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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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#14401

Hermann Cohen

1842 - 1918 (76 years)

Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".

#14402

Alexander Bogdanov

Alexander Bogdanov

1873 - 1928 (55 years)

Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov , born Alexander Malinovsky, was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was a polymath who pioneered blood transfusion and general systems theory and made important contributions to cybernetics.

#14403

Thales of Miletus

Thales of Miletus

650 BC - 548 BC (102 years)

Thales of Miletus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece, and credited with the saying "know thyself" which was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

#14404

Charles Fourier

Charles Fourier

1772 - 1837 (65 years)

François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker, and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of his views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.

#14405

Julius Evola

1898 - 1974 (76 years)

Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola was an Italian far-right philosopher. Evola regarded his values as aristocratic, monarchist, masculine, traditionalist, heroic, and defiantly reactionary. An eccentric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany; in the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant Right.

#14406

Hermann Lotze

1817 - 1881 (64 years)

Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and logician. He also had a medical degree and was well versed in biology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws and relations, then developments in the universe could be explained as the functioning of a world mind. His medical studies were pioneering works in scientific psychology.

#14407

Numenius of Apamea

Numenius of Apamea

200 - 200 (0 years)

Numenius of Apamea was a Greek philosopher, who lived in Rome, and flourished during the latter half of the 2nd century AD. He was a Neopythagorean and forerunner of the Neoplatonists. Philosophy Statements and fragments of his apparently very numerous works have been preserved by Origen, Theodoret, and especially by Eusebius, and from them we may learn the nature of his Platonist-Pythagorean philosophy, and its approximation to the doctrines of Plato.

#14408

John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman

1801 - 1890 (89 years)

John Henry Newman was an English theologian, academic, intellectual, philosopher, polymath, historian, writer, scholar and poet, first as an Anglican priest and later as a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s, and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.

#14409

Philolaus

470 BC - 390 BC (80 years)

Philolaus was a Greek Pythagorean and pre-Socratic philosopher. He was born in a Greek colony in Italy and migrated to Greece. Philolaus has been called one of three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition and the most outstanding figure in the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras developed a school of philosophy that was dominated by both mathematics and mysticism. Most of what is known today about the Pythagorean astronomical system is derived from Philolaus's views. He may have been the first to write about Pythagorean doctrine. According to August Böckh , who cites Nicomachus, Philo...

#14410

Dignāga

480 - 540 (60 years)

Dignāga was an Indian Buddhist scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic . Dignāga's work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology .

#14411

Simplicius of Cilicia

Simplicius of Cilicia

490 - 560 (70 years)

Simplicius of Cilicia was a disciple of Ammonius Hermiae and Damascius, and was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He was among the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being allowed back into the empire. He wrote extensively on the works of Aristotle. Although his writings are all commentaries on Aristotle and other authors, rather than original compositions, his intelligent and prodigious learning makes him the last great philosopher of pagan antiquity. His works have preserved much info...

#14412

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961 (36 years)

Frantz Omar Fanon was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique . His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

#14413

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn

1729 - 1786 (57 years)

Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau, Principality of Anhalt, and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature. Through his writings on philosophy and religion he came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Christian and Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe and beyond.

#14414

Cratylus

500 BC - Present (2526 years)

Cratylus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from the mid-late 5th century BC, known mostly through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue Cratylus. He was a radical proponent of Heraclitean philosophy and influenced the young Plato.

#14415

Kuno Fischer

1824 - 1907 (83 years)

Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic. Biography After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle, became a privatdocent at Heidelberg in 1850. The Baden government in 1853 laid an embargo on his teaching owing to his liberal ideas, but the effect of this was to rouse considerable sympathy for his views, and in 1856 he obtained a professorship at Jena, where he soon acquired great influence by the dignity of his personal character. In 1872, on Eduard Zeller's move to Berlin, Fischer succeeded him as professor of philosophy and the history ...

#14416

Eugen Dühring

1833 - 1921 (88 years)

Eugen Karl Dühring was a German philosopher, positivist, antisemite, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism. Life and works Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised at Berlin as a lawyer until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, occasioned his taking up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.

#14417

Harald Høffding

Harald Høffding

1843 - 1931 (88 years)

Harald Høffding was a Danish philosopher and theologian. Life Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen. He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school. The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding. The philosopher and author Ágúst H. Bjarnason was a student of Høffding.

#14418

C. D. Broad

1887 - 1971 (84 years)

Charlie Dunbar Broad , usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English epistemologist, historian of philosophy, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, and writer on the philosophical aspects of psychical research. He was known for his thorough and dispassionate examinations of arguments in such works as Scientific Thought , The Mind and Its Place in Nature , and Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy .

#14419

Guru Nanak

1469 - 1539 (70 years)

Gurū Nānak , also referred to as , was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. His birth is celebrated as Guru Nanak Gurpurab on Katak Pooranmashi , i.e. October–November.

#14420

Gorgias

483 BC - 375 BC (108 years)

Gorgias was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays wa...

#14421

James Mark Baldwin

James Mark Baldwin

1861 - 1934 (73 years)

James Mark Baldwin was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Princeton and the University of Toronto. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.

#14422

Robert Grosseteste

Robert Grosseteste

1175 - 1253 (78 years)

Robert Grosseteste , also known as Robert Greathead or Robert of Lincoln, was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, scientist and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents in Suffolk , but the associations with the village of Stradbroke is a post-medieval tradition. Upon his death, he was revered as a saint in England, but attempts to procure a formal canonisation failed. A. C. Crombie called him "the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford, and in some ways, of the modern English intellectual tradition".

#14423

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

1908 - 1986 (78 years)

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

#14424

Alan Watts

1915 - 1973 (58 years)

Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

#14425

Stanisław Leśniewski

Stanisław Leśniewski

1886 - 1939 (53 years)

Stanisław Leśniewski was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician. Life He was born on 28 March 1886 at Serpukhov, near Moscow, to father Izydor, an engineer working on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and mother Helena . Leśniewski went to a high school in Irkutsk. Later he attended lectures by Hans Cornelius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and lectures by Wacław Sierpiński at Lviv University.

#14426

André Malraux

1901 - 1976 (75 years)

Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency .

#14427

Eric Voegelin

1901 - 1985 (84 years)

Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

#14428

Aenesidemus

80 BC - 10 BC (70 years)

Aenesidemus was a 1st-century BC Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher from Knossos who revived the doctrines of Pyrrho and introduced ten skeptical "modes" for the suspension of judgment. He broke with the Academic Skepticism that was predominant in his time, synthesizing the teachings of Heraclitus and Timon of Phlius with philosophical skepticism. Although his primary work, the Pyrrhonian Discourses, has been lost, an outline of the work survives from the later Byzantine empire, and the description of the modes has been preserved by few ancient sources.

#14429

Gustav Bergmann

Gustav Bergmann

1906 - 1987 (81 years)

Gustav Bergmann was an Austrian-born American philosopher. He studied at the University of Vienna and was a member of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann was influenced by the philosophers Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and Rudolf Carnap, who were members of the Circle. In the United States, he was a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Iowa.

#14430

Paracelsus

1493 - 1541 (48 years)

Paracelsus , born Theophrastus von Hohenheim , was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology". Paracelsus also had a substantial influence as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 17th century. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.

#14431

Ralph Cudworth

1617 - 1688 (71 years)

Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew , 26th Master of Clare Hall , and 14th Master of Christ's College . A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe .

#14432

Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt

1769 - 1859 (90 years)

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.

#14433

Friedrich Pollock

Friedrich Pollock

1894 - 1970 (76 years)

Friedrich Pollock was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory.

#14434

Paul Arthur Schilpp

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Paul Arthur Schilpp was an American philosopher and educator. Biography Schilpp was born in Dillenburg, Germany and immigrated to the United States prior to World War I. Schilpp taught at Northwestern University, University of Puget Sound, UC Santa Barbara, University of the Pacific and spent the last years of his professional career teaching undergraduate philosophy courses at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Schilpp was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association .

#14435

Lewis Carroll

1832 - 1898 (66 years)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass . He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.

#14436

Chanakya

375 BC - 283 BC (92 years)

Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Vishnugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century.

#14437

Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix

1798 - 1863 (65 years)

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.

#14438

Abhinavagupta

950 - 1020 (70 years)

Abhinavagupta was a philosopher, mystic and aesthetician from Kashmir. He was also considered an influential musician, poet, dramatist, exegete, theologian, and logician – a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture.

#14439

Evald Ilyenkov

1924 - 1979 (55 years)

Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov was a Marxist author and Soviet philosopher. Biography Evald Ilyenkov did original work on the materialist development of Hegel's dialectics, notable for his account of concrete universals. His works include Dialectical Logic , Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism and The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital . Ilyenkov committed suicide in 1979.

#14440

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler

1905 - 1983 (78 years)

Arthur Koestler, was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism.

#14441

George Henry Lewes

George Henry Lewes

1817 - 1878 (61 years)

George Henry Lewes was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theatre. He was also an amateur physiologist. American feminist Margaret Fuller called Lewes a "witty, French, flippant sort of man". He became part of the mid-Victorian ferment of ideas which encouraged discussion of Darwinism, positivism, and religious skepticism. However, he is perhaps best known today for having openly lived with Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, as soulmates whose lives and writings were enriched by their relationship, though they never married each other.

#14442

Jean-Marie Guyau

Jean-Marie Guyau

1854 - 1888 (34 years)

Jean-Marie Guyau was a French philosopher and poet. Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry and literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.

#14443

John Austin

1790 - 1859 (69 years)

John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.

#14444

Gustav Shpet

1879 - 1937 (58 years)

Gustav Gustavovich Shpet was a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, psychologist, art theoretician, and interpreter of German-Polish descent. He was a student of a well-known Russian psychologist and philosopher George Chelpanov, a follower of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, who introduced Husserlian phenomenology to Russia, modifying the phenomenology which he found in Husserl. Shpet was a Vice president of the Russian State Academy of Arts in Moscow . Shpet is an author of many books, including his famous A View on the History of Russian philosophy and The Hermeneutics and its pr...

#14445

Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa

Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa

770 - 830 (60 years)

was an Indian philosopher known for his radical skepticism who most likely flourished between 800-840 probably in southern India. He was the author of one of the most extraordinary philosophical works in Indian history, the Tattvopaplavasiṃha in which he professed radical skepticism, which posits the impossibility of knowledge. In his work, he attempts to show the contradictions of various philosophical positions as well as the counter positions. He is loosely affiliated to the materialist Cārvāka/Lokāyata school of philosophy but his affiliation with charvaka is disputed among scholars. H...

#14446

Speusippus

407 BC - 339 BC (68 years)

Speusippus was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, c. 348 BC, Speusippus inherited the Academy, near age 60, and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, Speusippus frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimate principle, Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to h...

#14447

Arrian

89 - 175 (86 years)

Arrian of Nicomedia was a Greek historian, public servant, military commander, and philosopher of the Roman period. The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian is considered the best source on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Scholars have generally preferred Arrian to other extant primary sources, though this attitude has changed somewhat in light of modern studies into Arrian's method.

#14448

Nae Ionescu

1890 - 1940 (50 years)

Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.

#14449

Maurice Solovine

Maurice Solovine

1875 - 1958 (83 years)

Maurice Solovine was a Romanian philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his association with Albert Einstein. Biography Solovine was born in Iași, a university city in eastern Romania, near the border with Moldova. As a young student of philosophy in Bern, Solovine applied to study physics with Albert Einstein in response to an advertisement. The two men struck up a close relationship and Einstein was said to say to Solovine a few days after meeting him: "It is not necessary to give you lessons in physics. The discussion about the problems which we face in physics today is much more interesting; simply come to me when you wish.

#14450

Cato the Younger

Cato the Younger

95 BC - 46 BC (49 years)

Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , also known as Cato the Younger , was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. His conservative principles were focused on the preservation of what he saw as old Roman values in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a powerful political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day.

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