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,
#15001
Edward Waldo Emerson
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Edward Waldo Emerson was an American physician, writer and lecturer. Biography Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson, and educated at Harvard, where he graduated in 1866. He graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1874, and practiced medicine in Concord until 1882, when he received an inheritance and retired from his practice. He was an instructor in art anatomy at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1885 to 1906. He was also an accomplished equestrian.
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Jerome Inglott
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Jerome Inglott was a Maltese philosopher and theologian. His areas of specialisation in philosophy were chiefly metaphysics and ontology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta , and was one of the Philosopher-Rectors at the same university .
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Xiong Shili
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Xiong Shili was a Chinese essayist and philosopher whose major work A New Treatise on Vijñaptimātra is a Confucian critique of the Buddhist Vijñapti-mātra "consciousness-only" theory popularized in China by the Tang-dynasty pilgrim Xuanzang.
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Franciscus Patricius
1529 - 1597 (68 years)
Franciscus Patricius was a philosopher and scientist from the Republic of Venice, originating from Cres. He was known as a defender of Platonism and an opponent of Aristotelianism. His national origin differs in sources, and he is described both as Croatian and as Italian. In Croatia he is mostly referred to as Franjo Petriš or Frane Petrić . His family name in Cres was known as Petris.
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Al-Jubba'i
849 - 915 (66 years)
Abū 'Alī Muḥammad al-Jubbā'ī was a Mu'tazili influenced theologian and philosopher of the 10th century. Born in Khuzistan, he studied in Basra where he trained Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, who went on to found his own theological tradition, and his son Abū Hāshīm al-Jubbā'ī.
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Frédéric Paulhan
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Frédéric Paulhan was a French philosopher. He came from a family of merchants of Huguenot ancestry, and was a brilliant student at school in Nîmes. He left without graduating, and spent a few years without a recognised profession, studying and writing and developing an interest in philosophy and Republican political movements. In 1877 Paulhan contributed to the Revue Philosophique of Théodule Ribot. Paulhan became liable for military service when his assigned number was drawn in a lottery, but he was released from serving because of his stutter, which also made it difficult for him to teach.
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Arthur Biram
1878 - 1967 (89 years)
Arthur Yitzhak Biram was a German–Israeli philosopher, philologist, and educator. Biography Biram was born in Bischofswerda in Saxony in 1878 and attended school in Hirschberg, Silesia. He studied languages, including Arabic, at University of Berlin and at University of Leipzig and earned a doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1902, discussing the philosophy of Abu-Rasid al-Nisaburi. In 1904 he concluded the rabbi seminar at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Afterwards he taught languages and literature at the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.
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Hanna Reitsch
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Hanna Reitsch was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler alive in the in late April 1945.
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Gideon Mantell
1790 - 1852 (62 years)
Gideon Algernon Mantell MRCS FRS was an English obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist. His attempts to reconstruct the structure and life of Iguanodon began the scientific study of dinosaurs: in 1822 he was responsible for the discovery of the first fossil teeth, and later much of the skeleton, of Iguanodon. Mantell's work on the Cretaceous of southern England was also important.
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Oskar Schlemmer
1888 - 1943 (55 years)
Oskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923, he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is Triadisches Ballett , which saw costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body in what he described as a "party of form and colour".
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Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich was a German religious psychologist and philosopher. Oesterreich was also interested in parapsychology. He argued against the philosophy of materialism. He was the author of Die Besessenheit , a book on demonic possession. It was translated into English in 1966. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, was influenced by the book.
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Hosoi Heishu
1728 - 1801 (73 years)
Hosoi Heishū was a Japanese teacher of Confucian thought during the Edo period. He belonged to the eclectic school of Confucian philosophy, and his thought can be considered as the starting point of the eclectic brand of Confucianism.
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Adam Mahrburg
1855 - 1913 (58 years)
Adam Mahrburg was a Polish philosopher—the outstanding philosophical mind of Poland's Positivist period. Life Adam Mahrburg was a philosopher and theoretician of knowledge. He taught in Warsaw's secret university and published in learned and popular journals.
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Ludovico Silva
1937 - 1988 (51 years)
Luis José Silva Michelena, best known as Ludovico Silva was a Venezuelan poet and philosopher. A Marxist philosopher, he developed an account of ideology as symbolic surplus. Life Luis José Silva Michelena was born in Caracas on February 16, 1937, the son of Hector Silva Urbano and Josefina Michelena. He was educated at a private school, the Colegio San Ignacio, Caracas, before travelling to study philosophy, literature and philology in Spain, France and Germany. From 1970 to 1986 he was a professor of philosophy at the Central University of Venezuela. From 1964 to 1968 he was head of the Caracas Athenaeum.
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John Gregory
1724 - 1773 (49 years)
John Gregory , a.k.a. John Gregorie, was an eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment physician, medical writer and moralist. Life Gregory was born in Aberdeen, Scotland to the professor of medicine James Gregorie and Anna Chalmers, his father's second wife; his grandfather was the distinguished mathematician and astronomer James Gregory. Following the death of his father when he was eight years old, Gregory's education was conducted by Principal Chalmers, his grandfather, and his half-brother James, a professor of medicine. His cousin Thomas Reid, the moral philosopher, also guided and influenced his education.
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Wilibald Gurlitt
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Wilibald Gurlitt was a German musicologist. Gurlitt, son of the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt, attended the St. Anne Semi-Classical Secondary School in Dresden and passed his maturity examination in 1908. He continued his studies at Heidelberg University and the University of Leipzig, predominantly philosophy and the history of civilization at first, but later chiefly music science, in particular the history of music in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Charles Waddington
1819 - 1914 (95 years)
Charles-Pendrell Waddington was a French philosopher, cousin of Richard and William H. Waddington. He was born in Milan, of a Protestant family of English origin. Graduating from the École normale supérieure at 19, he taught at various institutions, including the Protestant Seminary at Strasbourg, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and the Sorbonne, where in 1879 he was appointed professor of ancient philosophy. In 1888 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. His works, notable for clearness and penetration, include:Ramus : Sa vie, ses écrits et ses opinions Essai de lo...
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Lajos Szabó
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Lajos Szabó was a Hungarian philosopher and one of the founders of the Budapest Dialogical School. Early life Lajos Szabó was born in Budapest on 1 July 1902. In 1919 he was dismissed from vocational secondary school due to his sympathies with the Hungarian Soviet Republic. At the beginning of the 1920s, he took part in the illegal Communist movement for a few months.
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Friedrich Feuerbach
1806 - 1880 (74 years)
Friedrich Heinrich Feuerbach was a German philologist and philosopher. In the 1840s, he played an important role disseminating materialist and atheist philosophy. Life Friedrich Feuerbach was born on 29 September 1806 in Munich. He was the youngest son of the distinguished jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach . His older brothers were all distinguished scholars.
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Thomas Erastus
1524 - 1583 (59 years)
Thomas Erastus was a Swiss physician and Calvinist theologian. He wrote 100 theses in which he argued that the sins committed by Christians should be punished by the State, and that the Church should not withhold sacraments as a form of punishment. They were published in 1589, after his death, with the title . His name was later applied to Erastianism.
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Hubert Beckers
1806 - 1889 (83 years)
Hubert Karl Philipp Beckers was a German philosopher known chiefly as an expositor of the philosophy of Schelling. Biography He was born at Munich, and studied at the university there. In 1832 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the Lyceum at Dillingen, and in 1847 professor of philosophy at the University of Munich. In 1853 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
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Friedrich Blume
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Friedrich Blume was professor of musicology at the University of Kiel from 1938 to 1958. He was a student in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig, and taught in the last two of these for some years before being called to the chair in Kiel. His early studies were on Lutheran church music, including several books on J.S. Bach, but broadened his interests considerably later. Among his prominent works were chief editor of the collected Praetorius edition, and he also edited the important Eulenburg scores of the major Mozart Piano Concertos. From 1949 he was involved in the planning and writing of Die Musik...
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Johann Philipp Siebenkees
1759 - 1796 (37 years)
Johann Philipp Siebenkees was a German philosopher. Siebenkees studied theology, philosophy, and philology at the Protestant University of Altdorf. In 1791 he became associate professor of philosophy there, and a full professor of languages in 1795. He also taught archaeology. It has been suggested that he was responsible for the invention of the iron maiden during this period. However, the oldest citation for it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Johann Georg Keyssler's Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain - 1st edition, 1756–1757. The quote is v...
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Correa Moylan Walsh
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Correa Moylan Walsh was an American author. He was an early expert in the field of index numbers. A polymath, he wrote on a wide range of topics: from mathematics, economics, and statistics, on the one hand to philosophy, political science, literature, and philosophy of history, on the other .
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Leonhart Fuchs
1501 - 1566 (65 years)
Leonhart Fuchs , sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs and cited in Latin as Leonhartus Fuchsius, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings had been used in other herbal books, Fuchs' book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plan...
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Nathan Birnbaum
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Nathan Birnbaum was an Austrian writer and journalist, Jewish thinker and nationalist. His life had three main phases, representing a progression in his thinking: a Zionist phase ; a Jewish cultural autonomy phase which included the promotion of the Yiddish language; and religious phase when he turned to Orthodox Judaism and became staunchly anti-Zionist.
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Sébastien Basson
1573 - Present (453 years)
Sébastien Basson, Latinized as Sebastianus Basso, was a French physician and natural philosopher of the beginning of the seventeenth century. He was an early theorist of a matter theory based on both atoms and compounds. His natural philosophy draws on several currents of thought, including Italian Renaissance naturalism, alchemy and Calvinist theology. Basson was an atomist, who, independently from Isaac Beeckman, formed the concept of "molecule".
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Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Takiyettin Mengusoglu was a Turkish philosopher. Mengusoglu was born in Malatya, Turkey. After finishing high school, he went to Germany and became a student of Nicolai Hartmann. He was known as Takiyettin Temuralp at that time and published Über die grenzen der erkennbarkeit bei Husserl und Scheler in German. He is the author of the university level textbook Felsefeye Giriş .
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Peter Mark Roget
1779 - 1869 (90 years)
Peter Mark Roget was a British physician, natural theologian, lexicographer, and founding secretary of The Portico Library. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a classified collection of related words. He also read a paper to the Royal Society about a peculiar optical illusion in 1824, which is often regarded as the origin of the persistence of vision theory that was later commonly used to explain apparent motion in film and animation.
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Thomé H. Fang
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Thomé H. Fang was a Chinese philosopher. He was described by Charles A. Moore as the "greatest philosopher of China" and by Vincent Shen as "one of the most creative contemporary Chinese philosophers."
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Willy Ley
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Willy Otto Oskar Ley was a German and American science writer and proponent of cryptozoology. The crater Ley on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor. Early life and Berlin years Willy Otto Oskar Ley was the son of Julius Otto Ley, a traveling merchant, and Frida May, the daughter of a Lutheran sexton. Ley grew up in his native Berlin during the First World War under the supervision of two aunts. When war erupted his father was in Great Britain. Consequently, he spent the remainder of the war at a detention camp on the Isle of Man. Meanwhile, his mother worked as milliner in a di...
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Patrick Francis Healy
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Patrick Francis Healy was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was an influential president of Georgetown University, becoming known as its "second founder". The university's flagship building, Healy Hall, bears his name. Though he considered himself and was largely accepted as White, Healy was posthumously recognized as the first Black American to become a Jesuit, to earn a PhD, and to become the president of a predominantly White university.
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David Baumgardt
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
David Baumgardt was an early 20th-century German Jewish philosopher in the field of philosophical history. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Early life and education Baumgardt was born in Erfurt, German Empire. As a young man he studied at the universities of Freiburg, Vienna, Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin, and served in the military during World War I.
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Erik Ahlman
1892 - 1952 (60 years)
Erik Gustav Ahlman was a Finnish philosopher and linguist. Ahlman initiated his academic career as a classical philologist. Ahlman was born in Turku. He worked as a theoretical science education professor at the Jyväskylä College of Education from 1935 to 1948 and then Professor of Moral Philosophy of the University of Helsinki from 1948–1952. His most important works are Arvojen ja välineiden maailma , Kulttuurin perustekijöitä and Ihmisen probleemi .
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Andreas Jaszlinszky
1715 - 1783 (68 years)
Andreas Jaszlinszky was the Slovak-born author of the early physics textbooks Institutiones physicae pars prima, seu physica generalis and Institutiones physicae pars altera, seu physica particularis .
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Joseph Droz
1773 - 1850 (77 years)
François-Xavier-Joseph Droz was a reactionary French writer on ethics, political science and political economy. Biography He was born at Besançon, where his family had supplied many notable members of the legal profession. Droz's own legal studies led him to Paris in 1792; he arrived the day after the dethronement of King Louis XVI of France, and was present during the massacres of September. On the declaration of war he joined the volunteer battalion of the Doubs, and for the next three years served in the Army of the Rhine. Discharged on health grounds, he obtained a much more congenial pos...
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Henry Aldrich
1647 - 1710 (63 years)
Henry Aldrich was an English theologian, philosopher, architect, and composer. Life Aldrich was educated at Westminster School under Dr Richard Busby. In 1662, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1689 was made Dean in succession to the Roman Catholic John Massey, who had fled to the Continent. In 1692, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford until 1695. In 1702, he was appointed Rector of Wem in Shropshire, but continued to reside at Oxford, where he died on 14 December 1710. He was buried in Christ Church Cathedral without any memorial, at his own request. However, a medal...
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Léon Dumont
1837 - 1877 (40 years)
Léon Dumont was a French psychologist and philosopher. He influenced William James and is perhaps best known for his treatise on the causes of laughter . Dumont's closing thoughts from the last page of Des causes du rire The miserable beggar said to the King of France, "Thy image is everywhere except in my pocket." One has seen that to laugh is to disarm hate and anger and to extract from some judges indulgence for a sin. In a word, the good joke, applied appropriately to any subject, has the effect of sweetening the deal for us: Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnus plerumque secat res. - ...
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Gottfried von Hagenau
1270 - 1313 (43 years)
Gottfried von Hagenau was a medieval priest, physician, theologian and poet from Alsace. As his name suggests, he was probably born in Haguenau, before 1275. After having studied medicine and theology in Strasbourg and in Paris, he worked as a headmaster in Basel, Switzerland, before settling as a physician in Strasbourg, where he applied for the post of canon at the St Thomas' Church. He was at first rejected but successfully sued against that decision before the Apostolic Signatura in Rome, and was instated as canon of St Thomas' Church in 1300. He died on 26 September 1313 and is buried in the church, where his ornate Gothic ledger stone is preserved to this day.
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Walter Reed
1851 - 1902 (51 years)
Walter Reed was a U.S. Army physician who in 1901 led the team that confirmed the theory of Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay that yellow fever is transmitted by a particular mosquito species rather than by direct contact. This insight gave impetus to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine, and most immediately allowed the resumption and completion of work on the Panama Canal by the United States. Reed followed work started by Finlay and directed by George Miller Sternberg, who has been called the "first U.S. bacteriologist".
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Joseph Franz Molitor
1779 - 1860 (81 years)
Franz Joseph Molitor, or Joseph Franz Molitor was a German writer and philosopher. Life Molitor was born the son of a Kurmainz civil servant. Beginning in 1797, he studied at the University of Mainz and from 1799 at the University of Marburg. He initially studied law but then switched to history and philosophy. He studied the works of Kant, Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling. From 1802, he was co-editor of the short-lived Zeitschrift für eine künftig aufzustellende Rechtswissenschaft nach dem Princip eines transscendentalen Realismus. Under the influence of theosophist Franz Xaver von Baader, h...
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Pierre Lasserre
1867 - 1930 (63 years)
Pierre Lasserre was a French literary critic, journalist and essayist. He became Director of the École des Hautes-Études. He was an agrégé in philosophy, contemporary with Henri Vaugeois and Louis Dimier. As a young man he was a strong nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard. He was the leading literary critic of Action française and the author of the first work on Charles Maurras. Along with Georges Valois, Lasserre was one of the first to work to incorporate Nietzschean themes into neoroyalism.
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K. J. Popma
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Klaas Johan Popma was one of the second generation of reformational philosophers arising from the Free University in Amsterdam, after the first generation of Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven. Other second generationers were: Hendrik Van Riessen, S. U. Zuidema and J. P. A. Mekkes.
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Sebastian Petrycy
1554 - 1626 (72 years)
Sebastian Petrycy of Pilzno , in Latin known as Sebastianus Petricius, was a Polish philosopher and physician. He lectured and published notable works in the field of medicine but is principally remembered for his masterly Polish translations of philosophical works by Aristotle and for his commentaries to them. Petrycy made major contributions to nascent Polish philosophical terminology.
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Anselm Feuerbach
1829 - 1881 (52 years)
Anselm Feuerbach was a German painter. He was the leading neoclassical painter of the German 19th-century school. Biography Early life Feuerbach was born at Speyer, the son of the archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and the grandson of the legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. The house of his birth is now a small museum.
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Adolf Lasson
1832 - 1917 (85 years)
Adolf Lasson was a German Jewish philosophical writer, strident Prussianist, and the father of Georg Lasson. Biography Born into a Jewish family, converted to Christianity, changing name from 'Lazarussohn.'He was educated at the Gymnasium Carolinum, Neu-Strelitz, and the University of Berlin . In 1858 he became teacher at the Friedrichsgymnasium, and from 1859 to 1897 he occupied the same position at the Louisenstädtisches Real-Gymnasium. In 1861 he took the Ph.D. degree at Leipzig University, and in 1877 became privatdozent in philosophy at Berlin University. Since 1874 he lectured on the history of German literature at the Viktoria Lyceum.
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Edgar Bauer
1820 - 1886 (66 years)
Edgar Bauer was a German political philosopher and a member of the Young Hegelians. He was the younger brother of Bruno Bauer. According to Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Edgar Bauer was the most anarchistic of the Young Hegelians, and "...it is possible to discern, in the early writings of Edgar Bauer, the theoretical justification of political terrorism." German anarchists such as Max Nettlau and Gustav Landauer credited Edgar Bauer with founding the anarchist tradition in Germany. In the mid-1840s, Marx' and Engels' critique of the Bauer brothers marked the beginning of their collaboration and an important stage in the development of Marxist thought.
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Yvonne Picard
1920 - 1943 (23 years)
Yvonne Picard was a French philosopher and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. She and her brother, the historian Gilbert Charles-Picard, were the children of the archaeologist Charles Picard.
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Klement Jug
1898 - 1924 (26 years)
Klement Jug was a Slovene philosopher, essayist and mountaineer who died while climbing Mount Triglav. Although he did not publish many works during his lifetime, he became one of the most influential thinkers of the younger generations of Slovenian intellectuals in the interwar period.
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