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,
#15251
Julian Huxley
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London , the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society , and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
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Abram Deborin
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Abram Moiseyevich Deborin was a Soviet Marxist philosopher and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . Deborin oscillated between The Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, before settling with the Bolsheviks and enjoying a long career as a philosopher in the Soviet Union. Although this career suffered under Stalin, he lived to see his works republished when the Soviet Union was led by Nikita Khrushchev.
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Galvano Della Volpe
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Galvano Della Volpe was an Italian professor of philosophy and Marxist theorist. Life Born on 24 September 1895 in Imola, in the then province of Bologna, Della Volpe served in the First World War and afterwards completed his studies at the University of Bologna. Della Volpe taught history and philosophy in a liceo in Ravenna and at the University of Bologna from 1925 to 1938, when he became chair of history and philosophy at the University of Messina, a post he held until his retirement in 1965. Della Volpe died on 13 July 1968 in Rome.
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Georgy Chelpanov
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Georgy Ivanovich Chelpanov was a Ukrainian and Soviet psychologist, philosopher and logician. Biography Chelpanov was born in Mariupol in to an upper-class family. Chelpanov received his primary education in Mariupol at the local parish school, and then studied at the Gymnasium Alexandrinum , graduating in 1883 with a gold medal. After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of the Novorossiysk University in Odessa and graduated in 1887 with a Ph.D.
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Henry More
1614 - 1687 (73 years)
Henry More was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school. Biography Henry was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire on 12 October 1614. He was the seventh son of Alexander More, mayor of Grantham, and Anne More . Both his parents were Calvinists but he himself "could never swallow that hard doctrine."
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Carl Linnaeus
1707 - 1778 (71 years)
Carl Linnaeus , also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as .
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Swaminarayan
1781 - 1830 (49 years)
Swaminarayan , also known as Sahajanand Swami, was a yogi and ascetic, who is believed by followers to be a manifestation of Krishna, or as the highest manifestation of Purushottama, and around whom the Swaminarayan Sampradaya developed.
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Carl von Clausewitz
1780 - 1831 (51 years)
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" and political aspects of waging war. His most notable work, , though unfinished at his death, is considered a seminal treatise on military strategy and science.
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Georges Cuvier
1769 - 1832 (63 years)
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier , was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.
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Samuel Clarke
1675 - 1729 (54 years)
Samuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican cleric. He is considered the major British figure in philosophy between John Locke and George Berkeley. Clarke's altered, Nontrinitarian revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer continues to influence worship among modern Unitarians.
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Raphael von Koeber
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Raphael von Koeber was a notable Russian-German teacher of philosophy and musician at the Tokyo Imperial University in Japan. Early life Raphael von Koeber was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire, his father was ethnic German, his mother was ethnic Russian, she died when he was one year old, and he was raised by his grandmother, a daughter of a priest and tutor to Tsar Alexander II’s wife. She taught young Raphael the piano at the age of 6, and greatly influenced him in his habits and studies. As an ethnic German, he was uncomfortable at school, which he therefore attended only irregularly.
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Peter Kropotkin
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France and England. While in exile, he gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. Kropotkin returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, ...
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Maximus the Confessor
580 - 662 (82 years)
Maximus the Confessor , also spelled Maximos, otherwise known as Maximus the Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople , was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar. In his early life, Maximus was a civil servant, and an aide to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He gave up this life in the political sphere to enter the monastic life. Maximus had studied diverse schools of philosophy, and certainly what was common for his time, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Aristotle, and numerous later Platonic commentators on Aristotle and Plato, like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. When o...
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Nicholas of Autrecourt
1299 - 1369 (70 years)
Nicholas of Autrecourt was a French medieval philosopher and Scholastic theologian. Life and thought Born in Autrecourt, near Verdun, he was educated at Paris and earned bachelor's degrees in theology and law and a master's degree in arts. Nicholas is known principally for developing skepticism to extreme logical conclusions. He is sometimes considered the sole genuinely skeptic philosopher of medieval times. Nicholas founded his skeptical position on arguments that knowledge claims were not "reducible to the first principle," that is, that it was not contradictory to deny them. His views hav...
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Francisco de Vitoria
1480 - 1546 (66 years)
Francisco de Vitoria was a Spanish Roman Catholic philosopher, theologian, and jurist of Renaissance Spain. He is the founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca, noted especially for his concept of just war and international law. He has in the past been described by scholars as the "father of international law", along with Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, though some contemporary academics have suggested that such a description is anachronistic, since the concept of postmodern international law did not truly develop until much later. American jurist Arthur Nussbaum noted Vitoria's influence on international law as it pertained to the right to trade overseas.
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Hajime Tanabe
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
was a Japanese philosopher of science, particularly of mathematics and physics. His work brought together elements of Buddhism, scientific thought, Western philosophy, Christianity, and Marxism. In the postwar years, Tanabe coined the concept of metanoetics, proposing that the limits of speculative philosophy and reason must be surpassed by metanoia.
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Luis de Molina
1535 - 1600 (65 years)
Luis de Molina was a Spanish Jesuit priest and scholastic, a staunch defender of free will in the controversy over human liberty and God's grace. His theology is known as Molinism. Life From 1551 to 1562, Molina studied law in Salamanca, philosophy in Alcalá de Henares, and theology in Coimbra. After 1563, he became a professor at the University of Coimbra, and afterward taught at the University of Évora, Portugal. From this post he was called, at the end of twenty years, to the chair of moral theology in Madrid, where he died.
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Nicole Oresme
1323 - 1382 (59 years)
Nicole Oresme , also known as Nicolas Oresme, Nicholas Oresme, or Nicolas d'Oresme, was a French philosopher of the later Middle Ages. He wrote influential works on economics, mathematics, physics, astrology, astronomy, philosophy, and theology; was Bishop of Lisieux, a translator, a counselor of King Charles V of France, and one of the most original thinkers of 14th-century Europe.
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Nicomachus
301 BC - 400 BC (-99 years)
Nicomachus was the son of Aristotle. The Suda states that Nicomachus was from Stageira, was a philosopher, a pupil of Theophrastus, and, according to Aristippus, his lover. He may have written a commentary on his father's lectures in physics. Nicomachus was born to the slave Herpyllis, and his father's will commended his care as a boy to several tutors, then to his adopted son, Nicanor. Historians think the Nicomachean Ethics, a compilation of Aristotle's lecture notes, was probably named after or dedicated to Aristotle's son. However, Nicomachus is also believed to be the name of Aristotle's father.
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Benedetto Croce
1866 - 1952 (86 years)
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, historian, and politician who wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, historiography, and aesthetics. A political liberal in most regards, he formulated a distinction between liberalism and "liberism" . Croce had considerable influence on other Italian intellectuals, from Marxists to Italian fascists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile, respectively.
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Baháʼu'lláh
1817 - 1892 (75 years)
Baháʼu'lláh was the founder of the Baháʼí Faith. He was born to an aristocratic family in Persia and was exiled due to his adherence to the messianic Bábí Faith. In 1863, in Iraq, he first announced his claim to a revelation from God and spent the rest of his life in further imprisonment in the Ottoman Empire. His teachings revolved around the principles of unity and religious renewal, ranging from moral and spiritual progress to world governance.
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Evert Willem Beth
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Evert Willem Beth was a Dutch philosopher and logician, whose work principally concerned the foundations of mathematics. He was a member of the Significs Group. Biography Beth was born in Almelo, a small town in the eastern Netherlands. His father had studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam, where he had been awarded a PhD. Evert Beth studied the same subjects at Utrecht University, but then also studied philosophy and psychology. His 1935 PhD was in philosophy.
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Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger
1780 - 1819 (39 years)
Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger was a German philosopher and academic. He is known as a theorist of Romanticism, and of irony. Biography Solger's extensive studies included attending Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie [Presentation of My System of Philosophy] lectures at the University of Jena in 1800–01 and Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" lectures in Berlin 1804. In 1811, Solger became professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin
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Ge Hong
284 - 364 (80 years)
Ge Hong , courtesy name Zhichuan , was a Chinese linguist, Taoist practitioner, philosopher, physician, politician, and writer during the Eastern Jin dynasty. He was the author of Essays on Chinese Characters, the Baopuzi, the Emergency Formulae at an Elbow's Length, among others. He was the originator of first aid in traditional Chinese medicine and influenced later generations.
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Alfred Sohn-Rethel
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Alfred Sohn-Rethel was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. His main intellectual achievement was the publication of Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship between German industry and National Socialism.
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Nichiren
1222 - 1282 (60 years)
Nichiren was a Japanese Buddhist priest and philosopher of the Kamakura period. Nichiren declared that the Lotus Sutra alone contains the highest truth of Buddhist teachings suited for the Third Age of Buddhism, insisting that the Sovereign of Japan and its people should support only this form of Buddhism and eradicate all others. He advocated the repeated recitation of its title, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as the only path to Buddhahood and held that Shakyamuni Buddha and all other Buddhist deities were extraordinary manifestations of a particular Buddha-nature termed Myoho-Renge that is equally accessible to all.
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Cesare Burali-Forti
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Cesare Burali-Forti was an Italian mathematician, after whom the Burali-Forti paradox is named. Biography Burali-Forti was born in Arezzo, and was an assistant of Giuseppe Peano in Turin from 1894 to 1896, during which time he discovered a theorem which Bertrand Russell later realised contradicted a previously proved result by Georg Cantor. The contradiction came to be called the Burali-Forti paradox of Cantorian set theory. He died in Turin.
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Alois Riehl
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
Alois Adolf Riehl was an Austrian neo-Kantian philosopher. He was born in Bozen in the Austrian Empire . He was the brother of . Biography Riehl studied at Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck and Graz. He earned his PhD from Innsbruck in 1868. He habilitated at Graz at 1870.
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Michael of Ephesus
1070 - 1129 (59 years)
Michael of Ephesus or Michael Ephesius wrote important commentaries on Aristotle, including the first full commentary on the Sophistical Refutations, which established the regular study of that text.
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Chandrakirti
600 - 650 (50 years)
Chandrakirti or "Chandra" was a Buddhist scholar of the Madhyamaka school and a noted commentator on the works of Nagarjuna and those of his main disciple, Aryadeva. He wrote two influential works on madhyamaka, the Prasannapadā and the Madhyamakāvatāra.
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Georges Politzer
1903 - 1942 (39 years)
Georges Politzer was a French philosopher and Marxist theoretician of Hungarian Jewish origin, affectionately referred to by some as the "red-headed philosopher" . He was a native of Oradea, a city in present-day Romania . He was murdered in the Holocaust.
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Gustave Courbet
1819 - 1877 (58 years)
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.
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Chaïm Perelman
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique , with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver .
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Diogenes of Apollonia
460 BC - 500 BC (-40 years)
Diogenes of Apollonia was an ancient Greek philosopher, and was a native of the Milesian colony Apollonia in Thrace. He lived for some time in Athens. He believed air to be the one source of all being from which all other substances were derived, and, as a primal force, to be both divine and intelligent. He also wrote a description of the organization of blood vessels in the human body. His ideas were parodied by the dramatist Aristophanes, and may have influenced the Orphic philosophical commentary preserved in the Derveni papyrus. His philosophical work has not survived in a complete form,...
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John Toland
1670 - 1722 (52 years)
John Toland was an Irish rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. Born in Ireland, he was educated at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leiden and Oxford and was influenced by the philosophy of John Locke.
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Sengzhao
384 - 414 (30 years)
Sengzhao was a Chinese Buddhist philosopher from Later Qin. Born to a poor family in Jingzhao, he acquired literary skills, apparently including the capacity to read Pali, and became a scribe. This exposed him to a variety of uncommon documents. He was influenced by Taoists, Laozi and Zhuangzi, and although we are told he enjoyed Lao Tzu’s Daodejing , he was overjoyed when he discovered the Vimalakirti Sutra. This encounter transformed his life and he became a Buddhist. He was known as being among the ablest of the disciples of Kumārajīva.
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Johannes Volkelt
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Johannes Immanuel Volkelt was a German philosopher. Biography He was educated at Vienna, Jena, and Leipzig. He became professor of philosophy at Basel in 1883 and at Würzburg in 1889, and in 1894 was made professor of philosophy and pedagogy in Leipzig.
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Jean Cavaillès
1903 - 1944 (41 years)
Jean Cavaillès was a French philosopher and logician who specialized in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. He took part in the French Resistance within the Libération movement and was arrested by the Gestapo on 17 February 1944 and shot on 4 April 1944.
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Albert of Saxony
1316 - 1390 (74 years)
Albert of Saxony was a German philosopher and mathematician known for his contributions to logic and physics. He was bishop of Halberstadt from 1366 until his death. Life Albert was born at Rickensdorf near Helmstedt, the son of a farmer in a small village; but because of his talent, he was sent to study at the University of Prague and the University of Paris.
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Gilbert Simondon
1924 - 1989 (65 years)
Gilbert Simondon was a French philosopher best known for his theory of individuation, a major source of inspiration for Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Bernard Stiegler. Career Born in Saint-Étienne, Simondon was a student of philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem, philosopher Martial Guéroult, and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. He defended his doctoral dissertations in 1958 at the University of Paris. His main thesis, L'individuation à la lumière des notions de Forme et d'Information , was published in two parts, the fi...
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Helena Roerich
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Helena Ivanovna Roerich was a Russian theosophist, writer, and public figure. In the early 20th century, she created, in cooperation with the Teachers of the East, a philosophic teaching of Living Ethics . She was an organizer and participant of cultural activity in the U.S., conducted under the guidance of her husband, Nicholas Roerich. Along with her husband, she took part in expeditions of hard-to-reach and little-investigated regions of Central Asia. She was an Honorary President-Founder of the Institute of Himalayan Studies "Urusvati" in India and co-author of the idea of the International Treaty for Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historical Monuments .
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Benjamin Constant
1767 - 1830 (63 years)
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque , or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Franco-Swiss political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion. A committed republican from 1795, he backed the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor and the following one on 18 Brumaire . During the Consulat, in 1800 he became the leader of the Liberal Opposition. Having upset Napoleon and left France to go to Switzerland then to the Kingdom of Saxony, Constant nonetheless sided with him during the Hundred Days and became politically active again during the French Restoration. He was elected Député in 1818 and remained in post until his death in 1830.
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Salomon Maimon
1754 - 1800 (46 years)
Salomon Maimon was a philosopher born of Lithuanian Jewish parentage in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, present-day Belarus. Some of his work was written in the German language. Biography Early years Salomon Maimon was born Shlomo ben Joshua in the town of Zhukov Borok near Mir in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , where his grandfather leased an estate from a Prince Karol Stanisław "Panie Kochanku" Radziwiłł. He was taught Torah and Talmud, first by his father, and later by instructors in Mir. He was recognized as a prodigy in Talmudic studies. His parents fell on hard times, and betrothed him to two separate girls in order to take advantage of their dowries, leading to a bitter rivalry.
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Sergei Rubinstein
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.
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Vladimir Bazarov
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, journalist, philosopher, and economist. Born as Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev, Bazarov is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of economic planning in the Soviet Union. He was one of the Russian Machists, as Lenin dubbed the term, and was a close friend to Alexander Bogdanov.
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Henri Gouhier
1898 - 1994 (96 years)
Henri Gouhier was a French philosopher, a historian of philosophy, and a literary critic. Biography Born in Auxerre, Yonne, Gouhier's studies led to a doctorate in 1926. He served as the Professor of philosophy at a lycée in Troyes from 1925 to 1928. Then he taught at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lille between 1929 and 1940; subsequently, he taught at the University of Bordeaux during 1940 and 1941.
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Karl Haushofer
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Karl Ernst Haushofer was a German general, professor, geographer, and diplomat. Haushofer's concept of Geopolitik influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler. Rudolf Hess was also a student of Haushofer, and during Hess and Hitler's incarceration by the Weimar Republic after the Beer Hall Putsch, Haushofer visited Landsberg prison to teach and mentor both Hess and Hitler. Haushofer also coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler also used to justify both crimes against peace and genocide. At the same time, however, Gen. Haushofer's half-Jewish wife and their children were categorized as Mischlinge under the Nuremberg Laws.
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Ahmad Sirhindi
1564 - 1624 (60 years)
Aḥmad al-Fārūqī al-Sirhindī , also known as Imam Rabbani and Mujadid Alf-e-Sani , was an Indian Islamic scholar, Hanafi jurist, and member of the Naqshbandī Sufi order. He has been described by some followers as a Mujaddid, meaning a “reviver", for his work in rejuvenating Islam and opposing Din-i Ilahi and other policies of Mughal emperor Akbar. While early South Asian scholarship credited him for contributing to conservative trends in Indian Islam, more recent works, notably by ter Haar, Friedman, and Buehler, have pointed to Sirhindi's significant contributions to Sufi epistemology and prac...
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René Magritte
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
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Romano Guardini
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Romano Guardini was an Italian, naturalized German Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian. Life Romano Michele Antonio Maria Guardini was born in Verona in 1885 and was baptized in the Church of San Nicolò all'Arena. His father Romano Tullo was a poultry wholesaler. Guardini had three younger brothers. The family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life. He attended the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium. Guardini wrote that as a young man he was “always anxious and very scrupulous.”
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