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,
#15101
Kuno Fischer
1824 - 1907 (83 years)
Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic. Biography After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle, became a privatdocent at Heidelberg in 1850. The Baden government in 1853 laid an embargo on his teaching owing to his liberal ideas, but the effect of this was to rouse considerable sympathy for his views, and in 1856 he obtained a professorship at Jena, where he soon acquired great influence by the dignity of his personal character. In 1872, on Eduard Zeller's move to Berlin, Fischer succeeded him as professor of philosophy and the history ...
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Eugen Dühring
1833 - 1921 (88 years)
Eugen Karl Dühring was a German philosopher, positivist, antisemite, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism. Life and works Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised at Berlin as a lawyer until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, occasioned his taking up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.
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Harald Høffding
1843 - 1931 (88 years)
Harald Høffding was a Danish philosopher and theologian. Life Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen. He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school. The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding. The philosopher and author Ágúst H. Bjarnason was a student of Høffding.
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C. D. Broad
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Charlie Dunbar Broad , usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English epistemologist, historian of philosophy, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, and writer on the philosophical aspects of psychical research. He was known for his thorough and dispassionate examinations of arguments in such works as Scientific Thought , The Mind and Its Place in Nature , and Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy .
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Guru Nanak
1469 - 1539 (70 years)
Gurū Nānak , also referred to as , was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. His birth is celebrated as Guru Nanak Gurpurab on Katak Pooranmashi , i.e. October–November.
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Gorgias
483 BC - 375 BC (108 years)
Gorgias was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays wa...
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James Mark Baldwin
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
James Mark Baldwin was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Princeton and the University of Toronto. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.
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Robert Grosseteste
1175 - 1253 (78 years)
Robert Grosseteste , also known as Robert Greathead or Robert of Lincoln, was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, scientist and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents in Suffolk , but the associations with the village of Stradbroke is a post-medieval tradition. Upon his death, he was revered as a saint in England, but attempts to procure a formal canonisation failed. A. C. Crombie called him "the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford, and in some ways, of the modern English intellectual tradition".
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Simone de Beauvoir
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
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Alan Watts
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
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Stanisław Leśniewski
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Stanisław Leśniewski was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician. Life He was born on 28 March 1886 at Serpukhov, near Moscow, to father Izydor, an engineer working on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and mother Helena . Leśniewski went to a high school in Irkutsk. Later he attended lectures by Hans Cornelius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and lectures by Wacław Sierpiński at Lviv University.
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André Malraux
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency .
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Eric Voegelin
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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Aenesidemus
80 BC - 10 BC (70 years)
Aenesidemus was a 1st-century BC Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher from Knossos who revived the doctrines of Pyrrho and introduced ten skeptical "modes" for the suspension of judgment. He broke with the Academic Skepticism that was predominant in his time, synthesizing the teachings of Heraclitus and Timon of Phlius with philosophical skepticism. Although his primary work, the Pyrrhonian Discourses, has been lost, an outline of the work survives from the later Byzantine empire, and the description of the modes has been preserved by few ancient sources.
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Gustav Bergmann
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Gustav Bergmann was an Austrian-born American philosopher. He studied at the University of Vienna and was a member of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann was influenced by the philosophers Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and Rudolf Carnap, who were members of the Circle. In the United States, he was a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Iowa.
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Paracelsus
1493 - 1541 (48 years)
Paracelsus , born Theophrastus von Hohenheim , was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology". Paracelsus also had a substantial influence as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 17th century. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.
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Ralph Cudworth
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew , 26th Master of Clare Hall , and 14th Master of Christ's College . A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe .
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Alexander von Humboldt
1769 - 1859 (90 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
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Friedrich Pollock
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Friedrich Pollock was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory.
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Paul Arthur Schilpp
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Paul Arthur Schilpp was an American philosopher and educator. Biography Schilpp was born in Dillenburg, Germany and immigrated to the United States prior to World War I. Schilpp taught at Northwestern University, University of Puget Sound, UC Santa Barbara, University of the Pacific and spent the last years of his professional career teaching undergraduate philosophy courses at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Schilpp was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association .
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Lewis Carroll
1832 - 1898 (66 years)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass . He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.
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Chanakya
375 BC - 283 BC (92 years)
Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Vishnugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century.
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Karl Mannheim
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Karl Mannheim was an influential Hungarian sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia , in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.
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György Lukács
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
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William Stanley Jevons
1835 - 1882 (47 years)
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna and by Léon Walras in Switzerland , marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal ...
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Antoine Arnauld
1612 - 1694 (82 years)
Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Contemporaries called him le Grand to distinguish him from his father.
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Heinrich Rickert
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
Heinrich John Rickert was a German philosopher, one of the leading neo-Kantians. Life Rickert was born in Danzig, Prussia to the journalist and later politician Heinrich Edwin Rickert and Annette née Stoddart. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany and Heidelberg .
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Aristippus
434 BC - 355 BC (79 years)
Aristippus of Cyrene was a hedonistic Greek philosopher and the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates, but adopted a different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by adapting circumstances to oneself and by maintaining proper control over both adversity and prosperity. His view that pleasure is the only good came to be called ethical hedonism. Due to the ideological and philosophical differences between Socrates and himself, Aristippus faced backlash by Socrates and many of his fellow-pupils. Out of his hedonistic belie...
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Rembrandt
1606 - 1669 (63 years)
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn , usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.
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John Venn
1834 - 1923 (89 years)
John Venn, FRS, FSA was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in logic, set theory, probability, statistics, and computer science. In 1866, Venn published The Logic of Chance, a groundbreaking book which espoused the frequency theory of probability, arguing that probability should be determined by how often something is forecast to occur as opposed to "educated" assumptions. Venn then further developed George Boole's theories in the 1881 work Symbolic Logic, where he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams.
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Aleksei Losev
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev was a Soviet and Russian philosopher, philologist and culturologist, one of the most prominent figures in Russian philosophical and religious thought of the 20th century. Early life Losev was born in Novocherkassk, the administrative center of the Don Host Oblast, the far western Russian territory held by the Don Cossacks on the banks of the Don River. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Aleksei Polyakov; a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. Losev's paternal great-grandfather was also named Aleksei, and was awarded for heroism during the Napoleonic Wars, while fighting in a Cossack Brigade.
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W. D. Ross
1877 - 1971 (94 years)
Sir William David Ross , known as David Ross but usually cited as W. D. Ross, was a Scottish Aristotelian philosopher, translator, WWI veteran, civil servant, and university administrator. His best-known work is The Right and the Good , in which he developed a pluralist, deontological form of intuitionist ethics in response to G. E. Moore's consequentialist form of intuitionism. Ross also critically edited and translated a number of Aristotle's works, such as his 12-volume translation of Aristotle together with John Alexander Smith, and wrote on other Greek philosophy.
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Andronicus of Rhodes
100 BC - 60 BC (40 years)
Andronicoos of Rhodes was a Greek philosopher from Rhodes who was also the scholarch of the Peripatetic school. He is most famous for publishing a new edition of the works of Aristotle that forms the basis of the texts that survive today.
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Johann Friedrich Herbart
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline. Herbart is now remembered amongst the post-Kantian philosophers mostly as making the greatest contrast to Hegel—in particular in relation to aesthetics. His educational philosophy is known as Herbartianism.
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Emanuel Swedenborg
1688 - 1772 (84 years)
Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic. He became best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell . Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions, notably on Easter Weekend, on 6 April 1744. His experiences culminated in a "spiritual awakening" in which he received a revelation that Jesus Christ had appointed him to write The Heavenly Doctrine to reform Christianity. According to The Heavenly Doctrine, the...
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Mikhail Bakhtin
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1...
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John Scotus Eriugena
810 - 877 (67 years)
John Scotus Eriugena, also known as Johannes Scotus Erigena, John the Scot, or John the Irish-born was an Irish Neoplatonist philosopher, theologian and poet of the Early Middle Ages. Bertrand Russell dubbed him "the most astonishing person of the ninth century". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that he "is the most significant Irish intellectual of the early monastic period. He is generally recognized to be both the outstanding philosopher of the Carolingian era and of the whole period of Latin philosophy stretching from Boethius to Anselm".
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Hans Vaihinger
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Hans Vaihinger was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his Die Philosophie des Als Ob , published in 1911 although its statement of basic principles had been written more than thirty years earlier.
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Wang Yangming
1472 - 1529 (57 years)
Wang Shouren , courtesy name Bo'an , art name Yangmingzi , usually referred to as Wang Yangming , was a Chinese calligrapher, general, philosopher, politician, and writer during the Ming dynasty. After Zhu Xi, he is commonly regarded as the most important Neo-Confucian thinker, for his interpretations of Confucianism that denied the rationalist dualism of the orthodox philosophy of Zhu Xi. Wang and Lu Xiangshan are regarded as the founders as the Lu–Wang school, or the School of the Mind.
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Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
500 - 600 (100 years)
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was a Greek author, Christian theologian and Neoplatonic philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century, who wrote a set of works known as the Corpus Areopagiticum or Corpus Dionysiacum.
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Wang Bi
226 - 249 (23 years)
Wang Bi , courtesy name Fusi , was a Chinese philosopher and politician. During his brief career he produced commentaries on the Tao Te Ching and I Ching which were highly influential in Chinese philosophy.
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Hans Driesch
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He has also been credited with performing the first artificial 'cloning' of an animal in the 1880s, although this claim is dependent on how one defines cloning.
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Anatoly Lunacharsky
1875 - 1933 (58 years)
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People's Commissar responsible for the Ministry of Education as well as an active playwright, critic, essayist and journalist throughout his career.
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Victor Cousin
1792 - 1867 (75 years)
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was the founder of "eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism. As the administrator of public instruction for over a decade, Cousin also had an important influence on French educational policy.
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Helena Blavatsky
1831 - 1891 (60 years)
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian and American mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy.
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Adolf Lindenbaum
1904 - 1941 (37 years)
Adolf Lindenbaum was a Polish-Jewish logician and mathematician best known for Lindenbaum's lemma and Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras. He was born and brought up in Warsaw. He earned a Ph.D. in 1928 under Wacław Sierpiński and habilitated at the University of Warsaw in 1934. He published works on mathematical logic, set theory, cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, the axiom of choice, the continuum hypothesis, theory of functions, measure theory, point-set topology, geometry and real analysis. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw from 1935 until the outbreak of war in September 1939.
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Jean Wahl
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Jean André Wahl was a French philosopher. Early career Wahl was educated at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, broken by World War II. He was in the U.S. from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a Jew at the Drancy internment camp and then escaped.
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Joseph Butler
1692 - 1752 (60 years)
Joseph Butler was an English Anglican bishop, theologian, apologist, and philosopher, born in Wantage in the English county of Berkshire . He is known for critiques of Deism, Thomas Hobbes's egoism, and John Locke's theory of personal identity. The many philosophers and religious thinkers Butler influenced included David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Henry Sidgwick, John Henry Newman, and C. D. Broad, and is widely seen as "one of the pre-eminent English moralists." He played a major, if underestimated role in developing 18th-century economic discourse, influencing the Dean of Gloucester and...
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Eugen Fink
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Eugen Fink was a German philosopher. Biography Fink was born in 1905 as the son of a government official in Germany. He spent his first school years with an uncle who was a Catholic priest. Fink attended a grammar school in Konstanz where he succeeded with his extraordinary memory. After his graduation exam in 1925, he studied philosophy, history, German language and economics, initially at Münster and Berlin and then in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl.
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Max Ernst
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages.
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