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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15101
Joseph Škoda
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Joseph Škoda was an Austrian physician, medical professor and dermatologist. Together with Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, he was the founder of the Modern Medical School of Vienna. Life Škoda was born in Pilsen, Kingdom of Bohemia, Austrian Empire, as the second son of a locksmith. He attended the gymnasium at Pilsen, entered the University of Vienna in 1825, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine on 10 July 1831.
Go to Profile#15102
Pierre Lemonnier
1675 - 1757 (82 years)
Pierre Lemonnier was a French astronomer, a professor of Physics and Philosophy at the Collège d'Harcourt , and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Lemonnier published the 6-volume Latin university textbook Cursus philosophicus ad scholarum usum accommodatus which consisted of the following volumes :Volume 1 - LogicaVolume 2 - MetaphysicaVolume 3 - Physica Generalis including mechanics and geometryVolume 4 - Physica Particularis including astronomy , optics, chemistry, gravity, and Newtonian versus Cartesian dynamicsVolume 5 - Physica Particularis including fluid mechanics, human ...
Go to Profile#15103
Irving Thalberg Jr.
1930 - 1987 (57 years)
Irving Grant Thalberg Jr. was an author and the son of 1930s Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and Academy Award-winning actress Norma Shearer. Thalberg was six years old when his father died from pneumonia at the age of 37. He was educated at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and attended Stanford University. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago until he died of cancer on August 21, 1987, four days before his 57th birthday. He left a wife and three daughters. Prior to the University of Illinois, he was briefly a professor at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#15104
William H. Welch
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Henry Welch was an American physician, pathologist, bacteriologist, and medical-school administrator. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and was also the founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country. Welch was more known for his cogent summations of current scientific work, than his own scientific research. The Johns Hopkins medical school library is also named after Welch. In his lifetime, he was called the "...
Go to Profile#15105
Robert Steele
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Robert Steele was a British scholar, best known for editing between c. 1905 and 1941 the 16-volume Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Bacon. Early in his life Steele was a disciple of William Morris, who was apparently influential in directing young Steele's attention towards studying medieval writings, and also attracted Steele's political views towards socialism. After studying chemistry, Steele was for a brief time a teacher of this subject at Bedford School. He soon abandoned this job and moved to London where he worked as a freelance journalist, writing for various literary and socialist publications.
Go to Profile#15106
Víctor Li-Carrillo Chía
1929 - 1988 (59 years)
Víctor Li-Carrillo Chía was a Peruvian philosopher. Education and influences He studied at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, then in France and Germany . On these trips he met Victor Goldschmidt and Martin Heidegger, among other famous names in philosophy and world culture. In this first part of his life his philosophical interests were focused on ancient Greek philosophy and language, as well as being heavily influenced by Heidegger, whom he recognizes as a teacher.
Go to Profile#15107
Franz Xaver Winterhalter
1805 - 1873 (68 years)
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a German painter and lithographer, known for his flattering portraits of royalty and upper-class society in the mid-19th century. His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture. Among his best known works are Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting and the portraits he made of Empress Elisabeth of Austria .
Go to Profile#15108
Dominique Parodi
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Dominique Parodi was a French philosopher and educational administrator. Dominique Parodi was born in Genoa. He was the son of Margarita and Dominique-Alexandre Parodi; his father was a poet and dramatist of Graeco-Italian background. A member of the group around Émile Durkheim, he was a contributor to their journal, L'Année Sociologique. Between 1919 and 1934 he was General Inspector of Public Instruction. He succeeded Xavier Léon as editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, editing it from 1935 to 1955.
Go to Profile#15109
Charles Secrétan
1815 - 1895 (80 years)
Charles Secretan was a Swiss philosopher. He was born on 19 January 1815 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he also died on 21 January 1895. Educated in his native town and later under Friedrich Schelling in Munich, he became a professor of philosophy at Lausanne , and later at Neuchâtel. In 1866 he returned to his old position at Lausanne.
Go to Profile#15110
Wylie J. Dodds
#15111
Friedrich Theodor Vischer
1807 - 1887 (80 years)
Friedrich Theodor Vischer was a German novelist, poet, playwright, and writer on the philosophy of art. Today, he is mainly remembered as the author of the novel Auch Einer, in which he developed the concept of , a comic theory that inanimate objects conspire against humans.
Go to Profile#15112
Zhang Xuecheng
1738 - 1801 (63 years)
Zhang Xuecheng was a Chinese historian and philosopher during the Qing dynasty. His father and his grandfather had been government officials, but, although Zhang achieved the highest civil service examination degree in 1778, he never held high office. Zhang's ideas about the historical process were revolutionary in many ways and he became one of the most enlightened historical theorists of the Qing dynasty, but he spent much of his life in near poverty without the support of a patron and, in 1801, he died, poor and with few friends. It was not until the late 19th century that Chinese scholars began to accept the validity of Zhang's ideas.
Go to Profile#15113
Gyula Pikler
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Gyula Pikler Hungarian philosopher of law, university professor, member of the Society for Social Sciences. He was one of the most prominent and influential representatives of positivist philosophy of law and state, and was also known abroad. It was under his influence and around his person that the Galileo Circle was founded in Budapest in 1908, which was joined primarily by progressive young intellectual people.
Go to Profile#15114
Johann Reinhold Forster
1729 - 1798 (69 years)
Johann Reinhold Forster was a German Reformed pastor and naturalist of partially Scottish descent who made contributions to the early ornithology of Europe and North America. He is best known as the naturalist on James Cook's second Pacific voyage, where he was accompanied by his son Georg Forster. These expeditions promoted the career of Johann Reinhold Forster and the findings became the bedrock of colonial professionalism and helped set the stage for the future development of anthropology and ethnology. They also laid the framework for general concern about the impact that alteration of t...
Go to Profile#15115
Athenodorus of Soli
300 BC - 360 BC (-60 years)
Athenodorus of Soli was a Stoic philosopher, and disciple of Zeno of Citium, who lived in the 3rd century BC. He was the son of Athenodorus, and was born in the town of Soli, Cilicia, and was the compatriot of another disciple of Zeno, Chrysippus. Athenodorus was the brother of the poet Aratus of Soli, the author of the long didactic poem, Phaenomena. Both brothers followed the teachings of Zeno.
Go to Profile#15116
Robert Oliver Cunningham
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Robert Oliver Cunningham was a Scottish naturalist. Birth and early life Cunningham was born on 27 March 1841, in Prestonpans, the second son of the Rev. William Bruce Cunningham , Free Church of Scotland minister in Prestonpans, and Cecilia Margaret Douglas , daughter of David Douglas, Lord Reston , the heir of Adam Smith. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy , and graduated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1864. He gained a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh with a thesis on the Solan Goose.
Go to Profile#15117
Edward Abramowski
1868 - 1918 (50 years)
Edward Józef Abramowski was a Polish philosopher, libertarian socialist, anarchist, psychologist, ethician, and supporter of cooperatives. Abramowski is also one of the best known activists of classical anarchism in Poland.
Go to Profile#15118
Karl Gustav Fellerer
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Karl Gustav Fellerer was a German musicologist. His works include more than 600 scientific publications on catholic church music, Italian music from 1600 to the beginning of the 20th century, and music history of the 19th century. He wrote monographs on Palestrina, Handel, Mozart, and Max Bruch and was editor of several musical journals. He published the Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch for 46 years, from 1930 until 1976. Fellerer was president of several musicology societies, including 16 years of the Joseph Haas Society.
Go to Profile#15119
William of Heytesbury
1313 - 1372 (59 years)
William of Heytesbury, or William Heytesbury, called in Latin Guglielmus Hentisberus or Tisberus , was an English philosopher and logician, best known as one of the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, Oxford, where he was a fellow.
Go to Profile#15120
Henry Fox Talbot
1800 - 1877 (77 years)
William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE FRAS was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent that affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He ...
Go to Profile#15121
Malcolm W. Greaves
#15122
Izrail Agol
1891 - 1937 (46 years)
Izrail Iossofovich Agol was a Soviet geneticist and philosopher. He was a member of the USSR Academy of Science, worked briefly in the United States of America, and took an interest in radiation induced mutagenesis. As a Marxist philosopher, he also studied vitalist and mechanist views in biology and their relation to Marxism. He was killed in the aftermath of Trofim Lysenko's rise in the Stalin regime.
Go to Profile#15123
Francis Anderson
1858 - 1941 (83 years)
Sir Francis Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher and educator. Early life Francis Anderson was born in Glasgow, the son of Francis Anderson, a manufacturer, and his wife Elizabeth Anna Lockart, née Ellison. Anderson was educated at Old Wynd and Oatlands public schools and became a pupil-teacher at the age of 14. He went on to the University of Glasgow, matriculating in 1876 and graduated M.A. in 1883. He was awarded Sir Richard Jebb's prize for Greek literature, took first place in the philosophical classes of Professors Veitch and Caird, and won two scholarships. For two years...
Go to Profile#15124
Syed Mujtaba Ali
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Syed Mujtaba Ali was a Bengali writer, journalist, travel enthusiast, academic, scholar and linguist. He lived in Bangladesh, India, Germany, Afghanistan and Egypt. Early life and education Ali was born on 13 September 1904 to a Bengali Muslim family in Karimganj, Sylhet district, British Raj. His father, Khan Bahadur Syed Sikander Ali, was a sub-registrar. He traced his paternal descent to Shah Ahmed Mutawakkil, a local holy man and a Syed of Taraf, though apparently unrelated to Taraf's ruling Syed dynasty. Ali's mother, Amatul Mannan Khatun, belonged to the Chowdhuries of Kala and Bahadurpur, an Islamised branch of the Pal family of Panchakhanda.
Go to Profile#15125
Gertrude C. Bussey
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Gertrude Carman Bussey was an American academic philosopher and activist for women's rights, civil liberties, and peace. Education and academic career Gertrude Bussey first attended Barnard College before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1908 from Wellesley College. After graduate study at Columbia University in 1908-1909 and teaching at a private school in Bronxville she went on to do further study at Oxford University during 1912-14. She then went to Northwestern University and became, in 1915, its first student to receive a PhD in philosophy. In the same year Dr. Bussey was appointed as an instructor of philosophy at Goucher College.
Go to Profile#15126
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...
Go to Profile#15127
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.
Go to Profile#15128
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.
Go to Profile#15129
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.
Go to Profile#15130
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.
Go to Profile#15131
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.
Go to Profile#15132
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...
Go to Profile#15133
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.
Go to Profile#15134
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...
Go to Profile#15135
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.
Go to Profile#15136
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.
Go to Profile#15137
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.
Go to Profile#15138
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.
Go to Profile#15139
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.
Go to Profile#15140
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.
Go to Profile#15141
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.
Go to Profile#15142
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.
Go to Profile#15143
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.
Go to Profile#15144
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."
Go to Profile#15145
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.
Go to Profile#15146
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.
Go to Profile#15147
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.
Go to Profile#15148
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."
Go to Profile#15149
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.
Go to Profile#15150
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.
Go to Profile