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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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,
#151
Chrysippus
281 BC - 208 BC (73 years)
Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Soli, Cilicia, but moved to Athens as a young man, where he became a pupil of the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. When Cleanthes died, around 230 BC, Chrysippus became the third head of the Stoic school. A prolific writer, Chrysippus expanded the fundamental doctrines of Cleanthes' mentor Zeno of Citium, the founder and first head of the school, which earned him the title of the Second Founder of Stoicism.
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Jean Baudrillard
#150
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction , Simulacra and Simulation , , and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place . His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.
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Jerry Fodor
#126
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate C...
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Franz Brentano
1838 - 1917 (79 years)
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist. His 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, considered his magnum opus, is credited with having reintroduced the medieval scholastic concept of intentionality into contemporary philosophy.
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Zeno of Elea
490 BC - 425 BC (65 years)
Zeno of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He was a student of Parmenides and one of the Eleatics. Born in Elea, Zeno defended his instructor's belief in monism, the idea that only one single entity exists that makes up all of reality. He rejected the existence of space, time, and motion. To disprove these concepts, he developed a series of paradoxes to demonstrate why these are impossible. Though his original writings are lost, subsequent descriptions by Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and Simplicius of Cilicia have allowed study of his ideas.
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Wilhelm Dilthey
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...
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Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer
1766 - 1848 (82 years)
Friedrich Philipp Immanuel Niethammer , later Ritter von Niethammer, was a German theologian, philosopher and Lutheran educational reformer. Biography He received instruction at the Maulbronn monastery, and in 1784 became a student at Tübinger Stift, where he met Friedrich Hölderlin , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling . In 1790 he moved to Jena, where he studied Kantian philosophy under Karl Leonhard Reinhold . Subsequently, he became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Jena, where he remained until 1804. In 1806, he was Protestant Ober...
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Oswald Spengler
1880 - 1936 (56 years)
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German polymath, whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work The Decline of the West , published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan.
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Martin Buber
1878 - 1965 (87 years)
Martin Buber was an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. He produced writings about Zionism and worked with various bodies within the Zionist movement extensively over a nearly 50 year period spanning his time in Europe and the Near East. In 1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du , and in ...
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Peter Geach
#804
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Peter Thomas Geach was a British philosopher who was Professor of Logic at the University of Leeds. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and the theory of identity.
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Félix Guattari
#219
Overall Influence
1930 - 1992 (62 years)
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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Al-Kindi
801 - 873 (72 years)
Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī was an Arab Muslim polymath active as a philosopher, mathematician, physician, and music theorist. Al-Kindi was the first of the Islamic peripatetic philosophers, and is hailed as the "father of Arab philosophy".
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Imre Lakatos
1922 - 1974 (52 years)
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the "research programme" in his methodology of scientific research programmes.
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Nagarjuna
150 - 250 (100 years)
Nāgārjuna [c. 150 – c. 250 CE ] was an Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher monk of the Madhyamaka school. He is widely considered one of the most important Buddhist philosophers. Jan Westerhoff considers him to be "one of the greatest thinkers in the history of Asian philosophy."
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Zhuang Zhou
369 BC - 288 BC (81 years)
Zhuang Zhou , commonly known as Zhuangzi , was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States period, a period of great development in Chinese philosophy, the Hundred Schools of Thought. He is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name, the Zhuangzi, which is one of the foundational texts of Taoism.
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Louis Althusser
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party . His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. A...
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Roland Barthes
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
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Charles Taylor
#357
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
#169
Hans Jonas
#401
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Hans Jonas was a German-born American Jewish philosopher, from 1955 to 1976 the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Biography Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach, on 10 May 1903. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Freiburg, the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg, and finally earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1928 from the University of Marburg with a thesis on Gnosticism entitled Der Begriff der Gnosis and directed by Martin Heidegger. During his study years his academic advisors included Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann.
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Herbert Feigl
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Herbert Feigl was an Austrian-American philosopher and an early member of the Vienna Circle. He coined the term "nomological danglers". Biography The son of a trained weaver who became a textile designer, Feigl was born in Reichenberg , Bohemia, into a Jewish family. He matriculated at the University of Vienna in 1922 and studied physics and philosophy under Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Hans Thirring, and Karl Bühler. He became one of the members of the Vienna Circle in 1924 and would be one of the few Circle members to have extensive conversations with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Fe...
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Thomas Reid
1710 - 1796 (86 years)
Thomas Reid was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher best known for his philosophical method, his theory of perception, and its wide implications on epistemology, and as the developer and defender of an agent-causal theory of free will. He also focused extensively on ethics, theory of action and philosophy of mind.
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David Malet Armstrong
#754
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, was an Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
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Georgi Plekhanov
1856 - 1918 (62 years)
Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was a Russian revolutionary, philosopher and Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia and was one of the first Russians to identify himself as "Marxist". Facing political persecution, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland in 1880, where he continued in his political activity attempting to overthrow the Tsarist regime in Russia. Plekhanov is known as the "father of Russian Marxism".
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Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#268
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas , senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
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Edmund Burke
1729 - 1797 (68 years)
Edmund Burke was an Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher who spent most of his career in Great Britain. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of Parliament between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party.
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Hippocrates
460 BC - 370 BC (90 years)
Hippocrates of Kos , also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician of the classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referred to as the "Father of Medicine" in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field, such as the use of prognosis and clinical observation, the systematic categorization of diseases, or the formulation of humoral theory. The Hippocratic school of medicine revolutionized ancient Greek medicine, establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields with which it had traditionally be...
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Wilfrid Sellars
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Life and career His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan , the University at Buffalo, and Oriel College, Oxford , where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During World War II, he served in military intelligence.
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Slavoj Žižek
#206
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
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Bruno Latour
#134
Overall Influence
1947 - 2022 (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Actor Network Theory, Social Theory Bruno Latour is an anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tours. Soon after graduating, he became interested in anthropology, and set out on a study of race and decolonization in Ivory Coast. He is best known for his work, Nous n’avons jamais ete modernes: Essais d’anthropologie symetrique (translated: We Have Never Been Modern). This theme, of challenging methods and findings of scientific inquiry, is revisited in his later work, Pandora’s Hope. His work in Science, Technology and Modernity has been provocative, to say the least.
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Anthony Kenny
#531
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is a British philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein of whose literary estate he is an executor. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in the style of analytic philosophy. He is a former president of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
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Arend Heyting
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Arend Heyting was a Dutch mathematician and logician. Biography Heyting was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to the formalisation of certain intuitionistic principles .
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Paul Ricœur
#273
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."
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Giordano Bruno
1548 - 1600 (52 years)
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets , and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
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Nicolas Malebranche
1638 - 1715 (77 years)
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian Catholic priest and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is best known for his doctrines of vision in God, occasionalism and ontologism.
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Hubert Dreyfus
#184
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".
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Swami Vivekananda
1863 - 1902 (39 years)
Swami Vivekananda , born Narendranath Datta , was an Indian <!--'Bengali' is linked in next paragraph. DO NOT ADD here, please.-->Hindu monk, philosopher, author, religious teacher, and the chief disciple of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. He was a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world, and the Father of modern Indian nationalism who is credited with raising interfaith awareness and bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion.
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Timothy Williamson
#1089
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#188
Charles Hartshorne
1897 - 2000 (103 years)
Charles Hartshorne was an American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics, but also contributed to ornithology. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument. Hartshorne is also noted for developing Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into process theology.
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Nel Noddings
#656
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Nel Noddings was an American feminist, educator, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. Biography Noddings received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State University in New Jersey, a master's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a PhD in education from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
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Bernard Bolzano
1781 - 1848 (67 years)
Bernard Bolzano was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1908 - 1961 (53 years)
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
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Thomas More
1478 - 1535 (57 years)
Sir Thomas More PC , venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state.
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William Alston
#1271
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
William Payne Alston was an American philosopher. He is widely considered to be one of the most important epistemologists and philosophers of religion of the twentieth century, and is also known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His views on foundationalism, internalism and externalism, speech acts, and the epistemic value of mystical experience, among many other topics, have been very influential. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, and Syracuse University.
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Theophrastus
371 BC - 287 BC (84 years)
Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher and the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. He was a native of Eresos in Lesbos. His given name was ; his nickname was given by Aristotle, his teacher, for his "divine style of expression".
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Max Scheler
1874 - 1928 (54 years)
Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Given that school's utopian ambitions of re-founding all of human knowledge, Scheler was nicknamed the "Adam of the philosophical paradise" by José Ortega y Gasset.
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Alexander of Aphrodisias
200 - 215 (15 years)
Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle. He was a native of Aphrodisias in Caria and lived and taught in Athens at the beginning of the 3rd century, where he held a position as head of the Peripatetic school. He wrote many commentaries on the works of Aristotle, extant are those on the Prior Analytics, Topics, Meteorology, Sense and Sensibilia, and Metaphysics. Several original treatises also survive, and include a work On Fate, in which he argues against the Stoic doctrine of necessity; and one On the Soul.
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Maurice Blanchot
#276
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
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Richard Swinburne
#575
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Richard Granville Swinburne is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years, Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
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Mulla Sadra
1571 - 1641 (70 years)
Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, more commonly known as Mullā Ṣadrā , was a Persian Twelver Shi'i Islamic mystic, philosopher, theologian, and ‘Ālim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century. According to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years.
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Nikolai Berdyaev
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person. Alternative historical spellings of his surname in English include "Berdiaev" and "Berdiaeff", and of his given name "Nicolas" and "Nicholas". Russian paleontologist and Christian apologist Alexander V. Khramov attributes his ideas about an atemporal human fall to Berdyaev and Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy.
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