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,
#16501
Edward Dembowski
1822 - 1846 (24 years)
Edward Dembowski was a Polish philosopher, literary critic, journalist, and leftist independence activist. Life Edward Dembowski was the son of Julia, née Kochanowska, and a conservative castellan-voivode of the Congress Poland, Leon Dembowski. On account of Edward's szlachta origins and contrasting radical social views, he was called "the red castellan's-son."
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Charles Andler
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Charles Philippe Théodore Andler was a French Germanist and philosopher. Life Andler was born to a Protestant family in Strasbourg. In 1887 and 1888, Andler failed to achieve his agrégation in philosophy, judged by Jules Lachelier, inspector-general in charge of philosophy, as showing "excessive bias" towards German philosophy. He therefore changed to take the German literature agrégation in 1889, passing out top of his class. Andler became professor of German at the Sorbonne in 1901 and at the Collège de France in 1926. Amongst his works were writings on Nietzsche, a commentary on The Commun...
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Hugo Bergmann
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Hugo Bergmann was an Israeli philosopher, born in Prague. Biography Hugo Samuel Bergmann was born and raised in Prague, Austria-Hungary. He was a member of the Prague intelligentsia visiting the salon group that met at the house of Berta Fanta. Bergmann married her daughter Else Fanta.
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Friedrich Christian Baumeister
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Friedrich Christian Baumeister was a German philosopher. Baumeister studied philosophy in Jena and Wittenberg. He became director of the Görlitz gymnasium in 1736. His textbooks propagated the metaphysics of Christian Wolff.
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Jakob Thomasius
1622 - 1684 (62 years)
Jakob Thomasius was a German academic philosopher and jurist. He is now regarded as an important founding figure in the scholarly study of the history of philosophy. His views were eclectic, and were taken up by his son Christian Thomasius.
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Lev Tikhomirov
1852 - 1923 (71 years)
Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov , originally a Russian revolutionary and one of the members of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya, following his disenchantment with violent revolution became one of the leading conservative thinkers in Russia. He authored several books on monarchism, Orthodoxy, and Russian political philosophy.
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Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
#16508
Erich Rothacker
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Erich Rothacker was a German philosopher, a leading exponent of philosophical anthropology. Rothacker's first major work, Logik und Systematik der Geisteswissenschaften , presents the view that actual historical individuals, whose cognitive equipment is partially created by a specific cultural community while at the same time constantly modifying it, are the elements that constitute the subject of knowledge, rather than a timeless universal entity as it is represented by Descartes or Locke.
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Stanisław Wyspiański
1869 - 1907 (38 years)
Stanisław Mateusz Ignacy Wyspiański was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer. A patriotic writer, he created a series of symbolic, national dramas within the artistic philosophy of the Young Poland Movement.
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Max Jacob
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. Life and career After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend . Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916.
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Shoghi Effendi
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Shoghí Effendi was the grandson and successor of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, appointed to the role of Guardian of the Baháʼí Faith from 1921 until his death in 1957. He created a series of teaching plans that oversaw the expansion of the faith to many new countries, and also translated many of the writings of the Baháʼí central figures. He was succeeded by an interim arrangement of the Hands of the Cause until the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963.
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William Kneale
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
William Calvert Kneale was an English logician best known for his 1962 book The Development of Logic, a history of logic from its beginnings in Ancient Greece written with his wife Martha. Kneale was also known as a philosopher of science and the author of a book on probability and induction. Educated at the Liverpool Institute High School for boys, he later became a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and in 1960 succeeded to the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy previously occupied by the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin. He retired in 1966.
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Arthur Ransome
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.
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Henrik Steffens
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Henrik Steffens , was a Norwegian philosopher, scientist, and poet. Early life, education, and lectures He was born at Stavanger. At the age of fourteen he went with his parents to Copenhagen, where he studied theology and natural science. In 1796 he lectured at the University of Kiel, and two years later went to the University of Jena to study the natural philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. He went to Freiberg in 1800, and there came under the influence of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1801, he published a volume on geology called Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde. which became his most successful and influential work as a scientist.
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Gaius Marius Victorinus
290 - 364 (74 years)
Gaius Marius Victorinus was a Roman grammarian, rhetorician and Neoplatonic philosopher. Victorinus was African by birth and experienced the height of his career during the reign of Constantius II. He is also known for translating two of Aristotle's books from ancient Greek into Latin: the Categories and On Interpretation . Victorinus had a religious conversion, from being a pagan to a Christian, "at an advanced old age" .
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Pierre Laromiguière
1756 - 1837 (81 years)
Pierre Laromiguière was a French philosopher. Life He was born at Livinhac-le-Haut, Rouergue, and died in Paris. As professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse, he was unsuccessful and incurred the displeasure of the French parliament by his thesis on the rights of property in connection with taxation. Subsequently, he came to Paris, where he was appointed professor of logic in the École Normale and lectured in the Prytanée. In 1799 he was made a member of the Tribunate, and in 1833 of the Academy of Moral and Political Science. In 1793 he published Projet d'éléments de métaphysique, a work characterized by lucidity and excellence of style.
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Aurel Kolnai
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Aurel Thomas Kolnai was a 20th-century philosopher and political theorist. Life Kolnai was born Aurel Stein in Budapest, Hungary to Jewish parents but moved to Vienna before his twentieth birthday to enter Vienna University, where he studied under Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Bühler, and Ludwig von Mises. It was also at this time that he became attracted to the thinking of Franz Brentano and the phenomenological thought of Brentano's student Edmund Husserl. Kolnai studied under Husserl briefly in 1928 in Freiburg. During the early 1920s, Kolnai wrote as an independent scholar with little success.
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William Wollaston
1659 - 1724 (65 years)
William Wollaston was a school teacher, Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a major Enlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated. He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
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Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Stilpo
359 BC - 279 BC (80 years)
Stilpo was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He was a contemporary of Theophrastus, Diodorus Cronus, and Crates of Thebes. None of his writings survive, but he is described in the writings of others as being interested in logic and dialectic, and he argued that the universal is fundamentally separated from the individual and concrete. His ethical teachings approached that of the Cynics and Stoics. His most important followers were Pyrrho, the founder of Pyrrhonism, and Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Gaius Musonius Rufus
25 - 95 (70 years)
Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD. He taught philosophy in Rome during the reign of Nero and so was sent into exile in 65 AD, returning to Rome only under Galba. He was allowed to stay in Rome when Vespasian banished all other philosophers from the city in 71 AD although he was eventually banished anyway, returning only after Vespasian's death. A collection of extracts from his lectures still survives. He is also remembered for being the teacher of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom.
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Mir Damad
1561 - 1631 (70 years)
Mir Damad , known also as Mir Mohammad Baqer Esterabadi, or Asterabadi, was a Twelver Shia Iranian philosopher in the Neoplatonizing Islamic Peripatetic traditions of Avicenna. He also was a Suhrawardi, a scholar of the traditional Islamic sciences, and foremost figure of the cultural renaissance of Iran undertaken under the Safavid dynasty. He was also the central founder of the School of Isfahan, noted by his students and admirers as the Third Teacher after Aristotle and al-Farabi.
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Ernest Newman
1868 - 1959 (91 years)
Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective approach of other critics, such as Neville Cardus, was reflected in his books on Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and others. He was music critic of The Sunday Times from 1920 until his death nearly forty years later. His other positions included chief music critic of The Birmingham Post from ...
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Syed Zafarul Hasan
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Syed Zafarul Hasan was a prominent twentieth-century Pakistani Muslim philosopher. Biography He was the eldest son of Khan Sahib Syed Diwan Mohammad. Hasan was educated at Aligarh and obtained doctorates from the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg, Germany, and Oxford University. Dr Zafarul Hasan was the first Muslim Scholar of the Indian sub-continent to secure a PhD from Oxford in Philosophy. His doctoral thesis Realism is a classic on the subject. Prominent philosophers and educationists lauded his work, among them, his teacher Prof. John Alaxander Smith , and Allama Mohammad Iqbal.
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Hermann Ulrici
1806 - 1884 (78 years)
Hermann Ulrici was a German philosopher. He was co-editor of the philosophical journal Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. He also wrote under the pseudonym of Ulrich Reimann. Life Ulrici was born at Pförten, in the Niederlausitz region of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was educated at the in Berlin. He initially studied law, but gave up his profession on the death of his father, and devoted four years to the study of literature, philosophy and science. In 1834 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Halle, where he remained till his death.
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Charles Bell
1774 - 1842 (68 years)
Sir Charles Bell was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist, and philosophical theologian. He is noted for discovering the difference between sensory nerves and motor nerves in the spinal cord. He is also noted for describing Bell's palsy.
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Georg Anton Friedrich Ast
1778 - 1841 (63 years)
Georg Anton Friedrich Ast was a German philosopher and philologist. Biography Ast was born in Gotha. Educated there and at the University of Jena, he became a privatdozent at Jena in 1802. In 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the University of Landshut, where he remained until 1826, when it was transferred to Munich. He lived there until his death in 1841.
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François Hemsterhuis
1721 - 1790 (69 years)
François Hemsterhuis was a Dutch writer on aesthetics and moral philosophy. The son of Tiberius Hemsterhuis, he was born at Franeker in the Netherlands. He was educated at the University of Leiden, where he studied Plato. Failing to obtain a professorship, he entered the service of the state, and for many years acted as secretary to the state council of the United Provinces. He died at the Hague on 7 July 1790. Through his philosophical writings he became acquainted with many distinguished persons—Goethe, Herder, Princess Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin, and especially Jacobi, with whom he had much in common.
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Ai Siqi
1910 - 1966 (56 years)
Ài Sīqí is the pen name of Li Shengxuan , a Yunnan Mongol Chinese philosopher and author. He was born in Tengchong, Yunnan, later traveling to Hong Kong, where he studied English and French at a Protestant school and was exposed to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People and Marxism. He read a great deal of Marxism, including the Communist Manifesto, in Japanese translation. This reading is the root of Ai’s most important works, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism and Philosophy for the Masses . He was a delegate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd National People's Congress.
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Franjo Marković
1845 - 1914 (69 years)
Franjo Marković was a Croatian philosopher and writer. He was an academician, the first professor of philosophy at the renovated University of Zagreb in 1874. The defender of the identity of philosophy as a metaphysical discipline, as opposed to scholasticism on one side, and positivism and materialism on the other side.
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Béla Juhos
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Béla Juhos was a Hungarian-Austrian philosopher and member of the Vienna Circle. Life Juhos was born on 22 November 1901 in Vienna into a Hungarian family of low nobility . His father was a Hungarian tradesman and entrepreneur owning an iron wholesale in Vienna and Budapest. Juhos attended primary school in Budapest and spoke Hungarian as a child. In 1909 he moved to Vienna, where he learned German and completed Realgymnasium in 1920.
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John Veitch
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
John Veitch , Scottish philosopher, poet and historian. He was born in Peebles, the only son of Peninsular War veteran James Veitch and his wife Nancy Ritchie, a woman steeped in the folk traditions of the Borders. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh.
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Christian Thomasius
1655 - 1728 (73 years)
Christian Thomasius was a German jurist and philosopher. Biography He was born in Leipzig and was educated by his father, Jakob Thomasius , at that time a junior lecturer in Leipzig University . Through his father's lectures, Christian came under the influence of the political philosophy of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, and continued the study of law at the University of Frankfurt in 1675, completing his doctorate in 1679. In 1680, he married Anna Christine Heyland and started a legal practice in Leipzig; the following year he began teaching at the university’s law school as well. In 1...
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Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, he held the ...
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George Ohsawa
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
George Ohsawa was a Japanese educator who was the founder of the macrobiotic diet. When living in Europe he went by the pen names of Musagendo Sakurazawa, Nyoiti Sakurazawa, and Yukikazu Sakurazawa. He also used the French first name Georges while living in France, and his name is sometimes also given this spelling. He wrote about 300 books in Japanese and 20 in French. He defined health on the basis of seven criteria: lack of fatigue, good appetite, good sleep, good memory, good humour, precision of thought and action, and gratitude.
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Johann Bernhard Basedow
1723 - 1790 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Basedow was a German educational reformer, teacher and writer. He founded the Philanthropinum, a short-lived but influential progressive school in Dessau, and was the author of "Elementarwerk", a popular illustrated textbook for children.
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James Martineau
1805 - 1900 (95 years)
James Martineau was a British religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism. He was the brother of the atheist social theorist, abolitionist Harriet Martineau. James Martineau's children included the Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist Edith Martineau, and painter and woodcarver Gertrude Martineau.
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Linji Yixuan
850 - 866 (16 years)
Linji Yixuan was the founder of the Linji school of Chán Buddhism during Tang dynasty China. Línjì yǔlù Information on Linji is based on the Línjì yǔlù , the Record of Linji. The standard form of these sayings was not completed until two hundred fifty years after Linji's death, and likely reflects the teaching of Chán in the Linji school at the beginning of the Song dynasty rather than that of Linji in particular.
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Gustav Teichmüller
1832 - 1888 (56 years)
Gustav Teichmüller was a German philosopher. His works, particularly his notion of perspectivism, influenced Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. Biography Teichmüller was born in Braunschweig in the Duchy of Brunswick. He was the son of August Teichmüller and Charlotte Georgine Elisabeth Teichmüller, née von Girsewaldt. His father was a lieutenant in the Prussian army. His mother also came from a soldier's family.
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Otto Mencke
1644 - 1707 (63 years)
Otto Mencke was a 17th-century German philosopher and scientist. Work Mencke obtained his doctorate at the University of Leipzig in August 1666 with a thesis entitled: Ex Theologia naturali – De Absoluta Dei Simplicitate, Micropolitiam, id est Rempublicam In Microcosmo Conspicuam.
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Caspar Neher
1897 - 1962 (65 years)
Caspar Neher was an Austrian-German scenographer and librettist, known principally for his career-long working relationship with Bertolt Brecht. Neher was born in Augsburg. He and Brecht were school friends who were separated for a time by the First World War, during which Neher was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class . In 1919, he studied under Angelo Jank at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He was first engaged professionally by the Munich Kammerspiele in 1922, although his designs for its production of Brecht's Drums in the Night were rejected. On 18 August 1923, Neher married Erika Tornquist in Graz.
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Edward Spencer Beesly
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Edward Spencer Beesly was an English positivist, trades union activist, and historian. Life He was born on 23 January 1831 in Feckenham, Worcestershire, the eldest son of the Rev. James Beesly and his wife, Mary Fitzgerald, of Queen's county, Ireland. After reading Latin and Greek with his father, in the autumn of 1846 Beesly was sent to King William's College on the Isle of Man, an evangelical establishment whose inadequate instruction and low moral tone were later depicted in Eric, or, Little by Little, by his school friend F. W. Farrar.
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Arturo Reghini
1878 - 1946 (68 years)
Arturo Reghini was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and esotericist. Biography Arturo Reghini was born in Florence on 12 November 1878. In 1898, he became a member of the Theosophical Society for which he founded a section in Rome. In 1903, he published in Palermo the first books of the editorial series named Biblioteca Teosofica and later Biblioteca filosofica
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Francisco Giner de los Ríos
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Francisco Giner de los Ríos was a philosopher, educator and one of the most influential Spanish intellectuals at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Biography He studied philosophy in Barcelona and Granada and eventually became professor of the philosophy of law and of international law at the University of Madrid. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Kantian German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
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Johann Christoph Gottsched
1700 - 1766 (66 years)
Johann Christoph Gottsched was a German philosopher, author and critic of the Enlightenment. Biography Early life He was born at Juditten near Königsberg , Brandenburg-Prussia, the son of a Lutheran clergyman, and was baptised in St. Mary's Church. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Königsberg, but immediately on taking the degree of Magister in 1723, he fled to Leipzig to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army. In Leipzig, he enjoyed the protection of Johann Burckhardt Mencke, who, under the name of "Philander von der Linde", was a well-known poet and president of the Deutschübende poetische Gesellschaft in Leipzig.
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Vittorino da Feltre
1378 - 1446 (68 years)
Vittorino da Feltre was an Italian humanist and teacher. He was born in Feltre, Belluno, Republic of Venice and died in Mantua. His real name was Vittorino Rambaldoni. It was in Vittorino that the Renaissance idea of the complete man, or l'uomo universale — health of body, strength of character, wealth of mind — reached its first formulation.
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Gemistos Plethon
1355 - 1452 (97 years)
Georgios Gemistos Plethon , commonly known as Gemistos Plethon, was a Greek scholar and one of the most renowned philosophers of the late Byzantine era. He was a chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe. As revealed in his last literary work, the Nomoi or Book of Laws, which he circulated only among close friends, he rejected Christianity in favour of a return to the worship of the classical Hellenic gods, mixed with ancient wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi.
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Ben Nicholson
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM was an English painter of abstract compositions , landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in his country. Background and training Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 in Denham, Buckinghamshire, the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and brother of the artist Nancy Nicholson, the architect Christopher Nicholson and to Anthony Nicholson. His maternal grandmother Barbara Pryde was a niece of the famous artist brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. The family moved to London in 1896. Nic...
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Antonio Aliotta
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Antonio Aliotta was an Italian philosopher. He was born in Palermo and studied philosophy at the University of Florence, graduating in 1903. His initial work was in experimental psychology. In 1912 he won the Paladin prize for his work, La reazione idealistica contro la scienza. He became professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Padua from 1913 to 1919, then served as a professor at the University of Naples until 1951.
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