part of Johnson's various clubs but later left The Literary Club after a disagreement with some of Johnson's other friends. His friendship with Johnson continued and he was made one of the executors of Johnson's will.
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Carlo Allioni
1728 - 1804 (76 years)
Carlo Allioni was an Italian physician and professor of botany at the University of Turin. His most important work was Flora Pedemontana, sive enumeratio methodica stirpium indigenarum Pedemontii 1755, a study of the plant world in Piedmont, in which he listed 2813 species of plants, of which 237 were previously unknown. In 1766, he published the Manipulus Insectorum Tauriniensium.
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Charles-François Daubigny
1817 - 1878 (61 years)
Charles-François Daubigny was a French painter, one of the members of the Barbizon school, and is considered an important precursor of impressionism. He was also a prolific printmaker, mostly in etching but also as one of the main artists to use the cliché verre technique.
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Klaus Lechner
#14016
Alexander Mavrokordatos
1641 - 1709 (68 years)
Alexander Mavrocordatos was a member of the Greek Mavrocordatos family, the ruler of the island of Mykonos, a doctor of philosophy and medicine of the University of Bologna, and Dragoman of the Porte to Sultan Mehmed IV in 1673 — notably employed in negotiations with the Habsburg monarchy during the Great Turkish War.
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Leon Petrażycki
1867 - 1931 (64 years)
Leon Petrażycki was a Polish philosopher, legal scholar, and sociologist. He is considered an important forerunner of the sociology of law. Life Leon Petrażycki was born into the Polish gentry of the Mogilev Governorate in the Russian Empire. In 1890 he graduated from Kiev University, then spent two years on a scholarship in Berlin, and in 1896 received a doctorate from the University of St. Petersburg. At the latter university, he served from 1897 to 1917 as a professor of the philosophy of law.
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Michael Hissmann
1752 - 1784 (32 years)
Michael Hissmann was a German philosopher, an advocate of French sensualism, and a radical materialist who translated Condillac, Charles de Brosses, and Joseph Priestley into German. Hissmann studied philosophy at Erlangen and Göttingen. From 1778 to 1783 he edited the Magazin für die Philosophie und ihre Geschichte. He became an extraordinary professor at Göttingen in 1782, and a full professor in 1784.
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William of Auvergne
1180 - 1249 (69 years)
William of Auvergne was a French theologian and philosopher who served as Bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death. He was one of the first western European philosophers to engage with and comment extensively upon Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy.
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Martin Paul Eccles
#14021
Solomon Steinheim
1789 - 1866 (77 years)
Solomon Ludwig Steinheim was a German physician, poet, and philosopher. Biography Steinheim was born on 6 August 1789 in Altona . He was educated first at the Gymnasium Christianeum, Altona, and pursued his medical studies at the University of Kiel. He had hardly graduated when he found a wide field for his activity in Altona, to where the inhabitants of the sister city of Hamburg, then occupied by the French troops, had fled to escape the Russian blockade, bringing with them typhus fever, which at that time was raging in the Hanseatic town. In 1845 ill health forced him to abandon a medical career and to move to a milder climate.
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Ary Scheffer
1795 - 1858 (63 years)
Ary Scheffer was a Dutch-French Romantic painter. He was known mostly for his works based on literature, with paintings based on the works of Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron and Walter Scott, as well as religious subjects. He was also a prolific painter of portraits of famous and influential people in his lifetime. Politically, Scheffer had strong ties to King Louis Philippe I, having been employed as a teacher of the latter's children, which allowed him to live a life of luxury for many years until the French Revolution of 1848.
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Oskar Minkowski
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Oskar Minkowski was a German physician and physiologist who held a professorship at the University of Breslau and is most famous for his research on diabetes. He was the brother of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski and father of astrophysicist Rudolph Minkowski.
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Archibald Garrod
1857 - 1936 (79 years)
Sir Archibald Edward Garrod was an English physician who pioneered the field of inborn errors of metabolism. He also discovered alkaptonuria, understanding its inheritance. He served as Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford from 1920 to 1927.
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Lyman Hotchkiss Atwater
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
Lyman Hotchkiss Atwater was an American Presbyterian philosopher. Life He was born in Cedar Hill, New Haven, Connecticut. He started going to Yale University at the age of 14 in 1827 and graduated in 1831. He spent some time after graduating as the head of the classical Department of Mount Hope Institute in Baltimore and then entered Yale Divinity School He was then licensed to preach by the Congregational Association of New Haven in May 1834. Then heading on to the First Congregational Church of Fairfield Connecticut. He remained there for 20 years.
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Samuel Gridley Howe
1801 - 1876 (75 years)
Samuel Gridley Howe was an American physician, abolitionist, and advocate of education for the blind. He organized and was the first director of the Perkins Institution. In 1824 he had gone to Greece to serve in the revolution as a surgeon; he also commanded troops. He arranged for support for refugees and brought many Greek children back to Boston with him for their education.
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George Cram Cook
1873 - 1924 (51 years)
George Cram Cook or Jig Cook was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, novelist, poet, and university professor. Believing it was his personal mission to inspire others, Cook led the founding of the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in 1915; their "creative collective" was considered the first modern American theatre company. During his seven-year tenure with the group, Cook oversaw the production of nearly one-hundred new plays by fifty American playwrights. He is particularly remembered for producing the first plays of Eugene O'Neill, along with those of Cook's wife Susan Glasp...
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John Baconthorpe
1290 - 1347 (57 years)
John Baconthorpe, OCarm was a learned English Carmelite friar and scholastic philosopher. Life John Baconthorpe was born at Baconsthorpe, Norfolk, he seems to have been the grandnephew of Roger Bacon . In youth, he joined the Carmelite Order, becoming a friar at Blakeney, near Walsingham. He studied at Oxford and Paris. He became regent master of the theology faculty at Paris by 1323. He is believed to have taught theology at Cambridge and Oxford. Eventually, he became known as doctor resolutus, though the implication of this is unclear.
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Qadi Baydawi
1201 - 1286 (85 years)
Qadi Baydawi was a Persian jurist, theologian, and Quran commentator. He lived during the post-Seljuk and early Mongol era. Many commentaries have been written on his work. He was also the author of several theological treatises.
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John Langalibalele Dube
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
John Langalibalele Dube OLG was a South African essayist, philosopher, educator, politician, publisher, editor, novelist and poet. He was the founding president of the South African Native National Congress , which became the African National Congress in 1923. He was an uncle to Dr Pixley ka Isaka Seme, with whom he founded SANNC. Dube served as the president of SANNC between 1912 and 1917. He was brought to America by returning missionaries and attended Oberlin Preparatory Academy.
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Shakib Arslan
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
Shakib Arslan was an Arab writer, poet, historian, politician, and Emir in Lebanon. A prolific writer, he produced some 20 books and 2,000 articles, as well as two collections of poetry and a "prodigious correspondence". He was known as Amir al-Bayān due to his influential writings.
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Valéria Dienes
1879 - 1978 (99 years)
Valéria Dienes was a Hungarian philosopher, dancer, dance instructor, choreographer and one of first Hungarian woman to graduate from university. She is widely considered to be one of the most important Hungarian theorists on movement. She was the recipient of Hungary's highest literary award, the Baumgarten Prize in 1934.
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Daniel Rutherford
1749 - 1819 (70 years)
Daniel Rutherford was a Scottish physician, chemist and botanist who is known for the isolation of nitrogen in 1772. Life Rutherford was born on 3 November 1749, the son of Anne Mackay and Professor John Rutherford . He began college at the age of 16 at Mundell's School on the West Bow close to his family home, and then studied medicine under William Cullen and Joseph Black at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a doctorate in 1772. From 1775 to 1786 he practiced as a physician in Edinburgh.
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Warner Fite
1867 - 1955 (88 years)
Warner Fite was an American philosopher. Biography Warner Fite was born in Philadelphia. He graduated with a BA from Haverford College in 1889 and received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1894. Besides teaching at the University of Chicago , Fite also worked at the University of Texas , Indiana University and Harvard University . He held the chair of Stuart Professor of Ethics at Princeton University from 1917 until his retirement in 1935.
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Max Loreau
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
Max Loreau was a 20th-century Belgian philosopher, poet and art critic. Life and career Born in Brussels, Max Loreau was a professor of modern philosophy at the University of Brussels. He was interested in a number of movements ranging from the Renaissance to Cobra. His work focused on artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Guillaume Corneille, and Asger Jorn. A comprehensive study of the logograms by Christian Dotremont was published in 1975; Loreau also worked with Pierre Alechinsky, who helped him to publish L'Épreuve. He died in 1990.
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Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa was "a significant logician, philosopher of language and epistemologist", and "one of the most outstanding female representatives" of the third generation of the Lwów–Warsaw school. She is "mostly known as the author of the important argumentation against neopositivism of the Vienna Circle as well as one of the main critics of relativistic theories of truth". She was also noted for popularising Tarski's works on semantics.
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Bernard Waeber
#14038
Govert Bidloo
1649 - 1713 (64 years)
Govert Bidloo or Govard Bidloo was a Dutch Golden Age physician, anatomist, poet and playwright. He was the personal physician of William III of Orange-Nassau, Dutch stadholder and King of England, Scotland and Ireland.
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Egon Friedell
1878 - 1938 (60 years)
Egon Friedell was a prominent Austrian cultural historian, playwright, actor and Kabarett performer, journalist and theatre critic. Friedell has been described as a polymath. Before 1916, he was also known by his pen name Egon Friedländer.
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Joseph Bell
1837 - 1911 (74 years)
Joseph Bell FRCSE was a Scottish surgeon and lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century. He is best known as an inspiration for the literary character, Sherlock Holmes.
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Grigore Tocilescu
1850 - 1909 (59 years)
Grigore George Tocilescu was a Romanian historian, archaeologist, epigrapher and folkorist, member of Romanian Academy. He was a professor of ancient history at the University of Bucharest, author of Marele Dicționar Geografic al României , general secretary of the Romanian Ministry of Teaching and multiple times senator, with conservative political views. Tocilescu is one of the first Romanian historians who focused on the study of civilizations in ancient Dacia. As a folklorist he collaborated on the publication of a folkloristics compendium.
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Stjepan Gradić
1613 - 1683 (70 years)
Stjepan Gradić, also known as Stefano Gradi was a polymath, philosopher, scientist and a patrician of the Republic of Ragusa. Biography Stijepo's parents were Miho Gradi and Marija Benessa . He was born in Ragusa , Republic of Ragusa, where he was first schooled. He moved to Rome by the order of his uncle, a vicar general of Ragusa, Petar Benessa. In Rome and in Bologna he studied philosophy, theology, law and mathematics. His mathematics professor in Rome was Bonaventura Cavalieri and in Bologna his mathematics professor was Benedetto Castelli. He became a priest in 1643, the year he returned home and soon became abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St.
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Eleonora Ziemięcka
1819 - 1869 (50 years)
Eleonora Ziemięcka - was a Polish philosopher and publicist. She is often considered to be Poland's first female philosopher. She wrote Thoughts on the Education of Women, and edited the journal Pielgrzym . She has been described as an "anti-Hegelian" and a conservative.
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Jacques Maroger
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Jacques Maroger was a painter and the technical director of the Louvre Museum's laboratory in Paris. He devoted his life to understanding the oil-based media of the Old Masters. He emigrated to the United States in 1939 and became an influential teacher. His book, The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters, has been criticized by some modern writers on painting who say that the painting medium Maroger promoted is unsound.
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Silas Weir Mitchell
1829 - 1914 (85 years)
Silas Weir Mitchell was an American physician, scientist, novelist, and poet. He is considered the father of medical neurology, and he discovered causalgia and erythromelalgia, and pioneered the rest cure.
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Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi
1270 - 1340 (70 years)
Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi was a Jewish poet, physician, and philosopher; born at Béziers . His Occitan name was En Bonet, which probably corresponds to the Hebrew name Tobiah; and, according to the practices of Hachmei Provence, he occasionally joined to his name that of his father, Abraham Bedersi.
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Liu Shipei
1884 - 1919 (35 years)
Liu Shipei was a philologist, Chinese anarchist, and revolutionary activist. While he and his wife, He Zhen were in exile in Japan he became a fervent nationalist. He then saw the doctrines of anarchism as offering a path to social revolution while remaining intent on preserving China's cultural essence, especially Taoism and the records of China's pre-imperial history. In 1909 he unexpectedly returned to China to work for the Manchu Qing government and after 1911 supported Yuan Shikai's attempt to become emperor. After Yuan's death in 1916 he joined the faculty at Peking University. He died ...
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Frank Hugh Foster
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Frank Hugh Foster, Ph. D., D.D. was an American clergyman of the Congregational church. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and graduated at Harvard in 1873. In his activities, he was assistant professor of mathematics in the United States Naval Academy, graduated at Andover Theological Seminary , served as pastor at North Reading, Massachusetts, studied at Göttingen and Leipzig , and from 1882 to 1884 was professor of philosophy in Middlebury College. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Church history in the Oberlin Theological Seminary; from 1892 to 1902, he served at Berkeley, ...
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Friedrich Calker
1790 - 1870 (80 years)
Friedrich Calker , German philosopher, was educated in Jena. For a short time, he was a lecturer in Berlin. In 1818, he was called to an extraordinary professorship in the newly founded University of Bonn, becoming an ordinary professor in 1826. He substantially echoed the ideas of his teacher Jakob Fries. His two major works are Urgesetzlehre des Wahren, Guten und Schönen und Denklehre .
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Charles Morris, Baron Morris of Grasmere
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Charles Richard Morris, Baron Morris of Grasmere, was an academic philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. Early life and education Morris was born in Sutton Valence, Kent. He was educated at Tonbridge School and at Trinity College, Oxford from which he received a BA, later converted to MA.
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