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,
#16401
Charles Blount
1654 - 1693 (39 years)
Charles Blount was an English deist and philosopher who published several anonymous essays critical of the existing English order. Life Blount was born in Upper Holloway, Islington, Middlesex, the fourth son of Sir Henry Blount. His father educated him at home and exposed him to freethinking philosophy. In 1672 Charles inherited lands in Islington and the estate of Blount's Hall in Staffordshire. He married Eleanor Tyrrell in Westminster Abbey at the end of 1672; they had three sons and a daughter. Throughout his life he remained at Blount's Hall as a leisured gentleman, although he also ...
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Scipione Riva-Rocci
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Scipione Riva Rocci was an Italian internist, pathologist and pediatrician. He is best known for the invention of an easy-to-use cuff-based version of the mercury sphygmomanometer for the measurement of blood pressure.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Scanzoni von Lichtenfels
1821 - 1891 (70 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Scanzoni von Lichtenfels was a German gynecologist and obstetrician born in Prague, in the Austrian Empire. He studied medicine in Prague, and spent most of his professional career as chair of obstetrics at the University of Würzburg, where he succeeded Franz Kiwisch von Rotterau.
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Francesco Filelfo
1398 - 1481 (83 years)
Francesco Filelfo was an Italian Renaissance humanist and author of the philosophic dialogue On Exile. Biography Filelfo was born at Tolentino, in the March of Ancona. He is believed to be a third cousin of Leonardo da Vinci. At the time of his birth, Petrarch and the students of Florence had already begun to exalt the recovery of classic texts and culture. They had created an eager appetite for the antique, had rediscovered many important Roman authors, and had freed Latin scholarship to some extent from the restrictions of earlier periods. Filelfo was destined to carry on their work in the...
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Saviour Cumbo
1810 - 1877 (67 years)
Saviour Cumbo was a Maltese theologian and minor philosopher. His philosophical writings deal mainly with the relationship between reason and faith. Though his engagement with philosophical reflection was peripheral, his contribution in this field was at least interesting and at most insightful. No portrait of him has been identified up till now.
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Appiano Buonafede
1716 - 1793 (77 years)
Appiano Buonafede was an Italian priest and philosopher who published under the name Agatopisto Cromaziano. Appiano Buonafede was born in Comacchio, a Province of Ferrara, and died in Rome. He became a professor of theology while in Naples in 1740, and entering the religious body of the Celestines, rose to be general of the order in 1777.
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Berechiah ha-Nakdan
1200 - 1300 (100 years)
Berechiah ben Natronai Krespia ha-Nakdan was a Jewish exegete, ethical writer, grammarian, translator, poet, and philosopher. His best-known works are Mishlè Shu'alim and Sefer ha-Ḥibbur . Biography Little is known for certain about Berechiah's life and much discussion has taken place concerning his date and native country. He is thought to have lived sometime in the 12th or 13th century, and is likely to have lived in Normandy and England, with some placing him about 1260 in Provence. It is possible that he was a descendant of Jewish scholars of Babylonia. He also knew foreign languages and...
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Crates of Athens
400 BC - 260 BC (140 years)
Crates of Athens was a Platonist philosopher and the last scholarch of the Old Academy. Biography Crates was the son of Antigenes of the Thriasian deme, the pupil and eromenos of Polemo, and his successor as scholarch of the Platonic Academy, in 270–69 BC. The intimate friendship of Crates and Polemo was celebrated in antiquity, and Diogenes Laërtius has preserved an epigram of the poet Antagoras, according to which the two friends were united after death in one tomb. The epigram, according to him, reads:
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James Paget
1814 - 1899 (85 years)
Sir James Paget, 1st Baronet FRS HFRSE was an English surgeon and pathologist who is best remembered for naming Paget's disease and who is considered, together with Rudolf Virchow, as one of the founders of scientific medical pathology. His famous works included Lectures on Tumours and Lectures on Surgical Pathology . There are several medical conditions which were described by, and later named after, Paget:Paget's disease of bonePaget's disease of the nipple Extramammary Paget's disease refers to a group of similar, more rare skin lesions discovered by Radcliffe Crocker in 1889 which affec...
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Carl Braun
1822 - 1891 (69 years)
Carl Braun , sometimes Carl Rudolf Braun alternative spelling: Karl Braun, or Karl von Braun-Fernwald, name after knighthood Carl Ritter von Fernwald Braun was an Austrian obstetrician. He was born 22 March 1822 in Zistersdorf, Austria, son of the medical doctor Carl August Braun.
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Nils Alwall
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Nils Alwall was a Swedish professor at Lund University, Sweden. He was a pioneer in hemodialysis and the inventor of one of the first practical dialysis machines. Alwall pioneered the technique of ultrafiltration and introduced the principle of hemofiltration. Alwall is referred to as the "father of extracorporeal blood treatment."
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Khalil Kamarah'i
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Ayatollah Haj Mirza Khalil Kamarah'i . He was an author, researcher and philosopher of contemporary theology that sought to unite the Muslim sects supporting his cause. He studied under Abdul-Karim Ha'eri Yazdi in Arak and Qom. He continued his studies of various Islamic subjects and philosophy throughout his life. He worked with the administration in the Vatican City on various philosophical questions, which he later released in a separate book. He travelled to Cairo on behalf of Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi and Mahmud Shaltut, the Grand Mufti and dean of Al-Azhar University Sheikh, for fatwa. H...
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Johann Christoph Hoffbauer
1766 - 1827 (61 years)
Johann Christoph Hoffbauer was a German philosopher, who published extensively on natural law, ethics and psychology. From 1785 he studied at the University of Halle, where his influences included the anti-Kantian philosopher Johann Augustus Eberhard. In 1794 he became an associate professor, and in 1799 a full professor of philosophy at Halle.
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George du Maurier
1834 - 1896 (62 years)
George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier was a Franco-British cartoonist and writer known for work in Punch and a Gothic novel Trilby, featuring the character Svengali. His son was the actor Sir Gerald du Maurier. The writers Angela du Maurier and Dame Daphne du Maurier and the artist Jeanne du Maurier were all granddaughters of George. He was also father of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and grandfather of the five boys who inspired J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.
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Henry Laurie
1837 - 1922 (85 years)
Henry Laurie was an Australian philosopher, a journalist, and the first professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Laurie was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he was strongly influenced by the philosopher Alexander Campbell Fraser. Laurie did not graduate from the university for health reasons, and then moved first to Canada, then to Victoria. In Australia, he became a journalist and contributed to the Warrnambool Examiner, and subsequently edited the weekly newspaper, the Warrnambool Standard, in partnership with a printer and journalist named William Fairfax. His i...
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Robert A. Kehoe
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Robert Arthur Kehoe was an American toxicologist and a dominant figure in occupational health. Working on behalf of the lead industry , Kehoe was the most powerful medically-trained proponent for the use of tetraethyllead as an additive in gasoline.
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Diodorus of Tyre
150 BC - 200 BC (-50 years)
Diodorus of Tyre was a Peripatetic philosopher, and a disciple and follower of Critolaus, whom he succeeded as the head of the Peripatetic school at Athens . He was still alive and active there in 110 BC, when Licinius Crassus, during his quaestorship of Macedonia, visited Athens. Cicero denies that he was a genuine Peripatetic, because it was one of his ethical maxims, that the greatest good consisted in a combination of virtue with the absence of pain, whereby a reconciliation between the Stoics and Epicureans was attempted.
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Frederick George Novy
1864 - 1957 (93 years)
Frederick George Novy was an American bacteriologist, organic chemist, and instructor. Born in Chicago, Illinois, the third son of Joseph Novy and his wife Frances, grew up on the West Side, near the site where the Great Chicago Fire started in 1871. After attending the local public schools, Novy matriculated to the University of Michigan where he studied chemistry, graduating with a B.S. in 1886. He performed his graduate studies at the same institution, receiving his master's degree in 1887 with a thesis on "Cocaine and its derivatives". At this time he became an instructor at the University, teaching a course in bacteriology, then was awarded an Sc.D.
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John Woodward
1665 - 1728 (63 years)
John Woodward was an English naturalist, antiquarian and geologist, and founder by bequest of the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology at the University of Cambridge. Though a leading supporter of observation and experiment in what we now call science, few of his theories have survived.
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Johann Nathanael Lieberkühn
1711 - 1756 (45 years)
Johann Nathanael Lieberkühn was a German physician. His middle name is sometimes misspelled Nathaniel. Lieberkühn studied theology initially, and then moved to physics, in particular mechanics. It was only after this that he commenced medicine. In 1739 he moved to Leiden, in the Netherlands, and then a year later to London and Paris. Following this he returned to Berlin as a member of the Collegium medico-chirurgicum, the body charged with improving the teaching and science of medicine in the Holy Roman Empire, making mathematical and optical instruments and working as a professor and medica...
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Ernest Amory Codman
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
Ernest Amory Codman, M.D., was an American surgeon who made contributions to anaesthesiology, radiology, duodenal ulcer surgery, orthopaedic oncology, shoulder surgery, and the study of medical outcomes.
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Roberta M. Goldwyn
#16423
Friedrich Würzbach
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf Würzbach was a Nietzsche scholar, Nazi sympathiser and convinced propagandist. He was born in Berlin in the summer of 1886 to a Polish-Jewish mother and German-Protestant father, and died in 1961 in Munich.
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Ferdinand Christoph Oetinger
1719 - 1772 (53 years)
Ferdinand Christoph Oetinger was a German physician. He studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen and medicine at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle, obtaining his doctorate at the latter institution in 1739. He later practiced medicine in Stuttgart and Urach, and in 1760 was named an associate professor of medicine at the University of Tübingen. In 1762 he became a full professor of medicine at Tübingen.
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Arthur Edward Murphy
1901 - 1962 (61 years)
Arthur Edward Murphy was an American philosopher. Life and career Murphy was born in Ithaca, New York. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from University of California, Berkeley in 1923, then went on to earn a doctorate there. He took an appointment at University of Chicago in 1927, then went to Cornell University in 1928 before returning to Chicago in 1929. He took a position as full professor at Brown University in 1931.
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Anders Wedberg
1913 - 1978 (65 years)
Anders Wedberg was a Swedish philosopher. Wedberg was born in Stockholm. His father was the prominent lawyer and member of the Swedish Academy Birger Wedberg. Anders was the father of chess player Tom Wedberg.
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Jan Brueghel the Younger
1601 - 1678 (77 years)
Jan Brueghel the Younger was a Flemish Baroque painter. He was the son of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and grandson of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, both prominent painters who contributed respectively to the development of Renaissance and Baroque painting in the Habsburg Netherlands. Taking over his father's workshop at an early age, he largely painted the same subjects as his father in a style which was similar to that of his father. He gradually was able to break away from his father's style by developing a broader, more painterly, and less structured manner of painting. He regularly collaborated ...
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Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm
1758 - 1811 (53 years)
Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm was a Protestant pastor and natural history writer, probably best known for his monumental "Unterhaltungen aus der Naturgeschichte" . He was the fourth of 14 children and son of Augsburg engraver and publisher Christian Art Wilhelm, proprietor of Martin Engelbrecht Art Dealer. He attended the Gymnasium bei St. Anna from 1767 to 1777, and between 1777 and 1781 studied theology, philosophy and philology in Leipzig under Professor Ernst Platner, Samuel Frederick Nathanael Morus and Johann August Ernesti. From 1781 he was in the service of the Protestant Church in Augsburg, and also a teacher at the high school at St.
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Alexander Bryan Johnson
1786 - 1867 (81 years)
Alexander Bryan Johnson , was a British-born American philosopher and semanticist. He immigrated to the United States as a child and worked as a banker in Utica, New York. He wrote about economics, language, and the nature of knowledge.
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Nicholas-Joseph Laforêt
1823 - 1872 (49 years)
Nicholas-Joseph Laforêt was a Belgian Catholic philosopher and theologian. Life After the regular theological course at the seminary of Namur, he entered the Catholic University of Leuven , where he applied himself especially to the study of Oriental languages, Holy Scripture, and philosophy. In 1848, he was appointed to the chair of moral philosophy at the university, and, the same year, received the doctorate in theology.
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Leiv Kreyberg
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Leiv Kreyberg was a Norwegian pathologist. He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1938 to 1964. Among his scientific studies was the development and typology of lung cancer. During World War II he contributed to the organizing of the Norwegian Army's medical service, and he participated in the repatriation of prisoners of war in Northern Norway.
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Géraud de Cordemoy
1626 - 1684 (58 years)
Géraud de Cordemoy was a French philosopher, historian and lawyer. He is mainly known for his works in metaphysics and for his theory of language. Biography Géraud de Cordemoy was born in a family of ancient nobility coming from Auvergne . He was the third of four children. His father was a master in arts at the University of Paris named Géraud de Cordemoy who died when he was nine years old. His mother was named Nicole de Cordemoy. As for Géraud, he was a private tutor and a linguist and practised as a lawyer.
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Pope Alexander II
1010 - 1073 (63 years)
Pope Alexander II , born Anselm of Baggio, was the head of the Roman Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 1061 to his death in 1073. Born in Milan, Anselm was deeply involved in the Pataria reform movement. Elected according to the terms of his predecessor's bull, In nomine Domini, Anselm's was the first election by the cardinals without the participation of the people and minor clergy of Rome. He also authorized the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
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Heinrich Racker
1910 - 1960 (50 years)
Heinrich Racker was a Polish-Argentine psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish origin. Escaping Nazism, he fled to Buenos Aires in 1939. Already a doctor in musicology and philosophy, he became a psychoanalyst, first under the direction of Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, and later working with Ángel Garma and Marie Langer in Argentina. His most important work is a study of the psychoanalytic technique known as transference and countertransference, which was published for the first time in 1968.
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John Brown
1735 - 1788 (53 years)
John Brown was a Scottish physician and the creator of the Brunonian system of medicine. Life Brown was born in Berwickshire, the son of a day-labourer. He was able to obtain an early and 'excellent classical education' from Mr. William Cruickshank, "one of the most celebrated teachers Scotland has produced." Brown had a particular ability for Latin, and was an early reader, having read the whole of the Old Testament by age 5. As one of his contemporaries, Thomas Beddoes, a renowned English physician, wrote in 1795: "I conclude that he was endowed with that quickness of sympathy and that sens...
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G. C. Field
1887 - 1955 (68 years)
Guy Cromwell Field FBA was a British philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy, at the University of Bristol 1926–1952 and its Pro-Vice-Chancellor 1944–1945 and 1947–1952. He was the grandson of Jesse Collings.
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Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Kenneth Sylvan Launfal Guthrie , philosopher and writer, was a grandson of feminist Frances Wright and brother of William Norman Guthrie, a Scottish-born Episcopalian priest who issued a series of translations of ancient philosophical writers, "making available to the public the neglected treasures of Neo-platonism".
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Nikolai Stankevich
1813 - 1840 (27 years)
Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich was a Russian public figure, philosopher, and poet. Biography Nikolay Stankevich was born in Uderevka, Voronezh Governorate, and in 1834 graduated from the Moscow State University, where he was influenced by Professor Mikhail Kachenovsky and followers of the so-called "skeptical school" in historiography. By late 1831, Stankevich had organized a literary and philosophical society called the Circle of Stankevich. He had been under police surveillance since 1833 due to his connections with a group of oppositionary university students led by Ya.I. Kostenetsky. I...
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Nicky Britten
#16440
Adriaan Heereboord
1614 - 1661 (47 years)
Adriaan Heereboord was a Dutch philosopher and logician. Life He was born in Leiden and graduated from the University of Leiden, where he had the chair of philosophy from 1643. Heereboord sympathised with the new thinking of René Descartes, but was also influenced by Petrus Ramus and Francis Bacon. He clashed almost immediately at Leiden with Jacobus Revius and Adam Steuart, standing respectively for traditional metaphysics and theology. A combative drinker, Heereboord became an embattled figure in the university, with his private life the subject of pamphlets, and in the end dropped out of h...
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Takano Iwasaburo
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
was a Japanese social statistician and labor activist. Early life and education Takano was the younger brother of Takano Fusataro. He was born on October 15, 1871, in Nagasaki, Japan. He attended what is now the Kaisei Academy, the , and the Tokyo Imperial University . Takano's university education was partially funded by Fusataro's work in the United States. He studied at Munich University from 1899 to 1903, where he met his wife, Barbara. They had a daughter in 1902. After returning to Japan, he earned a Doctor of Law in 1904.
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Bosley Crowther
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Francis Bosley Crowther Jr. was an American journalist, writer, and film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His work helped shape the careers of many actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews were sometimes regarded as unnecessarily harsh. Crowther was an advocate of foreign-language films in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini.
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Moritz von Schwind
1804 - 1871 (67 years)
Moritz von Schwind was an Austrian painter, born in Vienna. Schwind's genius was lyrical—he drew inspiration from chivalry, folklore, and the songs of the people. Schwind died in Pöcking in Bavaria, and was buried in the Alter Südfriedhof in Munich.
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Edwyn Bevan
1870 - 1943 (73 years)
Edwyn Robert Bevan OBE, FBA was a versatile British philosopher and historian of the Hellenistic world. Life Edwyn Robert Bevan was the fourteenth of sixteen children of Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, a partner in Barclays Bank, and his second wife Emma Frances Shuttleworth, daughter of Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth, Bishop of Chichester. He was educated at Monkton Combe School and at New College, Oxford.
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Tsunashima Ryōsen
1873 - 1907 (34 years)
Tsunashima Ryōsen was a Japanese author and philosopher. He was a graduate of Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō. He was originally a rationalist and then became a Christian. He is buried in Tokyo's Zōshigaya cemetery.
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Judith K. Ockene
#16447
Robert Paul Myers
#16448
Eduard Caspar Jacob von Siebold
1801 - 1861 (60 years)
Eduard Caspar Jacob von Siebold was a German professor of gynecology. He worked at Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Marburg and University of Göttingen. Life and career Von Siebold was born 19 March 1801, the son of gynecologist Adam Elias von Siebold, in Würzburg, in the Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg . He became a medical doctor in 1826, docent in obstetrics in 1827 in Berlin, and professor in this field in 1829 in Marburg. From 1833 until his death in 1861, he was director of the clinic for gynecology and obstetrics at University of Göttingen, succeeding Caspar Julius Mende. Von ...
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Baker Brownell
1887 - 1965 (78 years)
Baker Brownell was an American philosopher. Brownell was born in St. Charles, Illinois, the fifth of six children of Eugene A. and Esther Burr Baker Brownell. He grew up in St. Charles, where he graduated from St. Charles High School.
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Martin Foss
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Martin Foss was a German-born American philosopher, professor, and scholar. Life and career Martin Foss was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1889 and studied philosophy and law at German and French universities. He married Hilde Schindler, and they had two children, Oliver Foss, a painter, and the composer Lukas Foss. The Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came into power, and for the next four years Martin Fuchs commuted secretly between Paris and Berlin. With the help of the Quaker community in the United States, the family was able to immigrate to the U.S. in 1937. The Quakers...
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