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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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).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15401
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1846 - 1926 (80 years)
Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life", after he had been nominated by a member of the Swedish Academy.
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Ogyū Sorai
1666 - 1728 (62 years)
Ogyū Sorai, pen name Butsu Sorai, was a Japanese historian, philologist, philosopher, and translator. He has been described as the most influential such scholar during the Edo period Japan. His primary area of study was in applying the teachings of Confucianism to government and social order. He responded to contemporary economic and political failings of the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as the culture of mercantilism and the dominance of old institutions that had become weak with extravagance. Sorai rejected the moralism of Neo-Confucianism and instead looked to the ancient works. He argue...
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Max Bense
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Max Bense was a German philosopher, writer, and publicist, known for his work in philosophy of science, logic, aesthetics, and semiotics. His thoughts combine natural sciences, art, and philosophy under a collective perspective and follow a definition of reality, which – under the term existential rationalism – is able to remove the separation between humanities and natural sciences.
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Karl Groos
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Karl Groos was a German philosopher and psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play. His 1898 book on The Play of Animals suggested that play is a preparation for later life.
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Leo the Mathematician
790 - 900 (110 years)
Leo the Mathematician, the Grammarian or the Philosopher was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century". He was archbishop of Thessalonica and later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic.
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Owen Barfield
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Arthur Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings. Life Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth and Arthur Edward Barfield . He had three elder siblings: Diana , Barbara , and Harry . He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America.
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John Everett Millais
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street . Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophel...
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Vinoba Bhave
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Vinayak Narahari Bhave, also known as Vinoba Bhave , was an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights. Often called Acharya , he is best known for the Bhoodan Movement. He is considered as National Teacher of India and the spiritual successor of Mahatma Gandhi. He was an eminent philosopher. The Gita has been translated into the Marathi language by him with the title Geetai .
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Heinrich Gomperz
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Heinrich Gomperz was an Austrian philosopher. He was a son of Theodor Gomperz. He was a patient of Sigmund Freud and was married to Ada Stepnitz. Works , 1898., 1907.Die indische Theosophie, 1925., 2 Vols., 1905–1908., 1915.Über Sinn und Sinngebilde, Erklären und Verstehen, 1929., 1953.
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James Frederick Ferrier
1808 - 1864 (56 years)
James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer and philosopher. He introduced the word epistemology in philosophical English, as well as coining agnoiology for the study of ignorance. Education and early writings Ferrier was born at 15 Heriot Row in Edinburgh, the son of John Ferrier, writer to the signet. He was educated at the Royal High School, the University of Edinburgh and Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently, his metaphysical tastes having been fostered by his intimate friend, Sir William Hamilton, spent some time at Heidelberg studying German philosophy.
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Euclid of Megara
436 BC - 365 BC (71 years)
Euclid of Megara was a Greek Socratic philosopher who founded the Megarian school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates in the late 5th century BC, and was present at his death. He held the supreme good to be one, eternal and unchangeable, and denied the existence of anything contrary to the good. Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter's Elements.
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Dagobert D. Runes
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Dagobert David Runes was an immigrant publisher in the US, a philosopher and author. Biography Runes was born in Zastavna, Bukovina, Austro-Hungary . He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1924, under the direction of Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle of positivist philosophers.
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Edgar Cayce
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Edgar Cayce was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to speak from his higher self while in a trance-like state. His words were recorded by his friend, Al Layne; his wife, Gertrude Evans, and later by his secretary, Gladys Davis Turner. During the sessions, Cayce would answer questions on a variety of subjects such as healing, reincarnation, dreams, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition, Atlantis, and future events. Cayce, a devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher, said that his readings came from his subconscious mind exploring the dream realm, where he said all minds were timelessly connected.
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John Lewis
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
John Lewis was a British Unitarian minister and Marxist philosopher and author of many works on philosophy, anthropology, and religion. Lewis's father, a successful builder and architect, came from a Welsh farming family, and was a very devout Methodist. Young Lewis's social and political views clashed with those of his father. Their quarrels eventually led to his father disinheriting him.
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Francis Ellingwood Abbot
1836 - 1903 (67 years)
Francis Ellingwood Abbot was an American philosopher and theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method. His lifelong romance with his wife Katharine Fearing Loring forms the subject of If Ever Two Were One, a collection of his correspondence and diary entries.
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Dietrich von Hildebrand
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer. Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII. He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Pope John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicist...
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Stéphane Lupasco
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Stéphane Lupasco was a Romanian philosopher who developed non-Aristotelian logic. Early years Stéphane Lupasco was born in Bucharest on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavian aristocracy. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck, who established the family in Paris in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon, he studied philosophy, biology and physics at the Sorbonne and, briefly, law. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20s and 30s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in...
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D. Elton Trueblood
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
David Elton Trueblood , who was usually known as "Elton Trueblood" or "D. Elton Trueblood", was a noted 20th-century American Quaker author and theologian, former chaplain both to Harvard and Stanford universities.
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Bernardino Telesio
1509 - 1588 (79 years)
Bernardino Telesio was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist. While his natural theories were later disproven, his emphasis on observation made him the "first of the moderns" who eventually developed the scientific method.
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Émile Meyerson
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Émile Meyerson was a Polish-born French epistemologist, chemist, and philosopher of science. Meyerson was born in Lublin, Poland. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 74. Biography Meyerson was educated at the University of Heidelberg and studied chemistry under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1882 Meyerson settled in Paris. He served as foreign editor of the Havas news agency, and later as the director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. He became a naturalized French citizen after World War I.
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Carlos Vaz Ferreira
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Carlos Vaz Ferreira was a Uruguayan philosopher, lawyer, writer, and academic. Influenced by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, he is notable for introducing liberal, pluralistic political values and pragmatic philosophical concepts to South American society.
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Théodore Simon Jouffroy
1796 - 1842 (46 years)
Théodore Simon Jouffroy , aka Simon Joseph Théodore Jouffroy, was a French philosopher. Biography He was born at Les Pontets, Franche-Comté, département of Doubs. In his tenth year, his father, a tax-gatherer, sent him to an uncle at Pontarlier, under whom he began his classical studies. At Dijon his compositions attracted the attention of an inspector, who had him placed in the normal school, Paris. There he came under the influence of Victor Cousin, and in 1817 he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the normal and Bourbon schools.
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Aryadeva
200 - 250 (50 years)
Āryadeva , was a Mahayana Buddhist monk, a disciple of Nagarjuna and a Madhyamaka philosopher. Most sources agree that he was from "Siṃhala", which some scholars identify with Sri Lanka. After Nagarjuna, he is considered to be the next most important figure of the Indian Madhyamaka school.
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Jacob Moleschott
1822 - 1893 (71 years)
Jacob Moleschott was a Dutch physiologist and writer on dietetics. He is known for his philosophical views in regard to scientific materialism. He was a member of German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .
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John Playfair
1748 - 1819 (71 years)
John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth , which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
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F. C. S. Schiller
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, FBA , usually cited as F. C. S. Schiller, was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein , Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California. In his lifetime he was well known as a philosopher; after his death, his work was largely forgotten.
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Louis Lavelle
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Louis Lavelle was a French philosopher, considered one of the greatest French metaphysicians of the twentieth century. His magnum opus, La Dialectique de l'éternel présent , is a systematic metaphysical work. Lavelle's other principal works include De l'Être , De l'Acte , Du Temps et de l'Eternité , and De l'Âme Humaine .
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Nicholas Murray Butler
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Nicholas Murray Butler was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. Butler was president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the deceased James S. Sherman's replacement as William Howard Taft’s running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election. He became so well known and respected that The New York Times printed his Christmas greeting to the nation many years during the 1920s and 1930s.
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Christoph von Sigwart
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Christoph von Sigwart was a German philosopher and logician. He was the son of philosopher Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart . Life After a course of philosophy and theology, Sigwart became professor at Blaubeuren , and eventually at Tübingen, in 1865.
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Cooper Harold Langford
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
Cooper Harold Langford was an American analytic philosopher and mathematical logician who co-authored the book Symbolic Logic with C. I. Lewis. He is also known for introducing the Langford–Moore paradox.
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Dominique Dubarle
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Dominique Dubarle was a French Dominican friar and religious philosopher, a professor at the Saulchoir. He was dean of the faculty of philosophy of the Catholic Institute of Paris from 1967 to 1973 and was an expert at the Second Vatican Council .
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Mani
216 - 274 (58 years)
Mani was an Iranian prophet and the founder of Manichaeism, a religion most prevalent in late antiquity. Mani was born in or near Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, at the time part of the Parthian Empire. Seven of his major works were written in Syriac, and the eighth, dedicated to the Sasanian emperor Shapur I, was written in Middle Persian. He died in Gundeshapur.
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Hui Shi
370 BC - 310 BC (60 years)
Hui Shi , or Huizi , was a Chinese philosopher during the Warring States period. A representative of the School of Names , he is famous for ten paradoxes about the relativity of time and space, for instance, "I set off for Yue today and came there yesterday." Said to have written a code of laws, Hui was a prime minister in the state of Wei.
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Maurice Blondel
1861 - 1949 (88 years)
Maurice Blondel was a French philosopher, whose most influential works, notably L'Action, aimed at establishing the correct relationship between autonomous philosophical reasoning and Christian belief.
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Abel Rey
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Abel Rey was a French philosopher and historian of science. Abel Rey succeeded Gaston Milhaud as professor of the history of philosophy in its relation to science at the Sorbonne, and established the Institut d'histoire des sciences et des techniques to encourage cooperation between the sciences and humanities. It has been argued that Rey influenced Philipp Frank and the formation of the Vienna Circle. Rey's history of science was wide, including sciences from physics to sociology, and deep, ranging from antiquity to the present; moreover, it included the study of culture's influence on the ...
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Anton Marty
1847 - 1914 (67 years)
Martin Anton Maurus Marty was a Swiss-born Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest. He specialized in philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology and ontology. Biography Marty was a student and follower of Franz Brentano, his teacher at the University of Würzburg in 1868–70. He was ordained in 1870, but resigned from the priesthood in 1872.
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Eino Kaila
1890 - 1958 (68 years)
Eino Sakari Kaila was a Finnish philosopher, critic and teacher. He worked in numerous fields including psychology , physics and theater, and attempted to find unifying principles behind various branches of human and natural sciences.
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Krastyo Krastev
1866 - 1919 (53 years)
Krastyo Kotev Krastev , popularly known as Dr. Krastev , was a Bulgarian writer, translator, philosopher and public figure most notable as Bulgaria's first professional literary critic. Krastev was an influential member of the modernist Misal circle, a leading collaboration of writers that aimed to revolutionize Bulgarian literature and introduce the modern ideas of European literature and philosophy to the country.
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Otto Liebmann
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Otto Liebmann was a German neo-Kantian philosopher. Biography He was born at Löwenberg, Silesia, into a Jewish family, and educated at Leipzig and Halle. He was made professor at Strassburg and went to Jena in 1882. He died at Jena. The mathematician Heinrich Liebmann was his son.
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Karl Ludwig Michelet
1801 - 1893 (92 years)
Karl Ludwig Michelet was a German philosopher. He was born and died in Berlin. Biography Michelet studied at the grammar school and at Humboldt University in his native town, took his degree as doctor of philosophy in 1824, and became professor in 1829, a post which he retained till his death.
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Susan Stebbing
1885 - 1943 (58 years)
Lizzie Susan Stebbing was a British philosopher. She belonged to the 1930s generation of analytic philosophy, and was a founder in 1933 of the journal Analysis. Stebbing was the first woman to hold a philosophy chair in the United Kingdom, as well as the first female President of Humanists UK.
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Frank Meyer
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Frank Straus Meyer was an American philosopher and political activist best known for his theory of "fusionism" – a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalism into a philosophical synthesis which is posited as the definition of modern American conservatism. Meyer's philosophy was presented in two books, primarily In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo and also in a collection of his essays, The Conservative Mainstream . Fusionism has been summed up by E. J. Dionne, Jr. as "utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends."
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Zou Yan
305 BC - 240 BC (65 years)
Zou Yan was a Chinese Warring States-era philosopher and spiritual writer best known as the representative thinker of the Yin and Yang School during the Hundred Schools of Thought era in Chinese philosophy.
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Diogenes of Oenoanda
200 - 200 (0 years)
Diogenes of Oenoanda was an Epicurean Greek from the 2nd century AD who carved a summary of the philosophy of Epicurus onto a portico wall in the ancient Greek city of Oenoanda in Lycia . The surviving fragments of the wall, originally extended about 80 meters, form an important source of Epicurean philosophy. The inscription, written in Greek, sets out Epicurus' teachings on physics, epistemology, and ethics. It was originally about 25,000 words long and filled 260 square meters of wall space. Less than a third of it has been recovered.
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Theodor Lessing
1872 - 1933 (61 years)
Karl Theodor Richard Lessing was a German Jewish philosopher. He is known for opposing the rise of Hindenburg as president of the Weimar Republic and for his classic on Jewish self-hatred , a book which he wrote in 1930, three years before Adolf Hitler came to power, in which he tried to explain the phenomenon of Jewish intellectuals who incited antisemitism against the Jewish people and who regarded Judaism as the source of evil in the world.
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Alexander of Hales
1175 - 1245 (70 years)
Alexander of Hales , also called Doctor Irrefragibilis and Theologorum Monarcha, was a Franciscan friar, theologian and philosopher important in the development of scholasticism. Life Alexander was born at Hales, Shropshire , England, between 1180 and 1186. He came from a rather wealthy country family. He studied at the University of Paris and became a master of arts sometime before 1210. He began to read theology in 1212 or 1213, and became a regent master in 1220 or 1221. He introduced the Sentences of Peter Lombard as the basic textbook for the study of theology. During the University stri...
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Gustavo Bontadini
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Gustavo Bontadini was an Italian philosopher, writer, and a teacher. He was born in Milan and died in 1990, aged 87. Bontadini was also an influential representative known for Neo-Scholasticism in the 20th century. From 1951 to 1973, he became a professor of Theoretical philosophy in the Catholic university in Milan. He was also a teacher of Emanuele Severino, Angelo Scola and other Italian philosophers.
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Harry Houdini
1874 - 1926 (52 years)
Erich Weisz , known as Harry Houdini , was a Hungarian-American escape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer, noted for his escape acts. His pseudonym is a reference to his magical mentor, French magician Robert-Houdin .
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Ibn al-Rawandi
827 - 911 (84 years)
Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi , commonly known as Ibn al-Rawandi , was an early Persian scholar and theologian. In his early days, he was a Mu'tazilite scholar, but then rejected the Mu'tazilite doctrine. Afterwards, he became a Shia scholar; there is some debate about whether he stayed a Shia until his death or became a skeptic, though most sources confirm his eventual rejection of all religion and becoming an atheist. Although none of his works have survived, his opinions had been preserved through his critics and the surviving books that answered him. His book with the m...
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Xu Fuguan
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Hsu Fu-kuan or Xu Fuguan ; 1902/03 – 1982 Biography Xu was born in 1902 or 1903 in a family of farmers and scholars in Hubei Province, China. Hsu's father taught at a private school established for village children who showed academic promise and could sit the imperial examinations to become scholar officials. In his teen-age years, Xu made his way to the provincial capital Wuhan which was then the cultural center where foreign influences and trends abounded. Wuhan was also an important staging area for the 1911 Republican Revolution that ended China's 2000-year-old imperial rule. Xu spent fifteen years with the Nationalist army attaining the rank of senior colonel.
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