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,
#15301
Martin Honecker
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
Martin Honecker was a German philosopher and psychologist. Biography The son of a businessman, he studied at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn and the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, with, among others, Adolf Dyroff. In 1914 Honecker graduated with a doctorate in the legal philosophy of Alessandro Turamini. He fought in World War I, but was captured by the French and interned in Switzerland.
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Pantaleo Carabellese
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Pantaleo Carabellese was an Italian philosopher. Biography Graduated from the University of Naples with a "laurea" in history and again from the University of Rome in philosophy , Carabellese taught philosophy in Palermo, Sicily and in Rome , marrying in 1936. Having carried out a rigorous critique of Cartesianism , Carabellese completed critical studies of authors including Immanuel Kant and Antonio Rosmini . Carabellese is further known for his "critical ontology" , where Being is not the mere abstract object but the inherent and irreducible foundation of consciousness, and thus the "bei...
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Feliks Koneczny
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
Feliks Karol Koneczny was a Polish historian, theatrical critic, librarian, journalist and social philosopher. He founded the original system of the comparative science of civilizations. Biography Koneczny was born in Kraków on 1 November 1862. His father was of Moravian origin. Koneczny's mother abandoned him at a young age while his father studied, although he had to work at a train station due to being expelled from the Jagiellonian University for partaking in the Kraków uprising.
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Antoni Lange
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Antoni Lange was a Polish poet, philosopher, polyglot , writer, novelist, science-writer, reporter and translator. A representative of Polish Parnassianism and symbolism, he is also regarded as belonging to the Decadent movement. He was an expert on Romanticism, French literature and a popularizer of Eastern cultures. His most popular novel is Miranda.
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Ernst Bergmann
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Ernst Bergmann was a German philosopher. In the early 1930s, he was known as the most famous German opponent of patriarchy, and after 1933, Bergmann became a leading proponent of a new pagan German religion .
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Hendrik G. Stoker
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Hendrik Gerhardus Stoker , born in Johannesburg, South Africa, was a leading Calvinist philosopher who taught at Potchefstroom. He studied there and the University of Cologne, and he completed his doctoral dissertation on "Nature and the forms of conscience" under Max Scheler.
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Célestin Bouglé
1870 - 1940 (70 years)
Célestin Charles Alfred Bouglé was a French philosopher known for his role as one of Émile Durkheim's collaborators and a member of the L'Année Sociologique. Life Bouglé was born in Saint-Brieuc, Côtes-du-Nord. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1890 and aggregated in philosophy in 1893. He was, along with Xavier Léon, Élie Halévy, Léon Brunschvicg and Dominique Parodi, one of the founding members of the journal Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. In 1896 he joined with Durkheim and became one of the first editors of the Année Sociologique. He received his doctorate in 1899.
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Hans Scholl
1918 - 1943 (25 years)
Hans Fritz Scholl was, along with Alexander Schmorell, one of the two founding members of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany. The principal author of the resistance movement's literature, he was found guilty of high treason for distributing anti-Nazi material and was executed by the Nazi regime in 1943 during World War II.
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Elli Lambridi
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Elli Lambridi , also spelled Helle Lampride or Helle Lambridis, was a Greek philosopher who wrote extensively in the fields of ancient and modern philosophy. She also wrote on archaeology, wrote fiction and produced translations. She was also an educator and was active in Greek left-wing politics and feminism from an early age. It has been claimed that her prominence in twentieth-century Greek philosophy has "only recently become widely known". Her life and work was celebrated on 8 March 2017 at a talks event in the old Senate chamber of the Parliament of Greece in Athens.
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Edward Jenner
1749 - 1823 (74 years)
Edward Jenner was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae , the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
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William S. Sahakian
1922 - 1986 (64 years)
William S. Sahakian was an Armenian-American philosopher. Receiving his BS at Northeastern University with a major in psychology and sociology in 1944, Sahakian later completed his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University and at Boston University. In 1951, Sahakian received his Ph.D. degree from Boston University. Sahakian's dissertation was entitled, The emotive ethic in contemporary British and American philosophy. Sahakian also received a Master of Divinity degree at Boston University in 1947.
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Harriet Taylor Mill
1807 - 1858 (51 years)
Harriet Taylor Mill was an English philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her extant corpus of writing can be found in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Several pieces can also be found in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, especially volume XXI.
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John Addison Porter
1822 - 1866 (44 years)
John Addison Porter was an American professor of chemistry and physician. He is the namesake of the John Addison Porter Prize and was a founder of the Scroll and Key senior society of Yale University.
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Moderatus of Gades
50 - 100 (50 years)
Moderatus of Gades was a Greek philosopher of the Neopythagorean school, who lived in the 1st century AD. He was a contemporary of Apollonius of Tyana. He wrote a great work on the doctrines of the Pythagoreans, and tried to show that the successors of Pythagoras had made no additions to the views of their founder, but had merely borrowed and altered the phraseology.
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Dicaearchus
350 BC - 280 BC (70 years)
Dicaearchus of Messana , also written Dikaiarchos , was a Greek philosopher, geographer and author. Dicaearchus was a student of Aristotle in the Lyceum. Very little of his work remains extant. He wrote on geography and the history of Greece, of which his most important work was his Life of Greece. Although modern scholars often consider him a pioneer in the field of cartography, this is based on a misinterpretation of a reference in Cicero to Dicaearchus' tabulae, which does not refer to any maps made by Dicaearchus but is a pun on account books and refers to Dicaearchus' Descent into the Sanctuary of Trophonius.
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Dionysodorus
450 BC - Present (2476 years)
Dionysodorus was an ancient Greek sophistic philosopher and teacher of martial arts, generalship, and oration. Closely associated with his brother and fellow sophist Euthydemus, he is depicted in the writing of Plato and Xenophon.
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Francis Bowen
1811 - 1890 (79 years)
Francis Bowen was an American philosopher, writer, and educationalist. Biography He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He was educated at Mayhew School, Boston, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University, graduating from the latter in 1833. While attending Harvard, he taught school at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and Concord, Lexington and Northborough, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard, he taught for two years at Phillips Exeter Academy, returning to Harvard from 1835 to 1839 to tutor in Greek and teach intellectual philosophy and political economy. In 1839 he went to Europe, and, while living in Paris, met Sismondi, de Gerando, and other scholars.
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Gongsun Long
325 BC - 250 BC (75 years)
Gongsun Long , courtesy name Zibing , was a Chinese philosopher and writer who was a member of the School of Names of ancient Chinese philosophy. He also ran a school and enjoyed the support of rulers, and advocated peaceful means of resolving disputes in contrast to the wars which were common in the Warring States period. However, little is known about the particulars of his life, and furthermore many of his writings have been lost. All of his essays—fourteen originally but only six extant—are included in the anthology the Gongsun Longzi .
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Demonax
200 - 170 (-30 years)
Demonax was a Greek Cynic philosopher. Born in Cyprus, he moved to Athens, where his wisdom, and his skill in solving disputes, earned him the admiration of the citizens. He taught Lucian, who wrote a Life of Demonax in praise of his teacher. When he died he received a magnificent public funeral.
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Karl Ewald Hasse
1810 - 1902 (92 years)
Karl Ewald Hasse was a German physician and professor of special pathology, born in Dresden. He was the son of historian Friedrich Christian August Hasse . Biography Hasse studied medicine at the medical-surgical academy in Dresden and at University of Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1833. Later, he continued his education in Paris and Vienna, and subsequently returned to Leipzig, where in 1836 he received his habilitation. In 1839 he became an associate professor of pathological anatomy in Leipzig, and in 1844 relocated to Zürich, where he was appointed medical director of the cantonal hos...
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Rodrigo de Arriaga
1592 - 1667 (75 years)
Rodrigo de Arriaga was a Spanish philosopher, theologian and Jesuit. He is known as one of the foremost Spanish Jesuits of his day and as a leading representative of post-Suárezian baroque Jesuit nominalism. Accordig to Richard Popkin, Arriaga was “the last of the great Spanish Scholastics”.
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Walter Johannes Stein
1891 - 1957 (66 years)
Walter Johannes Stein was an Austrian philosopher, Waldorf school teacher, Grail researcher, and one of the pioneers of anthroposophy. Biography Of Jewish descent, Stein studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Vienna University, before completing a doctorate in philosophy at the end of the First World War, having continued work on it throughout his service in an artillery unit in the war. He became a personal student of Rudolf Steiner from about the age of 21, and enjoyed the unofficial supervision of Steiner while writing his dissertation. Broadly speaking, the dissertation was an at...
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Adolf Dygasiński
1839 - 1902 (63 years)
Adolf Dygasiński was a Polish novelist, publicist and educator. In Polish literature, he was one of the leading representatives of Naturalism. Life During his literary career, Dygasiński wrote forty-two short stories and novels. Since 1884 his works were being published in book-form and enjoyed considerable success. They were translated into Russian and German. In 1891, Dygasiński went on a trip to Brazil on a trail of Polish emigrants from Partitioned Poland. He produced a series of letters describing the tragic fate of Polish émigrés in South America. In the following years Dygasiński maintained a position of a tutor and coach for numerous wealthy landowning families.
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Anne Conway
1631 - 1679 (48 years)
Anne Conway was an English philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Gottfried Leibniz. Conway's thought is a deeply original form of rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns that lead some to think of it as unique among seventeenth-century systems. Hugh Trevor-Roper called her "England's greatest female philosopher."
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Johannes Rehmke
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Johannes Rehmke was a German philosopher and since 1885 professor at Greifswald University, later also provost of this university. He offered sharp criticisms of Immanuel Kant's approach to epistemology. In his article "The Conquest of Subjectivism," Paul Ferdinand Linke pointed out that it was Rehmke who first made a courageous break from subjectivism, which was the pervasive philosophical paradigm in late modern German philosophy.
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Ernest Radlov
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Ernest Leopoldovich Radlov or Ernst Radlow was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher and historian of philosophy of German origin. Co-founder of the St. Petersburg Philosophical Society, director of the Public Library in Petrograd .
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Roderick Firth
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Roderick Firth was an American philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1953 until his death. Education Firth earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1943. His thesis was entitled Sense-Data and the Principle of Reduction.
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880 - 1938 (58 years)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.
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Heraclides Ponticus
385 BC - 322 BC (63 years)
Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was born in Heraclea Pontica, now Karadeniz Ereğli, Turkey, and migrated to Athens. He is best remembered for proposing that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. He is also hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory; although this is disputed.
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Carl Wernicke
1848 - 1905 (57 years)
Carl Wernicke was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also the study of receptive aphasia, both of which are commonly associated with Wernicke's name and referred to as Wernicke encephalopathy and Wernicke's aphasia, respectively. His research, along with that of Paul Broca, led to groundbreaking realizations of the localization of brain function, specifically in speech. As such, Wernicke's area has been named after the scientist.
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Kasper Niesiecki
1682 - 1744 (62 years)
Kasper Niesiecki , also known as Kacper Niesiecki, was a Polish heraldist, Jesuit, lexicographer, writer, theologian and preacher. Biography Niesiecki was born in Greater Poland to a burgher family. In 1699 he began training as a Jesuit in Kraków. From 1701 to 1704 he studied philosophy in Lublin, earning a master's degree. In 1707 Niesiecki started his studies in theology at the Jagiellonian University, graduating in 1711. He undertook further study in Lutsk, Krosno, Bydgoszcz, Chojnice and Kalisz.
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Michael Servetus
1511 - 1553 (42 years)
Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio . He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
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Arkady Timiryasev
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Arkady Klimentievich Timiryazev was a Russian Marxist physicist and philosopher. Biography Arkady was the son of the prominent agronomist and biologist Kliment Timiryazev. He was closely associated with Maxim Gorky. Although he was deemed a professor of physics at Moscow State University, he was derided as the "monument's son" by people who questioned his competence. He was an ardent defender of the classical physics propounded by Isaac Newton and was particularly noted for his vitriolic denunciations of Albert Einstein. He used his Bolshevik ideology to attack other Soviet physicists such as Abram Ioffe and Sergei Vavilov.
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Adalbert Stifter
1805 - 1868 (63 years)
Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing and has long been popular in the German-speaking world, while remaining almost entirely unknown to English readers.
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Karl Friedrich Schinkel
1781 - 1841 (60 years)
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a Prussian architect, city planner and painter who also designed furniture and stage sets. Schinkel was one of the most prominent architects of Germany and designed both Neoclassical and neo-Gothic buildings. His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin.
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Nicolaus of Damascus
64 BC - 4 (68 years)
Nicolaus of Damascus was a Greek historian and philosopher who lived during the Augustan age of the Roman Empire. His name is derived from that of his birthplace, Damascus. His output was vast, but is nearly all lost. His chief work was a universal history in 144 books. There exist considerable remains of two works of his old age; a life of Augustus, and an autobiography. He also wrote a life of Herod, some philosophical works, and some tragedies and comedies.
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Pierre Laffitte
1823 - 1903 (80 years)
Pierre Laffitte was a French positivist philosopher. Laffitte was born at Béguey, Gironde. Residing at Paris as a teacher of mathematics, he became a disciple of Auguste Comte, who appointed him his literary executor. On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte's death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhered to Émile Littré, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the philosophy of science of Comte's earlier period. From 1853 Laffitte delivered Positivist lectures in the room formerly occupied by Comte in the rue Monsieur le Prince.
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Sebastiano Serlio
1475 - 1554 (79 years)
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva .
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Maulana Azad
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al-Hussaini Azad was an Indian independence activist, writer and a senior leader of the Indian National Congress. Following India's independence, he became the First Minister of Education in the Indian government. He is commonly remembered as Maulana Azad; the word Maulana is an honorific meaning 'Our Master' and he had adopted Azad as his pen name. His contribution to establishing the education foundation in India is recognised by celebrating his birthday as National Education Day across India.
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Irwin Edman
1896 - 1954 (58 years)
Irwin Edman was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy. Biography Irwin Edman was born in New York City to Jewish parents. He grew up in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, adjacent to Columbia University, with which he was to be affiliated his entire adult life. Edman spent his high-school years at Townsend Harris Hall, a New York high school for superior pupils. He then attended Columbia University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and earned his bachelor's degree in 1917 and his Ph.D. in 1920. During his student years at Columbia he was a member of the Boar's Head Society.
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Maurice de Vlaminck
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense colour. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905.
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Haribhadra
800 - 850 (50 years)
Haribhadra, also known as Shizi Xian or Sengge Zangpo was an 8th-century CE Buddhist philosopher, and a disciple of Śāntarakṣita, an early Indian Buddhist missionary to Tibet. He was one of the founding monks of the Vikramashila monastery. Haribhadra's commentary on the Abhisamayalankara was one of the most influential of the twenty-one Indian commentaries on that text, perhaps because of its author's status as Shantarakshita's student. Like his master, Haribhadra is retrospectively considered by Tibetan doxographical tradition to represent the Yogācāra-Svatantrika-Mādhyamaka school.
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Apollodorus of Seleucia
150 BC - Present (2176 years)
Apollodorus of Seleucia , or Apollodorus Ephillus, was a Stoic philosopher, and a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon. Apollodorus is famous for describing Cynicismism as "the short path to virtue", and he may have been the first Stoic after the time of Zeno and Aristo to systematically attempt to reconcile Stoicism with Cynicism. The lengthy account of Cynicism given by Diogenes Laërtius, which is presented from a Stoic point of view, may be derived from Apollodorus, and it is possible that he was the first Stoic to promote the idea of a line of Cynic succession from Socrates to Zeno .
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Pope Alexander VI
1431 - 1503 (72 years)
Pope Alexander VI was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 11 August 1492 until his death in 1503. Born into the prominent Borgia family in Xàtiva under the Crown of Aragon , Rodrigo studied law at the University of Bologna. He was ordained deacon and made a cardinal in 1456 after the election of his uncle as Pope Callixtus III, and a year later he became vice-chancellor of the Catholic Church. He proceeded to serve in the Curia under the next four popes, acquiring significant influence and wealth in the process. In 1492, Rodrigo was elected pope, taking the name Ale...
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Edward Kelley
1555 - 1590 (35 years)
Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot , was an English Renaissance occultist and scryer. He is known for working with John Dee in his magical investigations. Besides the professed ability to see spirits or angels in a "shew-stone" or mirror, which John Dee so valued, Kelley also said that he possessed the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, the goal of alchemy, as well as the philosopher's stone itself.
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John Grierson
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
John Grierson was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert J. Flaherty's Moana.
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Thomas Spencer Baynes
1823 - 1887 (64 years)
Thomas Spencer Baynes was an English philosopher. Life Baynes was born in Wellington, Somerset to a Baptist minister. He intended to study for Baptist ministry, and was at a theological seminary at Bath with that view but, being strongly attracted to philosophical studies, left it and went to Edinburgh, where he became the favourite pupil of Sir William Hamilton, of whose philosophical system he continued an adherent.
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Maitreya-nātha
270 - 350 (80 years)
Maitreya-nātha is a name whose use was pioneered by Buddhist scholars Erich Frauwallner, Giuseppe Tucci, and Hakuju Ui to distinguish one of the three founders of the Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, along with Asanga and Vasubandhu. Some scholars believe this Maitreya to be a historical person in India. The traditions themselves have held that it is referring to Maitreya, the future buddha.
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Petrus de Ibernia
1101 - 1201 (100 years)
Petrus de Ibernia, also known as Peter of Ireland, was a 13th-century writer and lecturer who is believed to have taught logic and natural philosophy to Thomas Aquinas. Peter of Ireland is mentioned by the Aquinas' biographers Wilhelm of Tocco and Peter Calo.
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