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,
#14051
Georg Jellinek
1851 - 1911 (60 years)
Georg Jellinek was a German public lawyer and was considered to be "the exponent of public law in Austria“. Life From 1867, Jellinek studied law, history of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He also studied philosophy, history and law in Heidelberg and Leipzig up until 1872. He was the son of Adolf Jellinek, a famous preacher in Vienna's Jewish community. In 1872 he completed his Dr. phil. thesis in Leipzig and in 1874 also his Dr. jur. in Vienna.
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Branislav Petronijević
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Branislav "Brana" Petronijević was a Serbian philosopher and paleontologist. His major work is the two-volume Prinzipien der Metaphysik , in which he outlines his original metaphysical system – a synthesis of Baruch Spinoza's monism and Gottfried Leibniz's monadological pluralism into what he called "monopluralism". Influenced by George Berkeley and G.W.F. Hegel, Petronijević held that our immediate experience is the source of basic logical and metaphysical axioms – what he called "empirio-rationalist" epistemology.
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Kurt Riezler
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Kurt Riezler was a German philosopher and diplomat. A top-level cabinet adviser in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he negotiated Germany's underwriting of Russia's October Revolution and authored the 1914 September Program which outlined German war aims during World War I. The posthumous publication of his secret notes and diaries played a role in the "Fischer Controversy" among German historians in the early 1960s.
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Heydar Huseynov
1908 - 1950 (42 years)
Dr. Heydar Najaf oglu Huseynov was an Azerbaijani philosopher and academician. Life Huseynov was born in Erivan into the petty bourgeois family of Haji Najaf Karbalai Huseynoglu and his wife Mashadi Gulsum, being the youngest of their six children. His father died shortly after Heydar's birth. After their eldest son Yusif was killed in an ethnic conflict in 1918, the family moved first to Batumi, then to Stavropol, until they finally settled in Baku where he received secondary education, graduated from the Azerbaijan State Pedagocical Institute with a degree in linguistics in 1931 and a Candidate of Sciences degree in philosophy.
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John Amos Comenius
1592 - 1670 (78 years)
John Amos Comenius was a Moravian philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century.
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Edward Bellamy
1850 - 1898 (48 years)
Edward Bellamy was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of his political ideas.
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Karl Rosenkranz
1805 - 1879 (74 years)
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Life Born in Magdeburg, he read philosophy at Berlin, Halle and Königsberg, devoting himself mainly to the doctrines of Hegel and Schleiermacher. After holding the chair of philosophy at Halle for two years, he became, in 1833, professor at the University of Königsberg. In his last years he was blind.
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Jan van Eyck
1390 - 1441 (51 years)
Jan van Eyck was a painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting, though most now regard that claim as an oversimplification.
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Bhāviveka
500 - 578 (78 years)
Bhāviveka, also called Bhāvaviveka , and Bhavya was a sixth-century madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher. Alternative names for this figure also include Bhavyaviveka, Bhāvin, Bhāviviveka, Bhagavadviveka and Bhavya. Bhāviveka is the author of the Madhyamakahrdaya , its auto-commentary the Tarkajvālā and the Prajñāpradīpa .
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Stanisław Jaśkowski
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Stanisław Jaśkowski was a Polish logician who made important contributions to proof theory and formal semantics. He was a student of Jan Łukasiewicz and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic. He is regarded as one of the founders of natural deduction, which he discovered independently of Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. He is also known for his research into paraconsistent logic. Upon his death, his name was added to the Genius Wall of Fame. He was the President of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Constantin Brâncuși
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought ...
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Herman Van Breda
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Herman Leo Van Breda was a Franciscan, philosopher and founder of the Husserl Archives at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. On 19 August 1934, he was ordained as a priest and in 1936 he started studying philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he obtained a PhD degree in 1941 with a dissertation on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Later he became a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he stayed until his death in 1974.
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Jakob Sigismund Beck
1761 - 1840 (79 years)
Jakob Sigismund Beck was a German philosopher. Biography Beck was born in the village of Liessau in the rural district of Marienburg in Royal Prussia, Poland in 1761. The son of a priest , he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Königsberg, where Christian Jakob Kraus, Johann Schultz, and Immanuel Kant were his teachers. After his studies he first accepted a post as a teacher at a grammar school in Halle. With his thesis Dissertatio de Theoremate Tayloriano, sive de lege generali, secundum quam functionis mutantur, notatis a quibus pendent variabilibus, which he wrote in Halle, he was qualified as a university lecturer.
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Manuel Sacristán
1925 - 1985 (60 years)
Manuel Sacristán Luzón was a Spanish philosopher and writer. Sacristán, the son of a Francoist collaborator, moved to Barcelona in 1940, thereafter living most of his life in said city. He soon became a member of the Falange Española youth section and studied Law and Philosophy in the University of Barcelona, where he became a member of the cultural section of the Sindicato Español Universitario . After a thwarted contact with a clandestine Anarchist group, he and two fellow Falangists were shunned and persecuted by the mainstream SEU officials, resulting in the suicide of one of them and an ...
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Joseph Henry Woodger
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Joseph Henry Woodger was a British theoretical biologist and philosopher of biology whose attempts to make biological sciences more rigorous and empirical was significantly influential to the philosophy of biology in the twentieth century. Karl Popper, the prominent philosopher of science, claimed "Woodger... influenced and stimulated the evolution of the philosophy of science in Britain and in the United States as hardly anybody else".
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Edgar S. Brightman
1884 - 1953 (69 years)
Edgar Sheffield Brightman was an American philosopher and Christian theologian in the Methodist tradition, associated with Boston University and liberal theology, and promulgated the philosophy known as Boston personalism.
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Jean Grenier
1898 - 1971 (73 years)
Jean Grenier was a French philosopher and writer. He taught for a time in Algiers, where he became a significant influence on the young Albert Camus. Biography Born in Paris, Grenier spent his childhood and adolescence in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, the birthplace of Jules Lequier, the visionary philosopher to whom Grenier would eventually dedicate his doctoral thesis. These early years, during which he became acquainted with Louis Guilloux, Edmond Lambert and Max Jacob, are documented in his autobiographical novel Les grèves . In 1922 Grenier gained a teaching qualification in philosophy and began his academic career at the Institut français in Naples, alongside Henri Bosco.
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Walter Dubislav
1895 - 1937 (42 years)
Walter Dubislav was a German logician and philosopher of science . Biography After studying mathematics and philosophy, Dubislav attained a doctorate in 1922 with "Contributions to the theories of definition and proof within mathematical logic" . In 1928 he became a private lecturer in philosophy of mathematics and the natural sciences at the Technical University of Berlin and from 1931 was Professor Extraordinarius . In 1936 he emigrated to Prague.
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Helen Keller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the Unite...
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Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1846 - 1926 (80 years)
Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life", after he had been nominated by a member of the Swedish Academy.
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Ogyū Sorai
1666 - 1728 (62 years)
Ogyū Sorai, pen name Butsu Sorai, was a Japanese historian, philologist, philosopher, and translator. He has been described as the most influential such scholar during the Edo period Japan. His primary area of study was in applying the teachings of Confucianism to government and social order. He responded to contemporary economic and political failings of the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as the culture of mercantilism and the dominance of old institutions that had become weak with extravagance. Sorai rejected the moralism of Neo-Confucianism and instead looked to the ancient works. He argue...
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Max Bense
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Max Bense was a German philosopher, writer, and publicist, known for his work in philosophy of science, logic, aesthetics, and semiotics. His thoughts combine natural sciences, art, and philosophy under a collective perspective and follow a definition of reality, which – under the term existential rationalism – is able to remove the separation between humanities and natural sciences.
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Karl Groos
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Karl Groos was a German philosopher and psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play. His 1898 book on The Play of Animals suggested that play is a preparation for later life.
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Leo the Mathematician
790 - 900 (110 years)
Leo the Mathematician, the Grammarian or the Philosopher was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century". He was archbishop of Thessalonica and later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic.
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Owen Barfield
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Arthur Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings. Life Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth and Arthur Edward Barfield . He had three elder siblings: Diana , Barbara , and Harry . He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America.
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John Everett Millais
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street . Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophel...
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Vinoba Bhave
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Vinayak Narahari Bhave, also known as Vinoba Bhave , was an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights. Often called Acharya , he is best known for the Bhoodan Movement. He is considered as National Teacher of India and the spiritual successor of Mahatma Gandhi. He was an eminent philosopher. The Gita has been translated into the Marathi language by him with the title Geetai .
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Heinrich Gomperz
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Heinrich Gomperz was an Austrian philosopher. He was a son of Theodor Gomperz. He was a patient of Sigmund Freud and was married to Ada Stepnitz. Works , 1898., 1907.Die indische Theosophie, 1925., 2 Vols., 1905–1908., 1915.Über Sinn und Sinngebilde, Erklären und Verstehen, 1929., 1953.
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James Frederick Ferrier
1808 - 1864 (56 years)
James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer and philosopher. He introduced the word epistemology in philosophical English, as well as coining agnoiology for the study of ignorance. Education and early writings Ferrier was born at 15 Heriot Row in Edinburgh, the son of John Ferrier, writer to the signet. He was educated at the Royal High School, the University of Edinburgh and Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently, his metaphysical tastes having been fostered by his intimate friend, Sir William Hamilton, spent some time at Heidelberg studying German philosophy.
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Euclid of Megara
436 BC - 365 BC (71 years)
Euclid of Megara was a Greek Socratic philosopher who founded the Megarian school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates in the late 5th century BC, and was present at his death. He held the supreme good to be one, eternal and unchangeable, and denied the existence of anything contrary to the good. Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter's Elements.
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Dagobert D. Runes
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Dagobert David Runes was an immigrant publisher in the US, a philosopher and author. Biography Runes was born in Zastavna, Bukovina, Austro-Hungary . He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1924, under the direction of Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle of positivist philosophers.
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Edgar Cayce
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Edgar Cayce was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to speak from his higher self while in a trance-like state. His words were recorded by his friend, Al Layne; his wife, Gertrude Evans, and later by his secretary, Gladys Davis Turner. During the sessions, Cayce would answer questions on a variety of subjects such as healing, reincarnation, dreams, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition, Atlantis, and future events. Cayce, a devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher, said that his readings came from his subconscious mind exploring the dream realm, where he said all minds were timelessly connected.
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John Lewis
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
John Lewis was a British Unitarian minister and Marxist philosopher and author of many works on philosophy, anthropology, and religion. Lewis's father, a successful builder and architect, came from a Welsh farming family, and was a very devout Methodist. Young Lewis's social and political views clashed with those of his father. Their quarrels eventually led to his father disinheriting him.
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Francis Ellingwood Abbot
1836 - 1903 (67 years)
Francis Ellingwood Abbot was an American philosopher and theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method. His lifelong romance with his wife Katharine Fearing Loring forms the subject of If Ever Two Were One, a collection of his correspondence and diary entries.
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Dietrich von Hildebrand
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer. Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII. He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Pope John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicist...
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Stéphane Lupasco
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Stéphane Lupasco was a Romanian philosopher who developed non-Aristotelian logic. Early years Stéphane Lupasco was born in Bucharest on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavian aristocracy. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck, who established the family in Paris in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon, he studied philosophy, biology and physics at the Sorbonne and, briefly, law. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20s and 30s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in...
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D. Elton Trueblood
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
David Elton Trueblood , who was usually known as "Elton Trueblood" or "D. Elton Trueblood", was a noted 20th-century American Quaker author and theologian, former chaplain both to Harvard and Stanford universities.
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Bernardino Telesio
1509 - 1588 (79 years)
Bernardino Telesio was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist. While his natural theories were later disproven, his emphasis on observation made him the "first of the moderns" who eventually developed the scientific method.
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Émile Meyerson
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Émile Meyerson was a Polish-born French epistemologist, chemist, and philosopher of science. Meyerson was born in Lublin, Poland. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 74. Biography Meyerson was educated at the University of Heidelberg and studied chemistry under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1882 Meyerson settled in Paris. He served as foreign editor of the Havas news agency, and later as the director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. He became a naturalized French citizen after World War I.
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Carlos Vaz Ferreira
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Carlos Vaz Ferreira was a Uruguayan philosopher, lawyer, writer, and academic. Influenced by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, he is notable for introducing liberal, pluralistic political values and pragmatic philosophical concepts to South American society.
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Théodore Simon Jouffroy
1796 - 1842 (46 years)
Théodore Simon Jouffroy , aka Simon Joseph Théodore Jouffroy, was a French philosopher. Biography He was born at Les Pontets, Franche-Comté, département of Doubs. In his tenth year, his father, a tax-gatherer, sent him to an uncle at Pontarlier, under whom he began his classical studies. At Dijon his compositions attracted the attention of an inspector, who had him placed in the normal school, Paris. There he came under the influence of Victor Cousin, and in 1817 he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the normal and Bourbon schools.
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Aryadeva
200 - 250 (50 years)
Āryadeva , was a Mahayana Buddhist monk, a disciple of Nagarjuna and a Madhyamaka philosopher. Most sources agree that he was from "Siṃhala", which some scholars identify with Sri Lanka. After Nagarjuna, he is considered to be the next most important figure of the Indian Madhyamaka school.
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Jacob Moleschott
1822 - 1893 (71 years)
Jacob Moleschott was a Dutch physiologist and writer on dietetics. He is known for his philosophical views in regard to scientific materialism. He was a member of German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .
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John Playfair
1748 - 1819 (71 years)
John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth , which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
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F. C. S. Schiller
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, FBA , usually cited as F. C. S. Schiller, was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein , Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California. In his lifetime he was well known as a philosopher; after his death, his work was largely forgotten.
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Louis Lavelle
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Louis Lavelle was a French philosopher, considered one of the greatest French metaphysicians of the twentieth century. His magnum opus, La Dialectique de l'éternel présent , is a systematic metaphysical work. Lavelle's other principal works include De l'Être , De l'Acte , Du Temps et de l'Eternité , and De l'Âme Humaine .
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Nicholas Murray Butler
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Nicholas Murray Butler was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. Butler was president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the deceased James S. Sherman's replacement as William Howard Taft’s running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election. He became so well known and respected that The New York Times printed his Christmas greeting to the nation many years during the 1920s and 1930s.
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Christoph von Sigwart
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Christoph von Sigwart was a German philosopher and logician. He was the son of philosopher Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart . Life After a course of philosophy and theology, Sigwart became professor at Blaubeuren , and eventually at Tübingen, in 1865.
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Cooper Harold Langford
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
Cooper Harold Langford was an American analytic philosopher and mathematical logician who co-authored the book Symbolic Logic with C. I. Lewis. He is also known for introducing the Langford–Moore paradox.
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Dominique Dubarle
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Dominique Dubarle was a French Dominican friar and religious philosopher, a professor at the Saulchoir. He was dean of the faculty of philosophy of the Catholic Institute of Paris from 1967 to 1973 and was an expert at the Second Vatican Council .
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