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,
#14901
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
1836 - 1917 (81 years)
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was an English physician and suffragist. She was the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. She was the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor in Britain.
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Antoine-Jacques Roustan
1734 - 1808 (74 years)
Antoine-Jacques Roustan was a Genevan pastor and theologian, who engaged in an extensive correspondence with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unlike Rousseau, he believed that a Christian republic was practical - that the Christian religion was not incompatible with patriotism or republicanism.
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Marsilius of Inghen
1335 - 1396 (61 years)
Marsilius of Inghen was a medieval Dutch Scholastic philosopher who studied with Albert of Saxony and Nicole Oresme under Jean Buridan. He was Magister at the University of Paris as well as at the University of Heidelberg from 1386 to 1396.
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Li Shizhen
1517 - 1593 (76 years)
Li Shizhen , courtesy name Dongbi, was a Chinese acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician, and writer of the Ming dynasty. He is the author of a 27-year work, the Compendium of Materia Medica . He developed several methods for classifying herb components and medications for treating diseases.
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Anna Howard Shaw
1847 - 1919 (72 years)
Anna Howard Shaw was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the United States. Early life
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Jacek Woroniecki
1878 - 1949 (71 years)
Adam Marian Tomasz Pius Leon duke Korybut Woroniecki, religious name Jacek was a Polish Servant of God. He was a priest and member of the Dominican Order, theologian, teacher, professor of ethics and scholastic philosopher. He was also the rector of the Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski from 1922 to 1924, a member of Polska Akademia Umiejętności , professor of the Angelicum and the founder of Zgromadzenie Sióstr Dominikanek Misjonarek Jezusa i Maryi .
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Seymour I. Schwartz
#14908
Hecato of Rhodes
200 BC - 160 BC (40 years)
Hecato or Hecaton of Rhodes was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Rhodes, and a disciple of Panaetius, but nothing else is known of his life. It is clear that he was eminent amongst the Stoics of the period. He was a voluminous writer, but nothing remains. Diogenes Laërtius mentions six treatises written by Hecato:Περὶ ἀγαθῶν – On Goods, in at least nineteen books.Περὶ ἀρετῶν – On Virtues.Περὶ παθῶν – On Passions.Περὶ τελῶν – On Ends.Περὶ παραδόξων – On Paradoxes, in at least thirteen books.Χρεῖαι – Maxims.In addition Cicero writes that Hecato wrote a work on On Duties, dedicated to Quintus Tubero.
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Yamunacharya
950 - 1038 (88 years)
Yamunacharya , also known as Alavandar and Yamunaithuraivan, was a Vishistadvaita philosopher based in Srirangam, Tamil Nadu, India. He is best-known for being a preceptor of Ramanuja, one of the leaders of the Sri Vaishnava tradition. He was born in the early 10th century CE, and was the grandson of Nathamuni, a famed yogi, who collected the works of the Tamil Alvars.
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Gail Stine
1940 - 1977 (37 years)
Gail Stine was an American philosopher who specialized in epistemology and philosophy of language. She was born in Schenectady, New York. Before her death at the age of 37, she was a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University. Wayne State now holds the annual Gail Stine Memorial Lecture in her honor.
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František Mareš
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
František Mareš was a Czechoslovak professor of physiology and philosophy, and a nationalist politician. He was rector of the Charles University in 1920–21, and a member of the National Democrats.
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Henri Langlois
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
Henri Langlois was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema. His film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often credited with providing the ideas that led to the development of the auteur theory.
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Andrzej Towiański
1799 - 1878 (79 years)
Andrzej Tomasz Towiański was a Polish philosopher and messianic religious leader. Life Towiański was born in Antoszwińce, a village near Vilnius, which after Partitions of Poland belonged to the Russian Empire. He was the charismatic leader of the Towiańskiite sect, known also as . In 1839 he experienced a vision in which the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary urged him to act as a messenger of the Apocalypse. The Poles, the French—particularly Napoleon—and Jews were to play leading roles. Among those influenced by his thinking were the Polish Romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Seweryn Goszczyński.
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Fan Zhen
450 - 515 (65 years)
Fàn Zhěn was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer. He was an atheist of the Southern Qi Dynasty, remembered today for his treatise Shén Miè Lùn . Fàn was born into a poor family in today's Zhumadian, Henan province. He was a member of a cadet branch of the elite Fàn family, and became a high-ranking official thanks to his erudition. In response to the prevailing Buddhist movement of his time, he wrote Shen Mie Lun in 507, a treatise denying the ideas of reincarnation and body-soul dualism. A courtier tried to persuade Fàn to give up his opinion, in exchange for a higher official title, but Fàn refused.
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Julia Ward Howe
1819 - 1910 (91 years)
Julia Ward Howe was an American author and poet, known for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage.
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Arthur Drews
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews was a German writer, historian, philosopher, and important representative of German monist thought. He was born in Uetersen, Holstein, in present-day Germany. Biography Drews became a professor of philosophy and German language at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. During his career he wrote widely on the histories of philosophy, religions and mythology. He was a disciple of Eduard von Hartmann who claimed that reality is the "unconscious World Spirit", also expressed in history through religions and the formation of consciousness in the minds of philosophers.
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Sophonias
1250 - 1350 (100 years)
Sophonias was a Byzantine monk who wrote commentaries or paraphrases of the works of Aristotle including De Anima, Sophistici Elenchi, Prior Analytics, and the Parva Naturalia, which are still extant. Little is known about Sophonias, except that he was probably the monk sent by Michael IX Palaiologos on an abortive mission to arrange a marriage between Michael and a western princess around 1295.
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Edmund Montgomery
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Edmund Duncan Montgomery was a Scottish-American philosopher, scientist and physician. He was the husband of German-American sculptor Elisabet Ney. Early life Montgomery was born on the 19th of March, 1835, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His parentage is unknown, but the Elisabet Ney Museum relates the possibility that he was the son of Isabella Davidson and a prominent Scottish jurist, Duncan McNeill, 1st Baron Colonsay. He and his mother lived in Paris and Frankfurt, supplemented by a trust fund for him.
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Giulio Camillo
1480 - 1544 (64 years)
Giulio "Delminio" Camillo was an Italian philosopher. He is best known for his Theatre of Memory, described in his posthumously published work L’Idea del Theatro. Biography Camillo was born around 1480 in Friuli, now in the north-east of Italy, and probably spent his childhood in either Portogruaro or Udine. He took his family name, Delminio, from the birthplace of his father, in Dalmatia . He studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the University of Padua in the years around 1500, and subsequently taught eloquence and logic at San Vito, an academy in Friuli. In 1508 he was involved in the short-lived Accademia Liviana at Pordenone.
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Johannes van Vloten
1818 - 1883 (65 years)
Johannes van Vloten was a Dutch scholar, literary historian and philosopher. He is known as a rediscoverer of Spinoza's work and a freethinker in his tradition, with a great deal of involvement in all kinds of social issues. Van Vloten was one of the founders of modern humanism.
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Robert G. Petersdorf
#14922
Max Brod
1884 - 1968 (84 years)
Max Brod was a Bohemian-born Israeli author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is best remembered as the friend and biographer of writer Franz Kafka. Kafka named Brod as his literary executor, instructing Brod to burn his unpublished work upon his death. Brod refused and had Kafka's works published instead.
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Camillo Berneri
1897 - 1937 (40 years)
Camillo Berneri was an Italian professor of philosophy, anarchist militant, propagandist and theorist. He was assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, presumably on the orders from Stalin's USSR. Biography
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Viktor Sonnenfeld
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Viktor D. Sonnenfeld was prominent Croatian translator and philosopher. Biography Sonnenfeld was born to a Jewish family in Petrijevci, near Osijek, on 21 January 1902. In Osijek, Sonnenfeld finished elementary school and gymnasium, and in Zagreb and Marseille, he studied philosophy. All his life Sonnenfeld worked and acted in Osijek. He worked at the Osijek daily "Hrvatski list", and for 20 years at "Glas Slavonije" as the editor of cultural section. Sonnenfeld translated works of German philosophers and writers such as; Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche and others.
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Francesco Maria Zanotti
1692 - 1777 (85 years)
Francesco Maria Zanotti Cavazzoni was an Italian philosopher and writer. Besides being a writer, he was also a commentator on works of art. He was considered an authoritative source on many topics.
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Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann
1801 - 1877 (76 years)
Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann was a German physiologist, anatomist, and philosopher. He specialized in the study of the nervous and optic system. Biography Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann was born in Leipzig, and enrolled in medicine there in 1821. Together with Gustav Theodor Fechner, who got his degree in medicine in 1822, and Rudolph Hermann Lotze , they formed a small intellectual group which dissolved only in 1837 when Volkmann received his professorship in Dorpat . In 1826 he obtained his doctorate and in 1828 he was habilitated as Privatdozent at the University of Leipzig. It was there that he became professor extraordinary of zootomy in 1834.
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Cercidas
300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)
Cercidas was a poet, Cynic philosopher, and legislator for his native city Megalopolis. A papyrus roll containing fragments from seven of his Cynic poems was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1906. Life Cercidas was an admirer of Diogenes, whose death he recorded in some Meliambic lines. He is mentioned and cited by Athenaeus and Stobaeus. At his death he ordered the first and second books of the Iliad to be buried with him. Aelian relates that Cercidas died expressing his hope of being with Pythagoras of the philosophers, Hecataeus of the historians, Olympus of the musicians, and Homer of the po...
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Aeneas of Gaza
445 - 550 (105 years)
Aeneas of Gaza was a Neo-Platonic philosopher and a convert to Christianity who flourished towards the end of the fifth century. He is considered part of the Rhetorical School of Gaza, which flourished in Byzantine Palaestina in the fifth and sixth centuries.
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Scudder Klyce
1879 - 1933 (54 years)
Scudder Klyce was an American philosopher, scientist and naval officer. He is known for his work, Universe, which attempted to accumulate the knowledge of mankind into a single book to collect and deliver a solution for all the problems of humanity.
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Gaspar Lax
1487 - 1560 (73 years)
Gaspar Lax was a Spanish mathematician, logician, and philosopher who spent much of his career in Paris. Biography Lax was born in Sariñena, the son of Leonor de la Cueva and Gaspar Lax, a physician, and had two brothers and four sisters. He studied the Seven Liberal Arts and theology at the University of Saragossa, where he acquired a master's degree. Also during this period of time, all along with another friend, Lax fatally wounded another student by hitting his head. He later moved to Paris, and there he taught in 1507–1508 at the Collège de Calvi and then at the Collège de Montaigu, where he was a student of John Mair and simultaneously was a teacher himself.
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Hermann Johannes Pfannenstiel
1862 - 1909 (47 years)
Hermann Johannes Pfannenstiel was a German gynecologist born in Berlin. In 1885 he received his doctorate in Berlin and afterwards worked as a hospital assistant in Posen. He later moved to Breslau, where in 1896 he became an associate professor. In 1902 he was appointed chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Giessen, and five years later, he attained a similar position at the University of Kiel.
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Frederick C. Dommeyer
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Frederick Charles Dommeyer was an American philosopher and parapsychologist. Dommeyer was born in Warrington, Florida. He obtained an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. He worked at Syracuse University where he was head of the philosophy department . He was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research and contributed articles to the Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Philosophical Review and The Journal of Philosophy.
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Eduard Magnus
1799 - 1872 (73 years)
Eduard Magnus was a German painter, primarily known for portraits. Biography Magnus was born in Berlin as the third son of Johann Matthias Magnus, the founder of the Prussian Magnus-Bank. He studied simultaneously at the Prussian Academy of Arts, Bauakademie, and University of Berlin, becoming educated in medicine, architecture, and philosophy. He took to painting, as a student of Jakob Schlesinger, exhibiting for the first time in 1826 with promising results. He later traveled to Paris and Italy, returning to Germany in 1829. He went to Italy again in 1831, and traveled through Paris and England before returning again in 1835.
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Samuel Adler
1809 - 1891 (82 years)
Samuel Adler was a leading German-American Reform rabbi, Talmudist, and author. Early life Samuel Adler was born on December 3, 1809, in Worms, Confederation of the Rhine . He received his early religious education from his father Isaac, who was one of the associate rabbis in Worms and instructed him in Hebrew and the Biblical and Rabbinic literature of the Jews. When Rabbi Isaac Adler died on December 23, 1822, thirteen-year-old Samuel, his four young siblings, and their mother were left in straitened circumstances. In spite of innumerable difficulties and extreme privation, Samuel continued...
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Ludovico Carracci
1555 - 1619 (64 years)
Ludovico Carracci was an Italian, early-Baroque painter, etcher, and printmaker born in Bologna. His works are characterized by a strong mood invoked by broad gestures and flickering light that create spiritual emotion and are credited with reinvigorating Italian art, especially fresco art, which was subsumed with formalistic Mannerism. He died in Bologna in 1619.
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John Alexander Gunn
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
John Alexander Gunn was a philosopher who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool and worked there as a fellow. He went on to be appointed as a professor at the University of Melbourne in 1923 and retired in 1938. His successor as Director of Extension was Colin R. Badger.
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Sitanath Tattwabhushan
1856 - Present (170 years)
Pandit Sitanath Tattwabhushan was the official theologian and philosopher of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. His hymns still form the basis of Brahmo rites and liturgies. Early life He was born Sitanath Dutta, in a village in Sylhet in 1856. He arrived in Calcutta for higher education in 1871. Although he initially joined Keshub Chunder Sen's Brahmo Niketan where he developed an interest in the philosophy of religion. However following the closure of that institute, he joined Alexander Duff's General Assembly's Institution in 1875. In 1879, he joined Anandamohan Bose's City School as a teacher. La...
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Heinrich Carl Breidenstein
1796 - 1876 (80 years)
Heinrich Carl Breidenstein was a German musicologist. In Bonn he was university professor of musicology, and active in the musical life of the city. Life Breidenstein was born in 1796 in Steinau an der Straße, Hesse, son of Friedrich Ernst Breidenstein, schoolteacher and organist, and his wife Juliane. He was educated at a Gymnasium in Hanau, then studied law in Berlin and later in Heidelberg, where he turned to studying philology. He became a senior teacher at the Gymnasium in Heidelberg, also joining the choral society of Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, a jurist and amateur musician.
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David B. Zilberman
1938 - 1977 (39 years)
David Beniaminovich Zilberman was a Russian-American philosopher and sociologist, scholar of Indian philosophy and culture. He was well-versed in the study of languages and knew Russian, Sanskrit, English, Slavic languages, Ancient Greek, French, and German.
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Johann Klein
1788 - 1856 (68 years)
Johann Klein was professor of obstetrics at the University of Salzburg and at the University of Vienna. Johann Baptist Chiari was his son-in-law. In Vienna, he was succeeded by professor Carl Braun in 1856.
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Abdulkarim Zanjani
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
Sheikh Abdulkarim Zanjani was born in modern-day Iran, in the city of Zanjan, in the village of BarroBarrout. He went to Tehran to study, and became concerned with politics relating to Islamic nations. At 22 years old, he went to Najaf, and became a pupil of renowned religious scholars, such as Seyyed Mohammad Kazem Yazdi and Seyyed Mohammad Firouz Abadi. He demonstrated insight and skills in the sphere of Islamic philosophy. He is recognized primarily for two accomplishments: one concerned with the reconciliation and nearness of sects and Islamic cults, and another with the development of Is...
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Erich Heller
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Erich Heller was a British essayist, known particularly for his critical studies in German-language philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biography Heller was born at Chomutov in Bohemia , to the family of a Jewish physician. He graduated a doctor of law from the German University in Prague on 11 February 1935, at the age of 23. In 1939 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he began his professional career as a Germanist, being active at Cambridge and London and at Swansea . Heller became a British subject in 1947. From 1960 onwards he was based in the...
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Gilbert White
1720 - 1793 (73 years)
Gilbert White was a "parson-naturalist", a pioneering English naturalist, ecologist, and ornithologist. He is best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Life White was born on 18 July 1720 in his grandfather's vicarage at Selborne in Hampshire. His grandfather, also Gilbert White was at that time vicar of Selborne. Gilbert White's parents were John White a trained barrister and Anne Holt . Gilbert was the eldest of eight surviving siblings, Thomas , Benjamin , Rebecca , John , Francis , Anne , and Henry . Gilbert's family lived briefly at Compton, Surrey, before moving ...
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Amerigo Vespucci
1454 - 1512 (58 years)
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence, from whose name the term "America" is derived. Between 1497 and 1504, Vespucci participated in at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery, first on behalf of Spain and then for Portugal . In 1503 and 1505, two booklets were published under his name, containing colourful descriptions of these explorations and other alleged voyages. Both publications were extremely popular and widely read across much of Europe. Although historians still dispute the authorship and veracity of these accounts, at the time they...
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Walter L. Miller
Walter L. Miller is an American endocrinologist and professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco . Miller is expert in the field of human steroid biosynthesis and disorders of steroid metabolism. Over the past 40 years Miller's group at UCSF has described molecular basis of several metabolic disorders including, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, pseudo vitamin D dependent rickets, severe, recessive form of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, 17,20 lyase deficiency caused by CYP17A1 defects, P450scc deficiency caused by CYP11A1 defects, P450 oxidoreductase deficiency .
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Nessos of Chios
Nessos of Chios was a pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosopher from the island of Chios. Biography Little is known about the life and work of Nessos. The only thing that is known that was Democritus philosophy and the compatriot Metrodorus was his student. That is supported in commentaries of interpretations of Homeric and Hesiod works.
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Polemon
400 BC - 270 BC (130 years)
Polemon of Athens was an eminent Greek Platonist philosopher and Plato's third successor as scholarch from 314/313 to 270/269 BC. A pupil of Xenocrates, he believed that philosophy should be practiced rather than just studied, and he placed the highest good in living according to nature.
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Saint Timothy
17 - 97 (80 years)
Timothy or Timothy of Ephesus was an early Christian evangelist and the first Christian bishop of Ephesus, who tradition relates died around the year AD 97. Timothy was from the Lycaonian city of Lystra or of Derbe in Asia Minor, born of a Jewish mother who had become a Christian believer, and a Greek father. The Apostle Paul met him during his second missionary journey and he became Paul's companion and missionary partner along with Silas. The New Testament indicates that Timothy traveled with Paul the Apostle, who was also his mentor. He is addressed as the recipient of the First and Second Epistles to Timothy.
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Geert Groote
1340 - 1384 (44 years)
Gerard Groote , otherwise Gerrit or Gerhard Groet, in Latin Gerardus Magnus, was a Dutch Catholic deacon, who was a popular preacher and the founder of the Brethren of the Common Life. He was a key figure in the Devotio Moderna movement.
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Bohuslav Balbín
1621 - 1688 (67 years)
Bohuslav Balbín was a Czech writer, historian, geographer and Jesuit, called the "Czech Pliny". He became well known also as an advocate of the Czech language in the time of incoming germanization of the Czech lands.
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