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,
#16651
Georges Bénézé
1888 - 1978 (90 years)
Georges Bénézé was a French philosopher with a scientific background, which enabled him to temper the French critics of Einstein's Relativity theory during the 1920s. Bénézé was a disciple and editor of French philosopher Alain. Having completed his higher education as a student of the École normale supérieure , he taught Hegel's philosophy in a number of provincial lycées, most notably in Poitiers where Jean Hyppolite was a student, then became Professor of Lycée Henri-IV starting in 1936. A regular contributor to L'Œuvre, a collaborationist paper of Vichy France, Bénézé was sentenced to Indignité nationale by virtue of the 1944 Ordonnances, and then fired from public employment.
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Andreas Röschlaub
1768 - 1835 (67 years)
Andreas Röschlaub was a German physician born in Lichtenfels, Bavaria. He studied medicine at the Universities of Würzburg and Bamberg, gaining his doctorate at the latter institution in 1795. In 1798 he became a full professor of pathology at Bamberg, and in 1802 transferred to the University of Landshut, where he was director of the medical school. In 1826 he relocated to the University of Munich as a professor of medicine. He died on 7 July 1835 during a recreational trip to Ulm.
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Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum
1899 - 1942 (43 years)
Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum was a Polish logician and philosopher. She published some twenty research papers along with translations into Polish of three books by Bertrand Russell. The main focus of her writings was on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation. She is noted especially for authoring the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox which she credits to Carl Hempel and the probabilistic solution she outlined to it. Shot by the Gestapo in 1942, she, like her husband Adolf Lindenbaum, and many other eminent representatives of Polish logic, shared t...
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Abul A'la Maududi
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Abul A'la al-Maududi was an Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist, activist, and scholar active in British India and later, following the partition, in Pakistan. Described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as "the most systematic thinker of modern Islam", his numerous works, which "covered a range of disciplines such as Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, law, philosophy, and history", were written in Urdu, but then translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Burmese, Malayalam and many other languages. He sought to revive Islam, and to propagate what he understood to be "true Islam".
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Cleomenes the Cynic
300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)
Cleomenes was a Cynic philosopher. He was a pupil of Crates of Thebes, and is said to have taught Timarchus of Alexandria and Echecles of Ephesus, the latter of whom would go on to teach Menedemus. He wrote a work on Pedagogues from which Diogenes Laërtius has preserved an anecdote concerning Diogenes of Sinope: Cleomenes in his work on Pedagogues says that Diogenes' friends wanted to ransom him, for which he called them simpletons, for, he said, lions are not the slaves of those who feed them, but rather those who feed them are at the mercy of the lions, Fear, he added, is the mark of the slave, whereas wild beasts make human beings afraid of them.
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Camil Petrescu
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Camil Petrescu was a Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet. He marked the end of the traditional novel era and laid the foundation of the modern novel era in Romania. Life Petrescu was born in Bucharest in 1894. He lost both his parents early in life and was raised by a relative, or a nanny from the Moșilor suburb .
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Jean François de Saint-Lambert
1716 - 1803 (87 years)
Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet, philosopher and military officer. Biography Saint-Lambert was born at Nancy and raised on his parents' estate at Affracourt, a village in Lorraine near Haroué, a seat of the Beauvau family, with whom he had close ties. He studied at the university at Pont-à-Mousson, but then spent several years at home recovering from an unidentified illness. He often complained of poor health, but participated in military campaigns, led a strenuous social life, and lived to be 86 years old.
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Johann Jakob Engel
1741 - 1802 (61 years)
Johann Jakob Engel was a German author. Life Engel was born and died in Parchim, in the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He studied theology at Rostock and Bützow, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he took his doctors' degree. In 1776 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy and belles-lettres in the Joachimstal gymnasium at Berlin, and a few years later he became tutor to the crown prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William III.
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Anaxarchus
380 BC - 320 BC (60 years)
Anaxarchus was a Greek philosopher of the school of Democritus. Together with Pyrrho, he accompanied Alexander the Great into Asia. The reports of his philosophical views suggest that he was a forerunner of the Greek skeptics.
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Yahya ibn Adi
893 - 974 (81 years)
Abū Zakarīyā’ Yaḥyá ibn ʿAdī known as Yahya ibn Adi was a Syriac Jacobite Christian philosopher, theologian and translator working in Arabic. Biography Yahya ibn Adi was born in Tikrit to a family of Syriac Jacobite Christians in 893.
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Aristocles of Messene
200 - Present (1826 years)
Aristocles of Messene , in Sicily, was a Peripatetic philosopher, who probably lived in the 1st century AD. Life Little is known about the life of Aristocles. He came from Messene in Sicily , not from the then far better known city of Messene in the Peloponnese. There are some indications that he stayed in Alexandria. In earlier research he was wrongly considered to be the teacher of the famous Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias. It was erroneously believed that the philosopher Aristotle of Mytilene whom Alexander mentions as his teacher was actually Aristocles and that the name "Aristotle" was a misspelling.
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Johannes Althusius
1557 - 1638 (81 years)
Johannes Althusius was a German-French jurist and Calvinist political philosopher. He is best known for his 1603 work, "Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata". revised editions were published in 1610 and 1614. The ideas expressed therein relate to the early development of federalism in the 16th and 17th centuries and the construction of subsidiarity.
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Georgius Agricola
1494 - 1555 (61 years)
Georgius Agricola was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest in the mining and refining of metals. For his groundbreaking work De Natura Fossilium published in 1546, he is generally referred to as the Father of Mineralogy.
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Peter of Spain
1300 - 1300 (0 years)
Peter of Hispania was the author of the , later known as the , an important medieval university textbook on Aristotelian logic. As the Latin Hispania was considered to include the entire Iberian Peninsula, he is traditionally and usually identified with the medieval Portuguese scholar and ecclesiastic Peter Juliani, who was elected Pope John XXI in 1276. The identification is sometimes disputed, usually by Spanish authors, who claim the author of the was a Castilian Blackfriar. He is also sometimes identified as Petrus Ferrandi Hispanus .
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Hastings Rashdall
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Hastings Rashdall was an English philosopher, theologian, historian, and Anglican priest. He expounded a theory known as ideal utilitarianism, and he was a major historian of the universities of the Middle Ages.
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John Cook Wilson
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
John Cook Wilson was an English philosopher, Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College. Early life and career John Cook Wilson was born in Nottingham, England, in 1849. He was the son of James Wilson, a Methodist minister. After studying at Derby Grammar School, 1862–67, Cook Wilson went up with a scholarship to Balliol College in 1868, where he read both Classics under H. W. Chandler and Mathematics under H. J. S. Smith. He graduated with a double 'double-first', gaining both firsts in Mathematical and Classical Moderations , and then firsts in Mathematics and Literae Humaniores or 'Greats' .
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Ljubomir Nedić
1858 - 1902 (44 years)
Ljubomir Nedić was a Serbian philosopher and literary critic. Having received academic training in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Nedić taught at the Belgrade Higher School beginning in 1885, after having defended his doctorate thesis on Sir William Hamilton's logic. During the 1890s, Nedić left philosophy and began his career as a literary critic. His criticisms were controversial during his time and targeted many highly respected Serbian writers such as Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Laza Kostić and Milan Milićević. Nedić advocated an interpretation of literary works with minimal attention...
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Yanagi Sōetsu
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Yanagi Sōetsu, also known as Yanagi Muneyoshi, was a Japanese art critic, philosopher, and founder of the mingei movement in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s. Personal life Yanagi was born in 1889 to Yanagi Narayoshi, a hydrographer of the Imperial Navy and Katsuko.
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George Sylvester Morris
1840 - 1889 (49 years)
George Sylvester Morris was a 19th-century American educator and philosophical writer. Biography Morris was born in Norwich, Vermont. He was the son of a well known abolitionist and temperance man. In 1861, he graduated from Dartmouth College, served in the Union army for two years during the American Civil War, and taught at Dartmouth in 1863–1864.
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John Norris
1657 - 1711 (54 years)
John Norris, sometimes called John Norris of Bemerton , was an English theologian, philosopher and poet associated with the Cambridge Platonists. Life John Norris was born at Collingbourne Kingston, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester School, and Exeter College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1680. He was later appointed a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford . He lived a quiet life as a country parson and thinker at Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, Wiltshire, from 1692 until his death early in 1712.
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Edward Wheeler Scripture
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Edward Wheeler Scripture was an American physician and psychologist. He founded the experimental psychology laboratory at Yale University, directed the Vanderbilt Speech Clinic at Columbia University and was a founder of the American Psychological Association. Trained under experimental psychology pioneer Wilhelm Wundt, Scripture became best known for his contributions to speech science.
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Alice Hamilton
1869 - 1970 (101 years)
Alice Hamilton was an American physician, research scientist, and author. She was a leading expert in the field of occupational health, laid the foundation for health and safety protections, and a pioneer in the field of industrial toxicology.
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William of Conches
1080 - 1154 (74 years)
William of Conches was a French scholastic philosopher who sought to expand the bounds of Christian humanism by studying secular works of the classics and fostering empirical science. He was a prominent member of the School of Chartres. John of Salisbury, a bishop of Chartres and former student of William's, refers to William as the most talented grammarian after Bernard of Chartres.
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Georgia Harkness
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Georgia Elma Harkness was an American Methodist theologian and philosopher. Harkness has been described as one of the first significant American female theologians and was important in the movement to legalize the ordination of women in American Methodism.
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Gaston Berger
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Gaston Berger was a French futurist but also an industrialist, a philosopher and a state manager. He is mainly known for his remarkably lucid analysis of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and for his studies on the character structure.
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Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
1657 - 1757 (100 years)
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle , also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author and an influential member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of Enlightenment.
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Carlo Cattaneo
1801 - 1869 (68 years)
Carlo Cattaneo was an Italian philosopher, writer, and activist, famous for his role in the Five Days of Milan in March 1848, when he led the city council during the rebellion. Early life and education Cattaneo was born in Milan on 15 June 1801. He was the son of Melchiorre Cattaneo, a goldsmith, and Maria Antonia Sangiorgi. After attending school in Milan he studied law at the University of Pavia, graduating in 1824.
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Nikolay Strakhov
1828 - 1896 (68 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Strakhov, also transliterated as Nikolai Strahov , was a Russian philosopher, publicist, journalist and literary critic. He shared the ideals of Pochvennichestvo and was a longtime friend and correspondent of Leo Tolstoy.
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Svetozar Marković
1846 - 1875 (29 years)
Svetozar Marković was a Serbian political activist, literary critic and socialist philosopher. He developed an activistic anthropological philosophy with a definite program of social change. He was called the Serbian Nikolay Dobrolyubov.
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Raymond Ruyer
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher in the late 20th century. His work covered topics including the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of informatics, the philosophy of value and others. His most popular book is The Gnosis of Princeton in which he presents his own philosophical views under the pretence that he was representing the views of an imaginary group of American scientists. He developed an account of panpsychism which was a major influence on philosophers such as Adolf Portmann, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
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William Vorilong
1390 - 1463 (73 years)
William Vorilong, also known as Guillermus Vorrilong, Willem of Verolon, William of Vaurouillon, Guilelmus de Valle Rouillonis, etc. was a French philosopher and theologian. He wrote a biography of Duns Scotus. From 1457 onwards he was a regent master in Lyon, becoming licentiate and master of theology at Lyon in 1458.
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Ronald B. Levinson
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Ronald Bartlett Levinson was an American philosopher who focused in his work on Plato. Life He was born October 18, 1896, in Chicago, Illinois, and died November 21, 1980, in Bangor, Maine.1920 A.B. from Harvard University.1924 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.1926 University of Maine.1927 Professor and Head of the department of philosophy.
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Mary Somerville
1780 - 1872 (92 years)
Mary Somerville was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Ishida Baigan
1685 - 1744 (59 years)
Ishida Baigan was a Japanese lecturer and philosopher, born in Tanba Province, who founded the Shingaku movement based on Neo-Confucianism, the study of the doctrines of Zhu Xi, incorporating Shinto, Buddhism and so on, which advocated all education include teachings in ethics and morality.
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Crito of Alopece
469 BC - 500 BC (-31 years)
Crito of Alopece was an ancient Athenian agriculturist depicted in the Socratic literature of Plato and Xenophon, where he appears as a faithful and lifelong companion of the philosopher Socrates. Although the later tradition of ancient scholarship attributed philosophical works to Crito, modern scholars do not consider him to have been an active philosopher, but rather a member of Socrates' inner circle through childhood friendship.
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Hara Tanzan
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Hara Tanzan was a Japanese philosopher and Sōtō Buddhist monk. He served as abbot of Saijoji temple in Odawara and as professor at the University of Tokyo during the Bakumatsu and Meiji era. He was a forerunner of the modernization of Japanese Buddhism and the first to attempt to incorporate concepts from the natural sciences into Zen Buddhism.
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Lyubov Axelrod
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Lyubov Isaakovna Axelrod was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist philosopher and an art theoretician. Early life Axelrod was born in the family of a rabbi in Vilenkovichi, a village in the Vilna gubernia of the Russian Empire, now in Pastavy Raion, Belarus. She became involved with the narodnik organization at age 16. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1887, with the assistance of Leo Jogiches when the Vitebsk organisation collapsed in the wake of an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III of Russia organised by Aleksandr Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Lenin.
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Eudorus of Alexandria
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Eudorus of Alexandria was an ancient Greek philosopher, and a representative of Middle Platonism. He attempted to reconstruct Plato's philosophy in terms of Pythagoreanism. Life Little is known about Eudorus' life. Chronologically, he lived in the 1st century BC, and did his work prior to Strabo and Arius Didymus, both of whom quote him. He was involved in a plagiarism controversy with Aristo of Alexandria, one of Antiochus of Ascalon's students, as they had both written a work on the Nile. but he is not mentioned by Antiochus' contemporary Cicero, implying he was not one of Antiochus' students.
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Germaine de Staël
1766 - 1817 (51 years)
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël , was a prominent woman of letters and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan intellectual circles. She was the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a respected salonhostess. Throughout her life, she held a moderate stance during the tumultuous periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, persisting until the time of the French Restoration.
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Heinrich Ahrens
1808 - 1874 (66 years)
Julius Heinrich Ahrens was a German philosopher, jurist, and professor in Brussels, Graz, and Leipzig. Life Born in Salzgitter, Ahrens studied in Wolfenbüttel and the University of Göttingen. Ahrens, whose main interest was the philosophy of law and the state, was a disciple of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, with whom he defended his habilitation De confoederatione germanica in 1830.
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Aroj Ali Matubbar
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Aroj Ali Matubbar was a self-taught philosopher and rationalist from Bangladesh. Early life and education Matubbar was born in the village of Charbaria Lamchari, about from the city of Barisal in British India, now Bangladesh, to a poor peasant family. His original name was Aroj Ali; he later adopted the name Matubbar . He studied for only a few months at the village maqtab, where he focused on the Qur'an and Islamic studies.
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Julius Caesar Scaliger
1484 - 1558 (74 years)
Julius Caesar Scaliger , or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the New Learning. In spite of his contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high. Jacques Auguste de Thou claimed that none of the ancients could be placed above him and that he had no equal in his own time.
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Rupa Goswami
1489 - 1564 (75 years)
Rupa Goswami was a devotional teacher , poet, and philosopher of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. With his brother Sanatana Goswami, he is considered the most senior of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan associated with Caitanya Mahaprabhu, a hidden avatar of Krishna in Kali Yuga.
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Nostradamus
1503 - 1566 (63 years)
Michel de Nostredame , usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties , a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
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Al-Battani
858 - 930 (72 years)
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Raqqī al-Ḥarrānī aṣ-Ṣābiʾ al-Battānī , usually called al-Battānī, a name that was in the past Latinized as Albategnius, was an astronomer, astrologer and mathematician, who lived and worked for most of his life at Raqqa, now in Syria. He is considered to be the greatest and most famous of the astronomers of the medieval Islamic world.
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Carl von Ossietzky
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Carl von Ossietzky was a German journalist and pacifist. He was the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German rearmament. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force and training pilots in the Soviet Union. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was granted amnesty in December 1932.
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Clitomachus
187 BC - 110 BC (77 years)
Clitomachus or Cleitomachus was a Greek philosopher, originally from Carthage, who came to Athens in 163/2BC and studied philosophy under Carneades. He became head of the Academy around 127/6BC. He was an Academic skeptic like his master. Nothing survives of his writings, which were dedicated to making known the views of Carneades, but Cicero made use of them for some of his works.
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Sami Frashëri
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Sami bey Frashëri or Şemseddin Sâmi was an Ottoman Albanian writer, philosopher, playwright and a prominent figure of the Rilindja Kombëtare, the National Renaissance movement of Albania, together with his two brothers Abdyl and Naim. He also supported Turkish nationalism against its Ottoman counterpart, along with secularism against theocracy.
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John Turner
1865 - 1934 (69 years)
John Turner was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent." Turner was the first person to be ordered deported from the United States for violation of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act.
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Max Klinger
1857 - 1920 (63 years)
Max Klinger was a German artist who produced significant work in painting, sculpture, prints and graphics, as well as writing a treatise articulating his ideas on art and the role of graphic arts and printmaking in relation to painting. He is associated with symbolism, the Vienna Secession, and Jugendstil the German manifestation of Art Nouveau. He is best known today for his many prints, particularly a series entitled Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove and his monumental sculptural installation in homage to Beethoven at the Vienna Secession in 1902.
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