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.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15051
Roberts Bartholow
1831 - 1904 (73 years)
Roberts Bartholow or Robert Bartholow was an American physician and a professor at several American medical colleges. He is best known for his experiments involving a 30-year-old patient named Mary Rafferty. Rafferty was admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1874 with a 2-inch-diameter hole in her skull caused by a cancerous ulcer. Bartholow experimented with applying current to Rafferty's exposed dura using needle electrodes. His report detailed the first observations of how electrical stimulation of the brain affects motor functions of the body, but many ethical concerns were raised about the way in which he carried out his experiments.
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Anton de Haen
1704 - 1776 (72 years)
Anton de Haen was a Dutch physician who worked in Vienna as a professor at the University of Vienna and was the director of its medical department. He became a very influential physician in the Habsburg monarchy and eventually founded the Viennese Medicine School.
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Girolamo Borro
1512 - 1592 (80 years)
Girolamo Borro latinized as Hieronomyus Borrius was an Italian philosopher and a professor at the University of Pisa. He belonged to a group of natural philosophers who rejected appeals to the supernatural and occult to explain phenomena. He is thought to have influenced Galileo and Borro's ideas were published in dialogue form in a book on tides Dialogo del flusso e reflusso del mare . Another book by Borro was on moving bodies, De motu gravium et levium . He also authored some manuscripts including Multae sunt nostrarum ignorationum causae.
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David Hayes Agnew
1818 - 1892 (74 years)
David Hayes Agnew was an American surgeon. Biography Agnew was born on November 24, 1818, Nobleville, Pennsylvania . His parents were Robert Agnew and Agnes Noble. Agnew grew up as a Christian. He was surrounded by a family of doctors and had always known he was going to become a physician. As a young boy, he had a sharp sense of humor and was very intelligent.
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Tadeusz M. Jaroszewski
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
Tadeusz Maciej Jaroszewski was a Polish Marxist philosopher and religious studies professor of humanities, in the years 1976–1981 director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN Publications Filozofia marksistowska. Podręcznik akademicki, Warszawa: Państ. Wydaw. Naukowe, 1975.Filozofia społeczna i doktryna polityczna Kościoła Katolickiego, Warszawa: Wyższa Szkoła Nauk Społecznych przy KC PZPR, 1965.Filozoficzne problemy współczesnego chrześcijaństwa, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973.Humanizm socjalistyczny , Warszawa: "Książka i Wiedza", 1980.Kierunki walki o laicyzację...
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Theo Lingen
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Theo Lingen , born Franz Theodor Schmitz, was a German actor, film director and screenwriter. He appeared in more than 230 films between 1929 and 1978, and directed 21 films between 1936 and 1960. Life and career Lingen was born the son of a lawyer in the city of Hanover, and grew up there. He attended the Royal Goethe Gymnasium – the predecessor of the Goethe School – in Hanover, but left before taking the Abitur . His theatrical talent was discovered during rehearsals for a school performance at the Schauburg boulevard theatre.
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Emil Knauer
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
Emil Knauer was an Austrian gynecologist and obstetrician. Career Knauer was born in 1867 as the son of baker Georg Knauer and his wife Karoline . After completing his schooling in his hometown, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna from autumn 1885 onwards.In Vienna he completed training in pathological anatomy under Johann Kundrat and in internal medicine under Hermann Nothnagel. In 1891 Knauer got his doctorate and worked from October 1891 at the surgical clinic of Theodor Billroth.In April 1893 he went to II. University Women's Hospital under Rudolf Chrobak, where he qualified ...
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Elias Ashmole
1617 - 1692 (75 years)
Elias Ashmole was an English antiquary, politician, officer of arms, astrologer and student of alchemy. Ashmole supported the royalist side during the English Civil War, and at the restoration of Charles II he was rewarded with several lucrative offices.
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John Fothergill
1712 - 1780 (68 years)
John Fothergill FRS was an English physician, plant collector, philanthropist and Quaker. His medical writings were influential, and he built up a sizeable botanic garden in what is now West Ham Park in London.
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Regnier de Graaf
1641 - 1673 (32 years)
Regnier de Graaf , original Dutch spelling Reinier de Graaf, or Latinized Reijnerus de Graeff , was a Dutch physician, physiologist and anatomist who made key discoveries in reproductive biology. He specialized in iatrochemistry and iatrogenesis, and was the first to develop a syringe to inject dye into human reproductive organs so that he could understand their structure and function.
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William Beaumont
1785 - 1853 (68 years)
William Beaumont was a surgeon in the U.S. Army who became known as the "Father of Gastric Physiology" for his research on human digestion on Alexis St. Martin. Early life William Beaumont was born to Samuel Beaumont and Lucretia Abel in Lebanon, Connecticut; his father was a farmer. He left his home after he turned twenty-one, moved to Champlain, New York and obtained a teaching job. In 1810 he relocated to St. Albans, Vermont, where he trained to become a physician through an apprenticeship with Dr. Truman Powell. In June 1812, the Third Medical Society of the State of Vermont in Burlingto...
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Antonio Riccoboni
1541 - 1599 (58 years)
Antonio Riccoboni was an Italian scholar, active during the Renaissance as a classical scholar or humanist and historian. Biography Antonio Riccoboni was born in Rovigo. First making his life as a tutor, he moved in 1570 to Venice and Padua to study at the University under Paolo Manuzio, Marc-Antoine Muret, and Carlo Sigonio. By 1571, he had been granted a doctorate in civil law, and soon after degrees in canon law. The next year he obtained a post as professor rhetoric at the university, succeeding Giovanni Fasolo.
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Priscus of Epirus
305 - 395 (90 years)
Priscus of Epirus , also known as Priscus the Thesprotian and Priscus the Molossian , was a Neoplatonist philosopher and theurgist, a colleague of Maximus of Ephesus, and a friend of the emperor Julian.
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Michel Villey
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Michel Villey was a French legal philosopher and historian. He was a professor at the University of Strasbourg and then at the University of Paris. He was born in Caen and was the grandson of philosopher Émile Boutroux. The Institut Michel-Villey is named in his honor.
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Shabtai Ben-Dov
1924 - 1978 (54 years)
Shabtai Ben-Dov was a member of Lehi and a philosopher. His work has been influential on several right-wing Israeli messianic groups. Personal life Ben-Dov was born in Vilnius, then part of Second Polish Republic in 1924 and moved to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1935. He joined the Irgun, which was fighting the British for control of the region. When Lehi split from Irgun, Ben-Dov joined the former to continue fighting the British, who he didn't think were doing enough to try and stop the Holocaust. He was caught, imprisoned, and eventually exiled to Africa by the British. He returned ...
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Kurt Singer
1886 - 1962 (76 years)
Kurt Singer was a German economist and philosopher. Born in Magdeburg, he was a professor at Hamburg University . He taught at the Tokyo Imperial University from 1931 to 1935. Singer died at Athens at the age of 75.
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Henry Clay Brockmeyer
1826 - 1906 (80 years)
Henry Clay Brockmeyer was a German-American poet, philosopher, and politician. Early life Brockmeyer was born Heinrich Conrad Brokmeyer in Westphalia, near Petershagen, to a well-to-do family. On his mother's side he was a nephew of Friedrich Wilhelm von Bismarck, a Napoleonic-era general and diplomat in Württemberg. He emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, reputedly after his religious mother burned his copy of Goethe's poems. Brockmeyer arrived in St. Louis around age 20 and worked in a tannery and in other trades. He built a prosperous shoe-making business in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi and sold it when his health declined.
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Aristo of Alexandria
Aristo of Alexandria was a Peripatetic philosopher who lived in the 1st century BC. According to Philodemus, he was a pupil of Antiochus of Ascalon . Strabo, a later contemporary, relates a story where both Ariston and Eudorus, a contemporary of his, had claimed to have written a work on the Nile, but that the two works were so nearly identical that the authors charged each other with plagiarism. Who was right is not said, though Strabo seems to be inclined to think that Eudorus was the guilty party.
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Papirius Fabianus
Papirius Fabianus was an Ancient Roman rhetorician and philosopher from the gens Papirius in the time of Tiberius and Caligula, in the first half of the 1st century AD. Biography Fabianus was the pupil of Arellius Fuscus and of Blandus in rhetoric, and of Quintus Sextius in philosophy. Although much the younger of the two, he instructed Gaius Albucius Silus in eloquence. The rhetorical style of Fabianus is described by Seneca the Elder, and he is frequently cited in the third book of Controversiae as well as in the Suasoriae. His early model in rhetoric was his instructor Arellius Fuscus; but ...
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Attalus
Attalus was a Stoic philosopher in the reign of Tiberius around 25 AD. He was defrauded of his property by Sejanus, and exiled where he was reduced to cultivating the ground. The elder Seneca describes him as a man of great eloquence, and by far the acutest philosopher of his age.
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Sotion
100 BC - 100 (200 years)
Sotion , a native of Alexandria, was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher who lived in the age of Tiberius. He belonged to the school of the Sextii, which was founded by Quintus Sextius and combined Pythagoreanism with Stoicism. Sotion was the teacher of Seneca the Younger, who "sat as a lad, in the school of the philosopher Sotion." Seneca derived from him his admiration of Pythagoreanism, and quotes Sotion's views concerning vegetarianism and the migration of the soul: You do not believe that souls are assigned, first to one body and then to another, and that our so-called death is merely a ch...
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Ann Baynard
1672 - 1697 (25 years)
Ann Baynard was a British natural philosopher and model of piety. She sought discussions with atheists and non-Christians. Later, during her eulogy, Reverend Prude called her philosophical knowledge of this 20-year-old woman the same size as that of an "old bearded male philosopher"
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Edward Lowinsky
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Edward Elias Lowinsky was an American musicologist. Lowinsky was one of the most prominent and influential musicologists in post-World War II America. His 1946 work on the "secret chromatic art" of Renaissance motets was hotly debated in its time, spurring considerable research into the issues of musica ficta and performance practice of early music.
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Percy Hughes
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Percy Hughes was a philosopher and teacher, and a leading figure in the Philosophy, Education, and Psychology department at Lehigh University. Life Hughes was born in Peshawar in British India. A child of missionary Anglican parents, Hughes lived in London before arriving to the United States at the age of 16. He received his A.B degree from Alfred University, and his MA and Ph.D. degrees from the Teachers College at Columbia University under John Dewey, who would become a lifelong friend.
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Andrew Duncan
1773 - 1832 (59 years)
Andrew Duncan, the younger was a British physician and professor at the University of Edinburgh. Life Duncan was the son of Elizabeth Knox and Andrew Duncan, the elder, born at Adam Square in Edinburgh on 10 August 1773. His early education was at the High School in Edinburgh. He was then apprenticed to Alexander and George Wood, surgeons of Edinburgh. He graduated with an MA in 1793, and MD in 1794.
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Franz von Wirer
1771 - 1844 (73 years)
Franz de Paula Augustin Wirer Ritter von Rettenbach was an Austrian physician who was a native of Korneuburg in Lower Austria. He was a physician to Austrian royalty, a rector at the University of Vienna and instructor at the Vienna Medical School.
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Thrasybulos Georgiades
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Thrasybulos Georgios Georgiades was a Greek musicologist, pianist, civil engineer and philosopher. He was for many years director of the Institute of Musicology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and he is widely regarded as one of the greatest German musicologists.
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Adam Steuart
1591 - 1645 (54 years)
Adam Steuart was a Scottish philosopher and controversialist. Life He became professor at the Academy of Saumur in 1617. In 1644, he was in London, where he engaged in propaganda for the Presbyterians against the Independents. The first attack on the Apologeticall Narration of the Five Dissenting Brethren was Steuart's. The Second Part of the Duply to M. S. alias Two Brethren addressed the issue of religious tolerance, which he classed with depravity. It was answered by John Goodwin. Steuart is mentioned in John Milton's poem On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament, a ...
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Alexander A. Maximow
1874 - 1928 (54 years)
Alexander Alexandrowitsch Maximow was a Russian-American scientist in the fields of Histology and Embryology whose team developed the hypothesis about the existence of "polyblasts". Maximow is renowned for his experimental work on the unitarian theory of hematopoiesis: all blood cells develop from a common precursor cell. Maximow served as a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Francesco Pona
1595 - 1655 (60 years)
Francesco Pona was an Italian medical doctor, philosopher, Marinist poet and writer from Verona, whose works ranged from scientific treatises and history to poetry and plays. Biography A Veronese medical doctor and member of many academies, Pona was a prolific writer, producing medical and scientific texts, historiography, literary translation, drama, lyric poetry, prose romances, and tales. A follower of Cesare Cremonini, a heterodox Aristotelian professor at Padua, Pona was a leading member of the influential Accademia degli Incogniti - a society of Venetian intellectuals famous for the libertine and anti-clerical tendencies of many of its members.
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John Gordon
1786 - 1818 (32 years)
Dr John Gordon FRSE FRCSE was a short-lived but influential Scottish anatomist. In 1806 he served as president of the Royal Medical Society. In 1815 he caused an international stir by debunking the new science of phrenology and publicly criticising its principal European exponents, Johann Spurzheim and Franz Joseph Gall.
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Theodor Billroth
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
Christian Albert Theodor Billroth was a German surgeon and amateur musician. As a surgeon, he is generally regarded as the founding father of modern abdominal surgery. As a musician, he was a close friend and confidant of Johannes Brahms, a leading patron of the Viennese musical scene, and one of the first to attempt a scientific analysis of musicality.
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Giovanni Filoteo Achillini
1466 - 1538 (72 years)
Giovanni Filoteo Achillini was an Italian philosopher. Born in Bologna, he was the younger brother of philosopher Alessandro. He studied Greek, Latin, theology, philosophy, music, antiquities, jurisprudence, poetry, etc., but did not excel in any specific field. He accumulated ample collections of antiquities.
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James Gates Percival
1795 - 1856 (61 years)
James Gates Percival was an American poet, surgeon, and geologist, born in Berlin, Connecticut, and died in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. Biography James Gates Percival was a precocious child and a versatile, yet morbid and impractical man. He had a remarkable ability to write verse on various subjects and in almost every known meter. His sentimentalism and dazzling diction appealed to a wide audience, earning him a reputation as the foremost poet in the United States during the 1820s. Some of his most famous poems include "Prometheus," "The Coral Grove," and "The Graves of the Patriots." He was a...
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Vicente T. Mendoza
1864 - 1964 (100 years)
Vicente Teódulo Mendoza Gutiérrez was a Mexican musicologist, composer and artist. He is best known for his studies on the Mexican corrido. In 1907 when Vicente T. Mendoza was 13 years old, he went to Mexico City where he studied piano and composition at the National Conservatory. At the same time he studied drawing. Between 1912 and 1930 he worked as a topographer. Later on, he taught solfege at the Conservatory. His main interest rests in Mexican folklore and music paleography. Along with the collaboration of Daniel Castañeda he compiled a treatise of precolumbian instruments, published in 1937 under the name Instrumental Precortesiano.
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Anirvan
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Sri Anirvan , born Narendra Chandra Dhar, was an Indian Hindu monk, writer and philosopher. Widely known as a scholar, his principal works were a Bengali translation of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine and the three-volume treatise Veda Mimamsa.
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Johann Georg Sulzer
1720 - 1779 (59 years)
Johann Georg Sulzer was a Swiss professor of Mathematics, who later on moved on to the field of electricity. He was a Wolffian philosopher and director of the philosophical section of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and translator of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals into German in 1755.
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James Allanson Picton
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
James Allanson Picton was a British independent minister, author, philosopher and Liberal politician. Picton promoted a philosophy known as Christian pantheism. Life Picton was born at Liverpool, the eldest son of Sir James Allanson Picton and his wife Sarah Pooley. His father was an architect and supporter of the Liverpool Free Library. He was educated at the High School, and at the Mechanics' Institute and joined his father's architectural practice at the age of 16. Three years later he decided to study for the ministry and joined the Lancashire Independent College and Owens College, Manchester.
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Siro the Epicurean
100 BC - 20 BC (80 years)
Siro was an Epicurean philosopher who lived in Naples. He was a teacher of Virgil, and taught at his school in Naples. There are two poems attributed to Virgil in the Appendix Vergiliana, which mention Siro, and where the author speaks of seeking peace in the company of Siro: I am setting sail for the havens of the blest to seek the wise sayings of great Siro, and will redeem my life from all care.
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Isaac Michaelson
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Isaac Claude Michaelson was an Israeli ophthalmologist and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Biography Michaelson was born in 1903 in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom. He studied ophthalmology at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1927.
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Grigory Ivanovich Rossolimo
1860 - 1928 (68 years)
Grigory Ivanovich Rossolimo was a Russian Empire and Soviet neurologist who was a native of Odessa. He specialized in the field of child neuropsychology. Biography In 1884 he graduated from the University of Moscow, and subsequently worked under Aleksei Kozhevnikov at the clinic of neurological diseases. He earned his medical doctorate in 1887, and in 1890 became head of the department of neurology at the clinic of Aleksei Alekseevich Ostroumov .
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Johannes Acronius Frisius
1520 - 1564 (44 years)
Johannes Acronius Frisius was a Dutch doctor and mathematician of the 16th century. He was named after his city of birth, Akkrum in Friesland. From 1547 he worked as professor of mathematics in Basel, then after 1549 as professor of logic, and in 1564 of medicine. He died from the plague in the same year. Apart from mathematical and scientific works, he wrote Latin poetry and humanist tracts.
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Jessie Gray
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jessie Catherine Gray was a Canadian cancer surgeon, educator, and researcher. Known as the Canadian "First Lady of Surgery", Gray is described as a trailblazer for women surgeons and an example that women could excel in the male-dominated field of general surgery. During her career, she was considered one of the top four cancer surgeons in North America, and she earned many firsts and fellowships in her field.
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Bernhardus Albinus
1653 - 1721 (68 years)
Bernhardus Friedrich Albinus was a Dutch physician and anatomist. His sons Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and Friedrich Bernhard Albinus were also anatomists of note in Leiden. Albinus was born in Dessau in the principality of Anhalt, where his father, Christoforus Albinus, was the mayor. His ancestral family name, Weiss, had been changed to Albinus in the 16th century, after the fashion of the time, by his ancestor Petrus Weiss, poet and historian. In his youth, a poor physical constitution led to his being schooled at home before being sent to the public school of his city. When the scientist...
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Franz König
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Franz König was a German surgeon. The son of a physician, he was born in Rotenburg an der Fulda. In 1855 he received his doctorate from the University of Marburg, and was later district wound surgeon in Hanau. Afterwards he was a professor of surgery at the universities of Rostock and Göttingen , and eventually at the Charité-Berlin, where in 1895 he succeeded Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben. In 1904 he was succeeded at the Charité by Otto Hildebrand.
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James Hector
1834 - 1907 (73 years)
Sir James Hector was a Scottish-New Zealand geologist, naturalist, and surgeon who accompanied the Palliser Expedition as a surgeon and geologist. He went on to have a lengthy career as a government employed man of science in New Zealand, and during this period he dominated the colony's scientific institutions in a way that no single man has since.
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Pieter Otto van der Chijs
1802 - 1867 (65 years)
Pieter Otto van der Chijs was a Dutch coin expert and one of the early prizewinners of Teylers Tweede Genootschap . He was the son of J. van der Chijs and A.S. Bagelaar who encouraged him to start collecting. At the age of nine became interested in coins when he studied the ones his parents donated to the poor of Delft each week. He began to collect coins from around the world. After following school in Delft, he became a student of letters at the University of Leiden in 1820. He won a few prizes before devoting himself to his hobby. He wrote an essay on the art of collecting old coins in 1829 and in 1831 he became a member of the Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy.
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William Mackenzie
1791 - 1868 (77 years)
William Mackenzie was a Scottish ophthalmologist. He wrote Practical Treatise of the Diseases of the Eye, one of the first British textbooks of ophthalmology. Life Mackenzie was born in Queen Street, Glasgow, and studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. From 1840 to 1848 he studied in London and in Europe. He obtained his medical doctorate under Georg Joseph Beer at the University of Vienna, and returned to Britain in 1848. In 1849, Mackenzie settled in Glasgow and began practice as a physician.
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Domenico Gagliardi
1660 - 1745 (85 years)
Domenico Gagliardi was an Italian physician and anatomist. He may have served as a professor of anatomy at Rome and served as chief physician to four Popes. He studied the structure of bones, dissolving the structures, and observing them under a microscope as described in his 1689 book Anatome ossium novis inventis illustrata.
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Xeniades
500 BC - 500 BC (0 years)
Xeniades was a skeptical philosopher from Corinth, probably a follower of the pre-Socratic Xenophanes. There may have been two such persons, as he is referenced by Democritus c. 400 BC, though was also supposedly the purchaser of Diogenes the Cynic c. 350 BC, when he was captured by pirates and sold as a slave. Xeniades was supposed to have been the man who persuaded Monimus to become a follower of Diogenes, and was the source of his skeptical doctrines.
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