The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#14951
Gerald C. MacCallum Jr.
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
Gerald C. MacCallum Jr. was an American philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. MacCallum is well known for his critique to the distinction, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, between negative and positive liberty, proposing instead that the concept of freedom can only be understood as a 'triadic relation', in which "x is free from y to do z". His other publications include Political Philosophy and Legislative Intent and Other Essays on Law, Politics, and Morality which collects 14 essays on topics that include legislative intent, violence, integrity...
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Julian Taylor
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Professor Julian Taylor, C.B.E., M.S., F.R.C.S., Hon.F.R.A.C.S. was a specialist in neurological surgery, Senior Surgeon at University College Hospital, a former vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons and later Professor of Surgery at the University of Khartoum.
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Mário de Andrade
1893 - 1945 (52 years)
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. He wrote one of the first and most influential collections of modern Brazilian poetry, Paulicéia Desvairada , published in 1922. He has had considerable influence on modern Brazilian literature, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil.
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William Romaine Newbold
1865 - 1926 (61 years)
William Romaine Newbold was an American philosopher who held the Adam Seybert Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy chair at the University of Pennsylvania from 1907 to 1926. Newbold was noted for his lectures and writings on the psychology of religion, Christian Gnosticism, and cryptography.
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Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
1623 - 1673 (50 years)
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a prolific English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright. In her lifetime she produced more than 12 original literary works, many of which became well known due to her high social status. This high social status allowed Margaret to meet and converse with some of the most important and influential minds of her time.
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Maurice Pradines
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Maurice Pradines was a French philosopher. Although his thought was largely original, Pradines may be categorized among the interwar period philosophers of the mind. Also a professor, he developed a philosophy of knowledge in light of problems of sensation.
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Zhang Fei
167 - 221 (54 years)
Zhang Fei , courtesy name Yide, was a Chinese military general and politician serving under the warlord Liu Bei in the late Eastern Han dynasty and early Three Kingdoms period of China. Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, who were among the earliest to join Liu Bei, shared a brotherly relationship with their lord and accompanied him on most of his early exploits. Zhang Fei fought in various battles on Liu Bei's side, including the Red Cliffs campaign , takeover of Yi Province , and Hanzhong Campaign . He was assassinated by his subordinates in 221 after serving for only a few months in the state of Shu H...
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Tang Yongtong
1893 - 1964 (71 years)
Tang Yongtong was a Chinese educator, philosopher and scholar best known for studying Chinese Buddhism. Tang was proficient in Sanskrit, Pali, English and Japanese. Tang attended the Tsinghua School and Shuntian School before he pursued advanced studies in the United States. While studying at Harvard University, he became known as "one of the three Outstanding Persons of Harvard" along with Chen Yinke and Wu Mi.
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Hélène Metzger
1889 - 1944 (55 years)
Hélène Metzger was a French philosopher of science and historian of science. In her writings she focused mainly on the history of chemistry. She was murdered in the Holocaust. Early life and education Hélène Bruhl was born on 26 August 1889 to an upper middle-class Jewish family in Chatou. She was the niece of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, an influential French anthropologist. Her father insisted that she and her sister stop their studies after only three years at university. In 1912, she obtained a diploma in crystallography. She married in 1914, and was widowed only a few months afterwards, after whic...
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Oton Postružnik
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Oton Postružnik was a Croatian artist, painter, graphic artist, and ceramist. He was one of the founding members of the Earth Group artist collective in Zagreb from 1929 to 1933. He studied in Zagreb, Prague and Paris, and was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1950 to 1970. He is best known for his abstract paintings of natural subjects, such as his Leaf series.
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Richard of Saint Victor
1110 - 1173 (63 years)
Richard of Saint Victor was a Medieval Scottish philosopher and theologian and one of the most influential religious thinkers of his time. A canon regular, he was a prominent mystical theologian, and was prior of the famous Augustinian Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris from 1162 until his death in 1173.
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Everett Hall
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
Everett Wesley Hall was an American philosopher, known for his advocacy of common-sense realism and his notion of what he called the "categorial" primacy of certain assertions. Hall received his A.B. and M.A. degrees from Lawrence College, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University . Between 1929 and his death in 1960, he taught at the following universities: the University of Chicago, Ohio State, Stanford, the University of Iowa, and the University of North Carolina . He also held visiting appointments at Northwestern University, the University of Southern California, and Kyoto University. Hall was the author of four books as well as numerous papers.
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Marietta Kies
1853 - 1899 (46 years)
Marietta Kies was an American philosopher and educator who belonged to the St. Louis Hegelians. She was the second American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy, after May Gorslin Preston Slosson , and taught full-time at a university.
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Yan Yuan
1635 - 1704 (69 years)
Yan Yuan , courtesy name Yizhi or Hunran, art name Xizhai was a Chinese classicist, essayist, and philosopher. He founded the practical school of Confucianism to contrast with the more ethereal Neo-Confucianism that had been popular in China for the previous six centuries. Like the Han learning scholars, he rejected the abstract metaphysics of the Neo-Confucians. However, he considered Han learning as too obsessed with philology and textual criticism and not enough emphasis on pragmatism. His school promoted the Six Arts.
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Hans Gude
1825 - 1903 (78 years)
Hans Fredrik Gude was a Norwegian romanticist painter and is considered along with Johan Christian Dahl to be one of Norway's foremost landscape painters. He has been called a mainstay of Norwegian National Romanticism. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
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Woodbridge Riley
1869 - 1933 (64 years)
Isaac Woodbridge Riley was an American academic scholar who worked in and across the areas of philosophy, religion, and psychology. His published work often combined two of these disciplines in considering the historical development of a social movement or entity , particularly examining the influence of the founders' psychological character. His books concerning the foundation and moral standing of Mormonism and Christian Science made him a focus of controversy. Most of his career was spent as a professor of philosophy at Vassar College.
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Nikephoros Blemmydes
1197 - 1269 (72 years)
Nikephoros Blemmydes was a 13th-century Byzantine author. Biography Blemmydes was born in 1197 in Constantinople as the second child of a physician. After the conquest of Constantinople by the forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, he migrated to Asia Minor. There, he received a liberal education in Prusa, Nicaea, Smyrna and Scamander. Blemmydes studied medicine, philosophy, theology, mathematics, astronomy, logic, and rhetoric. When he finally acquired a career as a cleric, he took an active part in the theological controversies between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, writing treatises on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, advocating the western usage.
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Octave Chanute
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Octave Chanute was a French-American civil engineer and aviation pioneer. He advised and publicized many aviation enthusiasts, including the Wright brothers. At his death, he was hailed as the father of aviation and the initial concepts of the heavier-than-air flying machine.
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Emil von Behring
1854 - 1917 (63 years)
Emil von Behring , born Emil Adolf Behring , was a German physiologist who received the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first one awarded in that field, for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin. He was widely known as a "saviour of children", as diphtheria used to be a major cause of child death. His work with the disease, as well as tetanus, has come to bring him most of his fame and acknowledgment. He was honoured with Prussian nobility in 1901, henceforth being known by the surname "von Behring."
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Konstantin Yuon
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Konstantin Fyodorovich Yuon or Juon was a noted Russian painter and theatre designer associated with the Mir Iskusstva. Later, he co-founded the Union of Russian Artists and the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.
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Otis Hamilton Lee
1902 - 1948 (46 years)
Otis Hamilton Lee was an American philosopher, noteworthy as a Guggenheim Fellow. Lee attended Fargo College from 1920 to 1922 and then the University of Minnesota, where he graduated with B.A. in 1924. From 1924 to 1927 he was a Rhodes Scholar at St John's College, Oxford, where he graduated with A.B. in 1926. From 1927 to 1929 he was an instructor in philosophy at the University of Michigan. In 1930 he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University, where he was an Austin Fellow from 1929 to 1930. At Harvard University he was an instructor and tutor from 1930 to 1933 and for the academic year 1934–1935.
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Jimmy Ernst
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Hans-Ulrich Ernst , known as Jimmy Ernst, was an American painter born in Germany. Early life Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of German Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus-Ernst, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents separated in 1922 and divorced in 1926 and Ernst remained with his mother in Cologne. He visited his father in France in 1930, where he met many artists, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy, as well as his father's lover Leonora Carrington. In February 1933, a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the SS searched Luise Straus' apartment.
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Léontine Zanta
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
Léontine Zanta was a French philosopher, feminist and novelist. One of the first two women to gain a doctorate in France, and the first to do so in philosophy, Zanta "was an intellectual celebrity in her day, active in journalism and in the feminist movement of the 1920s."
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David Teniers the Younger
1610 - 1690 (80 years)
David Teniers the Younger or David Teniers II was a Flemish Baroque painter, printmaker, draughtsman, miniaturist painter, staffage painter, copyist and art curator. He was an extremely versatile artist known for his prolific output. He was an innovator in a wide range of genres such as history painting, genre painting, landscape painting, portrait and still life. He is now best remembered as the leading Flemish genre painter of his day. Teniers is particularly known for developing the peasant genre, the tavern scene, pictures of collections and scenes with alchemists and physicians.
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Erich Unger
1887 - 1950 (63 years)
Erich Unger was a Jewish philosopher of standing who published many articles and a number of books, many of them in his native tongue, German. His writings cover a wide range of topics: poetry, Nietzsche, political theory, general philosophy and Jewish philosophy.
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Josip Križan
1841 - 1921 (80 years)
Josip Križan was a Slovenian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer. He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Graz and between 1867 and 1869 obtained a doctorate to become a professor.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
#14978
Otto Heubner
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Johann Otto Leonhard Heubner was a German internist and pediatrician who was a native of Mühltroff. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, and in 1867 became an assistant to Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich at Leipzig. He later founded a children's hospital and clinic in Leipzig, and in 1891 was appointed to the chair of pediatrics. In 1894 he moved to Berlin, where he became director of the children's clinic and polyclinic at the Charité.
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Valerius Cordus
1515 - 1544 (29 years)
Valerius Cordus was a German physician, botanist and pharmacologist who authored the first pharmacopoeia North of the Alps and one of the most celebrated herbals in history. He is also widely credited with developing a method for synthesizing ether .
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Belle da Costa Greene
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Belle da Costa Greene was an American librarian who managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan's death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Despite being born to Black parents, Greene spent her professional career passing for white.
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Laurens Perseus Hickok
1798 - 1888 (90 years)
Laurens Perseus Hickok , American philosopher and divine, was born in Connecticut. Biography He took his degree at Union College in 1820. Until 1836 he was occupied in active pastoral work, and was then appointed professor of theology at the Western Reserve College, Ohio, and later at the Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York.
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Jean Bourdeau
1848 - 1928 (80 years)
Jean Bourdeau was a French writer, known for his books on aspects of socialism. He was also a translator of Schopenhauer, and an early adopter in France of some of the thought of Nietzsche. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, from Johannes Janssen to Maxim Gorky and the rising personality cult of Lenin. He contributed in particular to the Journal des Débats, on contemporary philosophy
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Sophia Jex-Blake
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher, and feminist. She led the campaign to secure women access to a university education, when six other women and she, collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. She was the first practising female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; a leading campaigner for medical education for women, she was involved in founding two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh, at a time when no other medical schools were...
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Robert Henry Perry
#14985
Victor F. Tapson
#14986
Andrew D. Blann
#14987
James Allen
1864 - 1912 (48 years)
James Allen was a British philosophical writer known for his inspirational books and poetry and as a pioneer of the self-help movement. His best known work, As a Man Thinketh, has been mass-produced since its publication in 1902. It has been a source of inspiration to motivational and self-help authors.
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Susan Taubes
1928 - 1969 (41 years)
Susan Taubes was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual. Taubes was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann was the head of the Conservative or "Status Quo" branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest, and her father Sándor Feldmann was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school, though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.
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Kanokogi Kazunobu
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Kanokogi Kazunobu 鹿子木員信 was a Japanese professor, philosopher, mountaineer, author and war criminal. After training as a naval engineer, he saw combat in the Russo-Japanese War; after converting to Christianity he resigned his commission and travelled to the United States to study theology at Union Theological Seminary and philosophy at Columbia University.
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Frank Lynn Iber
#14991
E. S. Russell
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Edward Stuart Russell OBE FLS was a Scottish biologist and philosopher of biology. Russell was born near Glasgow. He studied at Greenock Academy and later at Glasgow University under Sir Graham Kerr and worked with J. Arthur Thompson after he graduated. He was influenced by his friend Patrick Geddes and in his zoological studies, sought to find holistic principles. He also believed in Lamarckian heritability. He was involved in fishery research, working on research vessels and publishing on the biology of cephalopods and quantitative methods for gathering fishery data. He also worked as Scottish Fisheries expert, Inspector of Fisheries and as an advisor to HM Government.
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Gregory of Rimini
1300 - 1358 (58 years)
Gregory of Rimini , also called Gregorius de Arimino or Ariminensis, was one of the great scholastic philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages. He was the first scholastic writer to unite the Oxonian and Parisian traditions in 14th-century philosophy, and his work had a lasting influence in the Late Middle Ages and Reformation. His scholastic nicknames were Doctor acutus and Doctor authenticus.
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Louis Jurine
1751 - 1819 (68 years)
Louis Jurine was a Swiss physician, surgeon and naturalist mainly interested in entomology. He lived in Geneva. Surgeon He studied surgery in Paris and quickly acquired a great reputation for his expertise in medicine and natural history beyond that which he had in Geneva. He taught courses in anatomy and surgery at the Société des Arts in Geneva and was made honorary professor of zoology at the Academy . He also founded a maternity hospice in 1807 and was awarded prizes for his work on the gasses of the human body, artificial feeding of infants, and pectoral angina.
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Ioannis Chalkeus
1667 - Present (359 years)
Ioannis Chalkeus or Chalkias, was an Aromanian scholar, philosopher and figure of the modern Greek Enlightenment. He was born in Moscopole, a major 18th century intellectual and commercial center of the Balkans . Chalkeus initially studied in the Greek college of his native town and then went to Rome where he converted to Catholicism. Chalkeus became director and teacher of the Greek school in Venice, the Flanginian, from 1694 to 1703 and from 1712 to 1716. He probably returned to Moscopole where he continued to teach.
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Léger Marie Deschamps
1716 - 1774 (58 years)
Léger Marie Deschamps , Benedictine monk, known under his Benedictine name of Dom Deschamps, was a French philosopher and utopian socialist, who taught a form of modified Spinozism. Metaphysics During his lifetime he published very little, but corresponded with most of the leaders of the French Enlightenment. Rediscovered in 1862, he was hailed as a precursor of Hegel. His metaphysical system anticipates Hegel by asserting that truth includes contradictory elements, and he had much to say about how the concept Being collapses into that of Nothing. There was a further revival of interest in h...
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D. J. B. Hawkins
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Denis John Bernard Hawkins was a British philosopher and Roman Catholic priest. Hawkins was born in Thornton Heath and attended Whitgift School, Croydon. He obtained his doctorates in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
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Ivan Sarailiev
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Ivan Sarailiev was a Bulgarian philosopher related to the school of pragmatism.; he finished his major book Pragmatism in 1938 quoting from Charles Sanders Peirce’s Collected Papers. Sarailiev was the first pragmatist in Eastern Europe and also a "very early pragmatist". He also introduced the idea of implied reader in his reception theory as early as in Savremennata nauka y religiata .
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Ma Chao
176 - 222 (46 years)
Ma Chao , courtesy name Mengqi, was a Chinese military general and warlord who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty and early Three Kingdoms period of China. A descendant of the general Ma Yuan, Ma Chao was the eldest son of Ma Teng, a prominent warlord in Liang Province . In 211, he formed a coalition with Han Sui and other northwestern warlords and revolted against the Han central government, which was led by the warlord Cao Cao. The coalition broke up after losing the Battle of Tong Pass against Cao Cao's forces. Ma Chao initially retreated, but later returned to attack and seize control ...
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John Latham
1740 - 1837 (97 years)
John Latham was an English physician, naturalist and author. His main works were A General Synopsis of Birds and General History of Birds . He was able to examine specimens of Australian birds which reached England in the last twenty years of the 18th century, and was responsible for providing English names for many of them. He named some of Australia's most famous birds, including the emu, sulphur-crested cockatoo, wedge-tailed eagle, superb lyrebird, Australian magpie, magpie-lark and pheasant coucal. He was also the first to describe the hyacinth macaw. Latham has been called the "grandfa...
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Eduard de Muralt
1808 - 1895 (87 years)
Eduard de Muralt was a Swiss-German professor of theology, librarian, and palaeographer. Born in Bischofszell, as son of Kaspar, a dealer, and of Elizabeth Sprüngli. Studies of theology in Zurich , then of philology and philosophy in Berlin, Jena and Paris. Muralt emigrated to Russia in 1834, took the German Protestant parish of St. Petersburg , he was a librarian of the Imperial Hermitage , and described Greek manuscripts housed in the library. He examined also the Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican Library.
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