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.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#16601
Richard Price
1721 - 1791 (70 years)
Richard Price was a Welsh moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was also a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions. He was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. According to the historian John Davies, Price was "the greatest Welsh thinker of all time".
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Gottlob Ernst Schulze
1761 - 1833 (72 years)
Gottlob Ernst Schulze was a German philosopher, born in Heldrungen . He was the grandfather of the pioneering biochemist Ernst Schulze. Biography Schulze was a professor at Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Göttingen. His most influential book was Aenesidemus , a skeptical polemic against Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Philosophy of the Elements.
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Lev Shestov
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian existentialist and religious philosopher. He is best known for his critiques of both philosophic rationalism and positivism. His work advocated a movement beyond reason and metaphysics, arguing that these are incapable of conclusively establishing truth about ultimate problems, including the nature of God or existence. Contemporary scholars have associated his work with the label "anti-philosophy."
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Simone Weil
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work.
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Gersonides
1288 - 1344 (56 years)
Levi ben Gershon , better known by his Graecized name as Gersonides, or by his Latinized name Magister Leo Hebraeus, or in Hebrew by the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG, was a medieval French Jewish philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, physician and astronomer/astrologer. He was born at Bagnols in Languedoc, France. According to Abraham Zacuto and others, he was the son of Gerson ben Solomon Catalan.
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René Guénon
1886 - 1951 (65 years)
René Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon , also known as Abdalwahid Yahia , was a French intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having written on topics ranging from esotericism, "sacred science" and "traditional studies" to symbolism and initiation.
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Constantin Noica
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Constantin Noica was a Romanian philosopher, essayist and poet. His preoccupations were throughout all philosophy, from epistemology, philosophy of culture, axiology and philosophic anthropology to ontology and logics, from the history of philosophy to systematic philosophy, from ancient to contemporary philosophy, from translating and interpretation to criticism and creation. In 2006 he was included to the list of the 100 Greatest Romanians of all time by a nationwide poll.
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Anton Chekhov
1860 - 1904 (44 years)
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
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Adam Ferguson
1723 - 1816 (93 years)
Adam Ferguson, , also known as Ferguson of Raith , was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson was sympathetic to traditional societies, such as the Highlands, for producing courage and loyalty. He criticized commercial society as making men weak, dishonourable and unconcerned for their community. Ferguson has been called "the father of modern sociology" for his contributions to the early development of the discipline. His best-known work is his Essay on the History of Civil Society.
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Callicles
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Callicles is thought to have been an ancient Athenian political philosopher. He figures prominently in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, where he "presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik". In terms of dramatic action, his function in the dialogue is to provide a counter-argument to Plato's philosophical ideas. The absence of contemporaneous sources external to this single text attesting to his existence has suggested to some that he may be no more than a character created by Plato for the dialogue. In this vein, it has also been proposed that Callic...
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Tadeusz Kotarbiński
1886 - 1981 (95 years)
Tadeusz Marian Kotarbiński was a Polish philosopher, logician and ethicist. A pupil of Kazimierz Twardowski, he was one of the most representative figures of the Lwów–Warsaw School, and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning as well as the Polish Academy of Sciences . He developed philosophical theory called reism and an ethical system called independent ethics. Kotarbiński also contributed significantly to the development of praxeology.
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Melissus of Samos
470 BC - 430 BC (40 years)
Melissus of Samos was the third and last member of the ancient school of Eleatic philosophy, whose other members included Zeno and Parmenides. Little is known about his life, except that he was the commander of the Samian fleet in the Samian War. Melissus’ contribution to philosophy was a treatise of systematic arguments supporting Eleatic philosophy. Like Parmenides, he argued that reality is ungenerated, indestructible, indivisible, changeless, and motionless. In addition, he sought to show that reality is wholly unlimited, and infinitely extended in all directions; and since existence is ...
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Raya Dunayevskaya
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Raya Dunayevskaya , later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.
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Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz was a Polish philosopher and logician, a prominent figure in the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic. He originated many novel ideas in semantics. Among these was categorial grammar, a highly flexible framework for the analysis of natural language syntax and semantics that remains a major influence on work in formal linguistics. Ajdukiewicz's fields of research were model theory and the philosophy of science.
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John of St. Thomas
1589 - 1644 (55 years)
John of St. Thomas, O.P., born João Poinsot , was a Portuguese Dominican friar, Thomist theologian, and professor of philosophy. He is known for being an early theorist in the field of semiotics. Biography Of noble parentage, he was sent early to the University of Coimbra, displayed talents of the first order, completed his humanities and philosophy, and obtained the degree of Master of Arts. He then entered the University of Louvain. Here, too, he showed remarkable ability, and won the title of Bachelor of Theology at an early age. He joined the Dominicans at Madrid in 1612 or 1613, taking the name of John of St.
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Susanne Langer
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She was one of the earliest American women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best remembered for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key which was followed by a sequel Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art in 1953. In 1960, Langer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Antiochus of Ascalon
130 BC - 68 BC (62 years)
Antiochus of Ascalon was an 1st century BC Platonism philosopher who rejected skepticism and blended Stoic doctrines with Platonism as the first philosopher in the tradition of Middle Platonism. Antiochus moved to Athens early in his life and became a pupil of Philo of Larissa at the Platonic Academy, but he went on to reject the prevailing Academic skepticism of Philo and his predecessors. This led to his resignation from the academy and the establishment of his own school, which he named the "Old Academy" as he claimed it was closer to original doctrines of Platonism that he believed had been betrayed by the skeptics of the New Academy under Philo.
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C. I. Lewis
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Clarence Irving Lewis , usually cited as C. I. Lewis, was an American academic philosopher. He is considered the progenitor of modern modal logic and the founder of conceptual pragmatism. First a noted logician, he later branched into epistemology, and during the last 20 years of his life, he wrote much on ethics. The New York Times memorialized him as "a leading authority on symbolic logic and on the philosophic concepts of knowledge and value." He was the first to coin the term "Qualia" as it is used today in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive sciences.
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Zhang Dongsun
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Zhang Dongsun , also known as Chang Tung-sheng, was a Chinese philosopher, public intellectual and political figure. He was a professor of Philosophy and Sinology at Yenching University and Tsinghua University.
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William Paley
1743 - 1805 (62 years)
William Paley was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his natural theology exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, which made use of the watchmaker analogy.
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Damascius
450 - 550 (100 years)
Damascius , known as "the last of the Athenian Neoplatonists," was the last scholarch of the neoplatonic Athenian school. He was one of the neoplatonic philosophers who left Athens after laws confirmed by emperor Justinian I forced the closure of the Athenian school in c. 529 AD. After he left Athens, he may have sought refuge in the court of the Persian King Chrosroes, before being allowed back into the Byzantine Empire. His surviving works consist of three commentaries on the works of Plato, and a metaphysical text entitled Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles.
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Marsilius of Padua
1275 - 1342 (67 years)
Marsilius of Padua was an Italian scholar, trained in medicine, who practiced a variety of professions. He was also an important 14th-century political figure. His political treatise Defensor pacis , an attempt to refute papal claims to a "plenitude of power" in affairs of both church and state, is seen by some scholars as the most revolutionary political treatise written in the later Middle Ages. It is one of the first examples of a trenchant critique of caesaropapism in Western Europe. Marsilius is sometimes seen as a forerunner of the Protestant reformation, because many of his beliefs we...
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Vladimir Solovyov
1853 - 1900 (47 years)
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer, and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.
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Rashi
1040 - 1105 (65 years)
Shlomo Yitzchaki , generally known by the acronym Rashi, was a medieval French rabbi, the author of comprehensive commentaries on the Talmud and Hebrew Bible. Acclaimed for his ability to present the basic meaning of the text in a concise and lucid fashion, Rashi's commentaries appeal to both learned scholars and beginning students, and his works remain a centerpiece of contemporary Torah study. A large fraction of rabbinic literature published since the Middle Ages discusses Rashi, either using his view as supporting evidence or debating against it. His commentary on the Talmud, which covers ...
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Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
1781 - 1832 (51 years)
Karl Christian Friedrich Krause was a German philosopher whose doctrines became known as Krausism. Krausism, when considered in its totality as a complete, stand-alone philosophical system, had only a small following in Germany, France, and Belgium, in contradistinction to certain other philosophical systems that had a much larger following in Europe at that time. However, Krausism became very popular and influential in Restoration Spain not as a complete, comprehensive philosophical system per se, but as a broad cultural movement. In Spain, Krausism was known as "Krausismo", and Krausists were known as "Krausistas".
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Ernest Renan
1823 - 1892 (69 years)
Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote works on the origins of early Christianity, and espoused popular political theories especially concerning nationalism, national identity, and the alleged superiority of White people over other human "races". Renan is known as being among the first scholars to advance the disputed Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars, Turkic peoples who had adopted Jewis...
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Julian Huxley
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London , the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society , and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
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Abram Deborin
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Abram Moiseyevich Deborin was a Soviet Marxist philosopher and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . Deborin oscillated between The Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, before settling with the Bolsheviks and enjoying a long career as a philosopher in the Soviet Union. Although this career suffered under Stalin, he lived to see his works republished when the Soviet Union was led by Nikita Khrushchev.
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Galvano Della Volpe
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Galvano Della Volpe was an Italian professor of philosophy and Marxist theorist. Life Born on 24 September 1895 in Imola, in the then province of Bologna, Della Volpe served in the First World War and afterwards completed his studies at the University of Bologna. Della Volpe taught history and philosophy in a liceo in Ravenna and at the University of Bologna from 1925 to 1938, when he became chair of history and philosophy at the University of Messina, a post he held until his retirement in 1965. Della Volpe died on 13 July 1968 in Rome.
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Georgy Chelpanov
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Georgy Ivanovich Chelpanov was a Ukrainian and Soviet psychologist, philosopher and logician. Biography Chelpanov was born in Mariupol in to an upper-class family. Chelpanov received his primary education in Mariupol at the local parish school, and then studied at the Gymnasium Alexandrinum , graduating in 1883 with a gold medal. After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of the Novorossiysk University in Odessa and graduated in 1887 with a Ph.D.
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Henry More
1614 - 1687 (73 years)
Henry More was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school. Biography Henry was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire on 12 October 1614. He was the seventh son of Alexander More, mayor of Grantham, and Anne More . Both his parents were Calvinists but he himself "could never swallow that hard doctrine."
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Carl Linnaeus
1707 - 1778 (71 years)
Carl Linnaeus , also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as .
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Swaminarayan
1781 - 1830 (49 years)
Swaminarayan , also known as Sahajanand Swami, was a yogi and ascetic, who is believed by followers to be a manifestation of Krishna, or as the highest manifestation of Purushottama, and around whom the Swaminarayan Sampradaya developed.
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Carl von Clausewitz
1780 - 1831 (51 years)
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" and political aspects of waging war. His most notable work, , though unfinished at his death, is considered a seminal treatise on military strategy and science.
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Georges Cuvier
1769 - 1832 (63 years)
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier , was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.
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Samuel Clarke
1675 - 1729 (54 years)
Samuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican cleric. He is considered the major British figure in philosophy between John Locke and George Berkeley. Clarke's altered, Nontrinitarian revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer continues to influence worship among modern Unitarians.
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Raphael von Koeber
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Raphael von Koeber was a notable Russian-German teacher of philosophy and musician at the Tokyo Imperial University in Japan. Early life Raphael von Koeber was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire, his father was ethnic German, his mother was ethnic Russian, she died when he was one year old, and he was raised by his grandmother, a daughter of a priest and tutor to Tsar Alexander II’s wife. She taught young Raphael the piano at the age of 6, and greatly influenced him in his habits and studies. As an ethnic German, he was uncomfortable at school, which he therefore attended only irregularly.
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Peter Kropotkin
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France and England. While in exile, he gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. Kropotkin returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, ...
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Maximus the Confessor
580 - 662 (82 years)
Maximus the Confessor , also spelled Maximos, otherwise known as Maximus the Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople , was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar. In his early life, Maximus was a civil servant, and an aide to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He gave up this life in the political sphere to enter the monastic life. Maximus had studied diverse schools of philosophy, and certainly what was common for his time, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Aristotle, and numerous later Platonic commentators on Aristotle and Plato, like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. When o...
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Nicholas of Autrecourt
1299 - 1369 (70 years)
Nicholas of Autrecourt was a French medieval philosopher and Scholastic theologian. Life and thought Born in Autrecourt, near Verdun, he was educated at Paris and earned bachelor's degrees in theology and law and a master's degree in arts. Nicholas is known principally for developing skepticism to extreme logical conclusions. He is sometimes considered the sole genuinely skeptic philosopher of medieval times. Nicholas founded his skeptical position on arguments that knowledge claims were not "reducible to the first principle," that is, that it was not contradictory to deny them. His views hav...
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Francisco de Vitoria
1480 - 1546 (66 years)
Francisco de Vitoria was a Spanish Roman Catholic philosopher, theologian, and jurist of Renaissance Spain. He is the founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca, noted especially for his concept of just war and international law. He has in the past been described by scholars as the "father of international law", along with Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, though some contemporary academics have suggested that such a description is anachronistic, since the concept of postmodern international law did not truly develop until much later. American jurist Arthur Nussbaum noted Vitoria's influence on international law as it pertained to the right to trade overseas.
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Hajime Tanabe
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
was a Japanese philosopher of science, particularly of mathematics and physics. His work brought together elements of Buddhism, scientific thought, Western philosophy, Christianity, and Marxism. In the postwar years, Tanabe coined the concept of metanoetics, proposing that the limits of speculative philosophy and reason must be surpassed by metanoia.
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Luis de Molina
1535 - 1600 (65 years)
Luis de Molina was a Spanish Jesuit priest and scholastic, a staunch defender of free will in the controversy over human liberty and God's grace. His theology is known as Molinism. Life From 1551 to 1562, Molina studied law in Salamanca, philosophy in Alcalá de Henares, and theology in Coimbra. After 1563, he became a professor at the University of Coimbra, and afterward taught at the University of Évora, Portugal. From this post he was called, at the end of twenty years, to the chair of moral theology in Madrid, where he died.
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Nicole Oresme
1323 - 1382 (59 years)
Nicole Oresme , also known as Nicolas Oresme, Nicholas Oresme, or Nicolas d'Oresme, was a French philosopher of the later Middle Ages. He wrote influential works on economics, mathematics, physics, astrology, astronomy, philosophy, and theology; was Bishop of Lisieux, a translator, a counselor of King Charles V of France, and one of the most original thinkers of 14th-century Europe.
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Nicomachus
301 BC - 400 BC (-99 years)
Nicomachus was the son of Aristotle. The Suda states that Nicomachus was from Stageira, was a philosopher, a pupil of Theophrastus, and, according to Aristippus, his lover. He may have written a commentary on his father's lectures in physics. Nicomachus was born to the slave Herpyllis, and his father's will commended his care as a boy to several tutors, then to his adopted son, Nicanor. Historians think the Nicomachean Ethics, a compilation of Aristotle's lecture notes, was probably named after or dedicated to Aristotle's son. However, Nicomachus is also believed to be the name of Aristotle's father.
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Benedetto Croce
1866 - 1952 (86 years)
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, historian, and politician who wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, historiography, and aesthetics. A political liberal in most regards, he formulated a distinction between liberalism and "liberism" . Croce had considerable influence on other Italian intellectuals, from Marxists to Italian fascists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile, respectively.
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Baháʼu'lláh
1817 - 1892 (75 years)
Baháʼu'lláh was the founder of the Baháʼí Faith. He was born to an aristocratic family in Persia and was exiled due to his adherence to the messianic Bábí Faith. In 1863, in Iraq, he first announced his claim to a revelation from God and spent the rest of his life in further imprisonment in the Ottoman Empire. His teachings revolved around the principles of unity and religious renewal, ranging from moral and spiritual progress to world governance.
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Evert Willem Beth
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Evert Willem Beth was a Dutch philosopher and logician, whose work principally concerned the foundations of mathematics. He was a member of the Significs Group. Biography Beth was born in Almelo, a small town in the eastern Netherlands. His father had studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam, where he had been awarded a PhD. Evert Beth studied the same subjects at Utrecht University, but then also studied philosophy and psychology. His 1935 PhD was in philosophy.
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Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger
1780 - 1819 (39 years)
Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger was a German philosopher and academic. He is known as a theorist of Romanticism, and of irony. Biography Solger's extensive studies included attending Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie [Presentation of My System of Philosophy] lectures at the University of Jena in 1800–01 and Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" lectures in Berlin 1804. In 1811, Solger became professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin
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Ge Hong
284 - 364 (80 years)
Ge Hong , courtesy name Zhichuan , was a Chinese linguist, Taoist practitioner, philosopher, physician, politician, and writer during the Eastern Jin dynasty. He was the author of Essays on Chinese Characters, the Baopuzi, the Emergency Formulae at an Elbow's Length, among others. He was the originator of first aid in traditional Chinese medicine and influenced later generations.
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