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,
#14151
Demonax
200 - 170 (-30 years)
Demonax was a Greek Cynic philosopher. Born in Cyprus, he moved to Athens, where his wisdom, and his skill in solving disputes, earned him the admiration of the citizens. He taught Lucian, who wrote a Life of Demonax in praise of his teacher. When he died he received a magnificent public funeral.
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Karl Ewald Hasse
1810 - 1902 (92 years)
Karl Ewald Hasse was a German physician and professor of special pathology, born in Dresden. He was the son of historian Friedrich Christian August Hasse . Biography Hasse studied medicine at the medical-surgical academy in Dresden and at University of Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1833. Later, he continued his education in Paris and Vienna, and subsequently returned to Leipzig, where in 1836 he received his habilitation. In 1839 he became an associate professor of pathological anatomy in Leipzig, and in 1844 relocated to Zürich, where he was appointed medical director of the cantonal hos...
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Rodrigo de Arriaga
1592 - 1667 (75 years)
Rodrigo de Arriaga was a Spanish philosopher, theologian and Jesuit. He is known as one of the foremost Spanish Jesuits of his day and as a leading representative of post-Suárezian baroque Jesuit nominalism. Accordig to Richard Popkin, Arriaga was “the last of the great Spanish Scholastics”.
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Walter Johannes Stein
1891 - 1957 (66 years)
Walter Johannes Stein was an Austrian philosopher, Waldorf school teacher, Grail researcher, and one of the pioneers of anthroposophy. Biography Of Jewish descent, Stein studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Vienna University, before completing a doctorate in philosophy at the end of the First World War, having continued work on it throughout his service in an artillery unit in the war. He became a personal student of Rudolf Steiner from about the age of 21, and enjoyed the unofficial supervision of Steiner while writing his dissertation. Broadly speaking, the dissertation was an at...
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Adolf Dygasiński
1839 - 1902 (63 years)
Adolf Dygasiński was a Polish novelist, publicist and educator. In Polish literature, he was one of the leading representatives of Naturalism. Life During his literary career, Dygasiński wrote forty-two short stories and novels. Since 1884 his works were being published in book-form and enjoyed considerable success. They were translated into Russian and German. In 1891, Dygasiński went on a trip to Brazil on a trail of Polish emigrants from Partitioned Poland. He produced a series of letters describing the tragic fate of Polish émigrés in South America. In the following years Dygasiński maintained a position of a tutor and coach for numerous wealthy landowning families.
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Anne Conway
1631 - 1679 (48 years)
Anne Conway was an English philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Gottfried Leibniz. Conway's thought is a deeply original form of rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns that lead some to think of it as unique among seventeenth-century systems. Hugh Trevor-Roper called her "England's greatest female philosopher."
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Johannes Rehmke
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Johannes Rehmke was a German philosopher and since 1885 professor at Greifswald University, later also provost of this university. He offered sharp criticisms of Immanuel Kant's approach to epistemology. In his article "The Conquest of Subjectivism," Paul Ferdinand Linke pointed out that it was Rehmke who first made a courageous break from subjectivism, which was the pervasive philosophical paradigm in late modern German philosophy.
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Ernest Radlov
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Ernest Leopoldovich Radlov or Ernst Radlow was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher and historian of philosophy of German origin. Co-founder of the St. Petersburg Philosophical Society, director of the Public Library in Petrograd .
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Roderick Firth
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Roderick Firth was an American philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1953 until his death. Education Firth earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1943. His thesis was entitled Sense-Data and the Principle of Reduction.
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880 - 1938 (58 years)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.
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Heraclides Ponticus
385 BC - 322 BC (63 years)
Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was born in Heraclea Pontica, now Karadeniz Ereğli, Turkey, and migrated to Athens. He is best remembered for proposing that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. He is also hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory; although this is disputed.
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Carl Wernicke
1848 - 1905 (57 years)
Carl Wernicke was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also the study of receptive aphasia, both of which are commonly associated with Wernicke's name and referred to as Wernicke encephalopathy and Wernicke's aphasia, respectively. His research, along with that of Paul Broca, led to groundbreaking realizations of the localization of brain function, specifically in speech. As such, Wernicke's area has been named after the scientist.
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Kasper Niesiecki
1682 - 1744 (62 years)
Kasper Niesiecki , also known as Kacper Niesiecki, was a Polish heraldist, Jesuit, lexicographer, writer, theologian and preacher. Biography Niesiecki was born in Greater Poland to a burgher family. In 1699 he began training as a Jesuit in Kraków. From 1701 to 1704 he studied philosophy in Lublin, earning a master's degree. In 1707 Niesiecki started his studies in theology at the Jagiellonian University, graduating in 1711. He undertook further study in Lutsk, Krosno, Bydgoszcz, Chojnice and Kalisz.
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Michael Servetus
1511 - 1553 (42 years)
Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio . He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
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Arkady Timiryasev
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Arkady Klimentievich Timiryazev was a Russian Marxist physicist and philosopher. Biography Arkady was the son of the prominent agronomist and biologist Kliment Timiryazev. He was closely associated with Maxim Gorky. Although he was deemed a professor of physics at Moscow State University, he was derided as the "monument's son" by people who questioned his competence. He was an ardent defender of the classical physics propounded by Isaac Newton and was particularly noted for his vitriolic denunciations of Albert Einstein. He used his Bolshevik ideology to attack other Soviet physicists such as Abram Ioffe and Sergei Vavilov.
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Adalbert Stifter
1805 - 1868 (63 years)
Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing and has long been popular in the German-speaking world, while remaining almost entirely unknown to English readers.
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Karl Friedrich Schinkel
1781 - 1841 (60 years)
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a Prussian architect, city planner and painter who also designed furniture and stage sets. Schinkel was one of the most prominent architects of Germany and designed both Neoclassical and neo-Gothic buildings. His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin.
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Nicolaus of Damascus
64 BC - 4 (68 years)
Nicolaus of Damascus was a Greek historian and philosopher who lived during the Augustan age of the Roman Empire. His name is derived from that of his birthplace, Damascus. His output was vast, but is nearly all lost. His chief work was a universal history in 144 books. There exist considerable remains of two works of his old age; a life of Augustus, and an autobiography. He also wrote a life of Herod, some philosophical works, and some tragedies and comedies.
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Pierre Laffitte
1823 - 1903 (80 years)
Pierre Laffitte was a French positivist philosopher. Laffitte was born at Béguey, Gironde. Residing at Paris as a teacher of mathematics, he became a disciple of Auguste Comte, who appointed him his literary executor. On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte's death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhered to Émile Littré, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the philosophy of science of Comte's earlier period. From 1853 Laffitte delivered Positivist lectures in the room formerly occupied by Comte in the rue Monsieur le Prince.
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Sebastiano Serlio
1475 - 1554 (79 years)
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva .
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Maulana Azad
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al-Hussaini Azad was an Indian independence activist, writer and a senior leader of the Indian National Congress. Following India's independence, he became the First Minister of Education in the Indian government. He is commonly remembered as Maulana Azad; the word Maulana is an honorific meaning 'Our Master' and he had adopted Azad as his pen name. His contribution to establishing the education foundation in India is recognised by celebrating his birthday as National Education Day across India.
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Irwin Edman
1896 - 1954 (58 years)
Irwin Edman was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy. Biography Irwin Edman was born in New York City to Jewish parents. He grew up in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, adjacent to Columbia University, with which he was to be affiliated his entire adult life. Edman spent his high-school years at Townsend Harris Hall, a New York high school for superior pupils. He then attended Columbia University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and earned his bachelor's degree in 1917 and his Ph.D. in 1920. During his student years at Columbia he was a member of the Boar's Head Society.
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Maurice de Vlaminck
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense colour. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905.
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Haribhadra
800 - 850 (50 years)
Haribhadra, also known as Shizi Xian or Sengge Zangpo was an 8th-century CE Buddhist philosopher, and a disciple of Śāntarakṣita, an early Indian Buddhist missionary to Tibet. He was one of the founding monks of the Vikramashila monastery. Haribhadra's commentary on the Abhisamayalankara was one of the most influential of the twenty-one Indian commentaries on that text, perhaps because of its author's status as Shantarakshita's student. Like his master, Haribhadra is retrospectively considered by Tibetan doxographical tradition to represent the Yogācāra-Svatantrika-Mādhyamaka school.
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Valerie Solanas
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist known for the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and for her attempt to murder artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government,...
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Matthew Tindal
1657 - 1733 (76 years)
Matthew Tindal was an eminent English deist author. His works, highly influential at the dawn of the Enlightenment, caused great controversy and challenged the Christian consensus of his time. Life Tindal was baptised on 12 May 1657 at Bere Ferrers in Devon, son of the Reverend John Tindal, who was rector of the parish, and his wife Anne Halse. Through his mother, he was a first cousin of Thomas Clifford, 1st Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, and therefore descended from the Clifford and Fortescue families.
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David Kaufmann
1852 - 1899 (47 years)
David Kaufmann was a Jewish-Austrian scholar born at Kojetín, Moravia . From 1861 to 1867 he attended the gymnasium at Kroměříž, Moravia, where he studied the Bible and Talmud with Jacob Brüll, rabbi of Kojetín, and with the latter's son Nehemiah.
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Ernst Kapp
1808 - 1896 (88 years)
Ernst Christian Kapp was a German-American philosopher of technology and geographer, and a follower of Carl Ritter. He was prosecuted for sedition in the late 1840s for publishing a small article entitled 'Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit' and was subsequently forced to leave Germany. He then emigrated to the German pioneer settlements of central Texas where he worked as a farmer, geographer and inventor.
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A. W. Benn
1843 - 1915 (72 years)
Alfred William Benn was an agnostic and an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. His book A History of Modern Philosophy was republished in the Thinker's Library series in 1930.
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Eric Hoffer
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer , was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. The Eric Hoffer Book Award is an international literary prize established in his honor. The University of California, Berkeley awards an annual literary prize named jointly for Hoffer.
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Konrad Johann Martin Langenbeck
1776 - 1851 (75 years)
Konrad Johann Martin Langenbeck was a German surgeon, ophthalmologist and anatomist who was a native of Horneburg. Biography Langenbeck studied medicine at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and in 1802 received his habilitation under August Gottlieb Richter at University of Göttingen. In 1804 he became an associate professor, and three years later established his own institute for surgery and ophthalmology. In 1814 he was appointed full professor at Göttingen and general surgeon of the Hannoverian Army.
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Pyotr Chaadayev
1794 - 1856 (62 years)
Pyotr or Petr Yakovlevich Chaadayev was a Russian philosopher. He was one of the Russian Schellingians. Chaadayev wrote eight "Philosophical Letters" about Russia in French between 1826 and 1831, which circulated among intellectuals in Russia in manuscript form for many years. They comprise an indictment of Russian culture for its laggard role far behind the leaders of Western civilization. He cast doubt on the greatness of the Russian past, and ridiculed Orthodoxy for failing to provide a sound spiritual basis for the Russian mind. He extolled the achievements of Europe, especially in ratio...
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Ladislav Klíma
1878 - 1928 (50 years)
Ladislav Klíma , was a Czech philosopher and novelist influenced by George Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His philosophy is referred to varyingly as existentialism and subjective idealism. Life Ladislav Klíma was born in the town of Domažlice in western Bohemia. He came from a moderately wealthy family. After expulsion from the school system in 1895 for allegedly insulting the State, the Church, and — out of what he described as “historical analphabetism” — the Habsburgs, he lived alternately in Tyrol, Zurich, and Prague. As part of his philosophy he only ever took on short term work. F...
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Felix Weltsch
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Felix Weltsch , was a German-speaking Jewish librarian, philosopher, author, editor, publisher and journalist. A close friend of Max Brod, Ludwig Winder and Franz Kafka, he was one of the most important Zionists in Bohemia.
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Herbert James Paton
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Herbert James Paton FBA FSA Scot , usually cited as H. J. Paton, was a Scottish philosopher who taught at various university institutions, including Glasgow and Oxford. He worked in British intelligence during the two world wars and played a diplomatic role on behalf of Poland at the 1919 Versailles conference. In 1968, the year before his death, he published The Claim of Scotland, a plea for greater general understanding of the constitutional position of his own native country.
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Johannes Clauberg
1622 - 1665 (43 years)
Johannes Clauberg was a German theologian and philosopher. Clauberg was the founding Rector of the first University of Duisburg, where he taught from 1655 to 1665. He is known as a "scholastic cartesian".
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Kamo no Mabuchi
1697 - 1769 (72 years)
Kamo no Mabuchi, or Mabuchi of Kamo was a kokugaku scholar, poet and philologist during mid-Edo period Japan. Along with Kada no Azumamaro, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane, he was regarded as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku, and through his research into the spirit of ancient Japan he expounded on the theory of magokoro, which he held to be fundamental to the history of Japan. Independently of and alongside his contemporary Motoori Norinaga, Mabuchi is accredited with the initial discovery of Lyman's Law, governing rendaku in the Japanese language, though which would later be name...
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Immanuel Kant
#14189
Echecrates of Phlius
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Echecrates was a Pythagorean philosopher from the ancient Greek town of Phlius. He appears in Plato's Phaedo dialogue as an aid to the plot. He meets Phaedo, the dialogue's namesake, some time after the execution of Socrates, and asks Phaedo to tell him the story of the famed philosopher's last hours. Phaedo's presentation of the story comprises most of the dialogue's remainder, though Echecrates interrupts at times to ask questions relevant to the retold discussion.
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Dionysius Lardner
1793 - 1859 (66 years)
Dionysius Lardner FRS FRSE was an Irish scientific writer who popularised science and technology, and edited the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopædia. Early life in Dublin He was born in Dublin on 3 April 1793 the son of William Lardner and his wife; his father was a solicitor in Dublin, who wished his son to follow the same calling. After some years of uncongenial desk work, Lardner entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1812. He obtained a B.A. in 1817 and an M.A. in 1819, winning many prizes.
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Bernardus Silvestris
1085 - 1160 (75 years)
Bernardus Silvestris, also known as Bernard Silvestris and Bernard Silvester, was a medieval Platonist philosopher and poet of the 12th century. Biography Little is known about Bernardus's life. In the nineteenth century, it was assumed that Bernardus was the same person as Bernard of Chartres, but the scholarly consensus is now that the two were different people. There is little evidence connecting Bernardus to Chartres, yet his work is consistent with the scholarship associated with Chartres in the twelfth century and is in that sense "Chartrian". Bernardus dedicated his Cosmographia to Thi...
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Jayatirtha
1345 - 1388 (43 years)
Sri Jayatirtha , also known as Teekacharya , was a Hindu philosopher, dialectician, polemicist and the sixth pontiff of Madhvacharya Peetha from . He is considered to be one of the most important seers in the history of Dvaita school of thought on account of his sound elucidations of the works of Madhvacharya. He is credited with structuring the philosophical aspects of Dvaita and through his polemical works, elevating it to an equal footing with the contemporary schools of thought. Along with Madhva and Vyasatirtha, he is venerated as one of the three great spiritual sages, or munitraya of Dvaita.
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Crantor
344 BC - 275 BC (69 years)
Crantor of Soli was an Ancient Greek philosopher and member of the Old Academy who was the first philosopher to write commentaries on the works of Plato. Life Crantor probably born around the middle of the 4th century BC, at Soli in Cilicia . He moved from Cilicia to Athens in order to study philosophy, where he became a pupil of Xenocrates and a friend of Polemon, and one of the most distinguished supporters of the philosophy of the older Academy. As Xenocrates died 314/3 BC, Crantor must have come to Athens prior to that year, although the date of his birth is not known. He died before both Polemon and Crates, who succeeded Polemon as scholarch.
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Theodor Gomperz
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Theodor Gomperz , Austrian philosopher and classical scholar, was born at Brno . Biography Gomperz studied at Brno and at Vienna under Hermann Bonitz. Graduating at the University of Vienna in 1867 he became privatdozent, and subsequently a professor of classical philology . In 1882 he was elected a full member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa from the University of Königsberg, and Doctor of Literature from the universities of Dublin and Cambridge, and became correspondent for several learned societies.
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Sosipatra
400 - 400 (0 years)
Sosipatra was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic who lived in Ephesus and Pergamon in the first half of the 4th century CE. The story of her life is told in Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists. Biography
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Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
1490 - 1573 (83 years)
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was a Spanish humanist, philosopher, and theologian of the Spanish Renaissance. He is mainly known for his participation in a famous debate with Bartolomé de las Casas in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–1551. The debate centered on the legitimacy of the conquest and colonization of America by the Spanish Empire and on the treatment of the Native Americans. The main philosophical referents of Ginés de Sepúlveda were Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roman law and Christian theology. These influences allowed him to argue for the cultural superiority and domination of the Spani...
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William Barton Rogers
1804 - 1882 (78 years)
William Barton Rogers was an American geologist, physicist, and educator at the College of William & Mary from 1828 to 1835 and at the University of Virginia from 1835 to 1853. In 1861, Rogers founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university opened in 1865 after the American Civil War. Because of his affiliation with Virginia, Mount Rogers, the highest peak in the state, is named after him.
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Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza
1578 - 1651 (73 years)
Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza , also called Puente Hurtado de Mendoza, was a Basque scholastic philosopher and theologian. Philosophical work He was a teacher of theology and philosophy in Valladolid and he occupied a chair at the University of Salamanca.
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Methodios Anthrakites
1660 - 1736 (76 years)
Methodios Anthrakites was a Greek Orthodox cleric, author, educator, mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher. He directed the Gioumeios and Epiphaneios Schools in Ioannina. He also supported the use of the people's language in education instead of archaic forms of Greek. He was involved in a controversy regarding Korydalism. He is known for being persecuted for introducing modern philosophical thought to Greek education, the incident is widely known as the Methodios Affair. He made a significant contribution to the growth of the Modern Greek Enlightenment during the Ottoman ...
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Yuri Samarin
1819 - 1876 (57 years)
Yuri Fyodorovich Samarin was a leading Russian Slavophile thinker and one of the architects of the Emancipation reform of 1861. He came from a noble family and befriended Konstantin Aksakov from an early age. An ardent admirer of Hegel and Khomyakov, Samarin attended the Moscow University, where his teachers included Mikhail Pogodin. He came to believe that "Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy alone, is a religion which philosophy can recognize" and that "the Orthodox church cannot exist apart from Hegel's philosophy". Samarin's dissertation was a study of Feofan Prokopovich's influence on the Russian O...
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