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,
#16801
Tommaso Campanella
1568 - 1639 (71 years)
Tommaso Campanella , baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet. Campanella was prosecuted by the Roman Inquisition for heresy in 1594 and was confined to house arrest for two years. Accused of conspiring against the Spanish rulers of Calabria in 1599, he was tortured and sent to prison, where he spent 27 years. He wrote his most significant works during this time, including The City of the Sun, a utopia describing an egalitarian theocratic society where property is held in common.
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Joan Miró
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
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Nicos Poulantzas
1936 - 1979 (43 years)
Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading structural Marxist; while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of the "democratic road to socialism." He is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s, such as Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's in Portugal, an...
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Paul Natorp
1854 - 1924 (70 years)
Paul Gerhard Natorp was a German philosopher and educationalist, considered one of the co-founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He was known as an authority on Plato. Biography Paul Natorp was born in Düsseldorf, the son of the Protestant minister Adelbert Natorp and his wife Emilie Keller. From 1871 he studied music, history, classical philology and philosophy in Berlin, Bonn and Strasbourg. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1876 at the University of Strasbourg under the supervision of the philosopher Ernst Laas and in 1881 completed his Habilitation under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.
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Joseph Dalton Hooker
1817 - 1911 (94 years)
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
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Oswald Külpe
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Oswald Külpe was a German structural psychologist of the late 19th and early 20th century. Külpe, who is lesser known than his German mentor, Wilhelm Wundt, revolutionized experimental psychology at his time. In his obituary, Aloys Fischer wrote that, “undoubtedly Külpe was the second founder of experimental psychology on German soil; for with every change of base he made it a requirement that an experimental laboratory should be provided.”
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Chaerephon
401 BC - 401 BC (0 years)
Chaerephon , of the Athenian deme Sphettus, was an ancient Greek best remembered as a loyal friend and follower of Socrates. He is known only through brief descriptions by classical writers and was "an unusual man by all accounts", though a man of loyal democratic values.
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Fernando Pessoa
1888 - 1935 (47 years)
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.
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Rudolf Eisler
1873 - 1926 (53 years)
Rudolf Eisler was an Austrian philosopher. Biography Rudolf Eisler was born in Vienna to a family of wealthy Jewish merchants. As a student of Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Eisler studied philosophy at Leipzig University and earned his Ph.D. there. In addition to Immanuel Kant, his philosophical writings, particularly those concerning phenomenalism, were largely influenced by Wundt, as well as Hermann Cohen and Edmund Husserl.
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Franz Rosenzweig
1886 - 1929 (43 years)
Franz Rosenzweig was a German theologian, philosopher, and translator. Early life and education Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany, to an affluent, minimally observant Jewish family. His father owned a factory for dyestuff and was a city council member. Through his granduncle, Adam Rosenzweig, he came in contact with traditional Judaism and was inspired to request Hebrew lessons when he was around 11 years old. Yet he did not learn of Sabbat eve until after he was in college. He started to study medicine for five semesters in Göttingen, Munich, and Freiburg. In 1907 he changed subje...
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Isaac Beeckman
1588 - 1637 (49 years)
Isaac Beeckman was a Dutch philosopher and scientist, who, through his studies and contact with leading natural philosopherss, may have "virtually given birth to modern atomism". Biography Beeckman was born in Middelburg, Zeeland, to a strongly Calvinistic family, which had fled from the Spanish-controlled Southern Netherlands a few years before. He had a strong early education in his home town and went on to study theology, literature and mathematics in Leiden. Upon his return to Middelburg he could not find a position as a minister, due to clashing ideas of his father and the local church, ...
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Louis Couturat
1868 - 1914 (46 years)
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist. Couturat was a pioneer of the constructed language Ido. Life and education Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France. In 1887 he entered École Normale Supérieure to study philosophy and mathematics. In 1895 he lectured in philosophy at the University of Toulouse and 1897 lectured in philosophy of mathematics at the University of Caen Normandy, taking a stand in favor of transfinite numbers. After a time in Hanover studying the writings of Leibniz, he became an assistant to Henri-Louis Bergson at the Collège de France i...
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Solomon ibn Gabirol
1021 - 1058 (37 years)
Solomon ibn Gabirol or Solomon ben Judah was an 11th-century Andalusian poet and Jewish philosopher in the Neo-Platonic tradition. He published over a hundred poems, as well as works of biblical exegesis, philosophy, ethics and satire. One source credits ibn Gabirol with creating a golem, possibly female, for household chores.
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Ludvig Holberg
1684 - 1754 (70 years)
Ludvig Holberg, Baron of Holberg was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright born in Bergen, Norway, during the time of the Dano–Norwegian dual monarchy. He was influenced by Humanism, the Enlightenment and the Baroque. Holberg is considered the founder of modern Danish and Norwegian literature. He was also a prominent Neo-Latin author, known across Europe for his writing. He is best known for the comedies he wrote in 1722–1723 for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre in Copenhagen. Holberg's works about natural and common law were widely read by many Danish law students over two hu...
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Marin Mersenne
1588 - 1648 (60 years)
Marin Mersenne, OM was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those written in the form for some integer . He also developed Mersenne's laws, which describe the harmonics of a vibrating string , and his seminal work on music theory, Harmonie universelle, for which he is referred to as the "father of acoustics". Mersenne, an ordained Catholic priest, had many contacts in the scientific world and has been called "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of ...
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Pausanias
110 - 180 (70 years)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.
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Hegesias of Cyrene
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Hegesias of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher. He argued that eudaimonia is impossible to achieve, and that the goal of life should be the avoidance of pain and sorrow. Conventional values such as wealth, poverty, freedom, and slavery are all indifferent and produce no more pleasure than pain. Cicero claims that Hegesias wrote a book called ἀποκαρτερῶν , which persuaded so many people that death is more desirable than life that Hegesias was banned from teaching in Alexandria. It has been thought by some that Hegesias was influenced by Buddhist teachings.
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Édouard Le Roy
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Édouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Le Roy was a French philosopher and mathematician. Life Le Roy entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1892, and received the agrégation in mathematics in 1895. He became Doctor in Sciences in 1898, taught in several high schools, and became in 1909 professor of mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris.
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Morris Raphael Cohen
1880 - 1947 (67 years)
Morris Raphael Cohen was an American judicial philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar who united pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis. This union coalesced into the "objective relativism" fermenting at Columbia University before and during the early twentieth-century interwar period. He was father to Felix S. Cohen and Leonora Cohen Rosenfield.
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Apuleius
125 - 170 (45 years)
Apuleius was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He was born in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day M'Daourouch, Algeria. He studied Platonism in Athens, travelled to Italy, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the attentions of a wealthy widow. He declaimed and then distributed his own defense before the proconsul and a court of magistrates convened in Sabratha, near Oea . This is known as th...
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Cerinthus
100 - 200 (100 years)
Cerinthus was an early Gnostic, who was prominent as a heresiarch in the view of the early Church Fathers. Contrary to the Church Fathers, he used the Gospel of Cerinthus, and denied that the Supreme God made the physical world. In Cerinthus' interpretation, the Christ descended upon Jesus at baptism and guided him in ministry and the performing of miracles, but left him at the crucifixion. Similarly to the Ebionites, he maintained that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but was a mere man, the biological son of Mary and Joseph.
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Michel Aflaq
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Michel Aflaq was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution .
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Benjamin Tucker
1854 - 1939 (85 years)
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was an American individualist anarchist. Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty . Tucker was a member of the First International, with his publication Liberty represented as the English language organ for the Socialistic-Revolutionary Congress. Tucker described his form of anarchism as "consistent Manchesterism" and stated that "the Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats."
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Magnus Hirschfeld
1868 - 1935 (67 years)
Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.
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Afrikan Spir
1837 - 1890 (53 years)
Afrikan Aleksandrovich Spir was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher of German-Greek descent who wrote primarily in German, but also French. His book Denken und Wirklichkeit had a significant influence on several eminent philosophers, scholars and writers such as Hans Vaihinger, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Leo Tolstoy and Rudolf Steiner.
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Vincenzo Gioberti
1801 - 1852 (51 years)
Vincenzo Gioberti was an Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, publicist and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Sardinia from 1848 to 1849. He was a prominent spokesman for liberal Catholicism.
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Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus
1796 - 1862 (66 years)
Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus was a German philosopher best known for his exegetical work on philosophy, such as his characterisation of Hegel's dialectic as a triad of "thesis–antithesis–synthesis."
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August Cieszkowski
1814 - 1894 (80 years)
Count August Dołęga Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist and social and political activist. His Hegelian philosophy influenced the young Karl Marx and action theorists. Biography Cieszkowski was born in Nowa Sucha, in the Duchy of Warsaw. He studied at the Jagiellonian University and in then, from 1832, at the University of Berlin where he became interested in Hegelianism through the lectures of Karl Ludwig Michelet, who became a lifelong friend. He gained his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1838. After his studies he travelled around Europe, visiting France, ...
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Olympiodorus the Younger
495 - 570 (75 years)
Olympiodorus the Younger was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astrologer and teacher who lived in the early years of the Byzantine Empire, after Justinian's Decree of 529 AD which closed Plato's Academy in Athens and other pagan schools. Olympiodorus was the last pagan to maintain the Platonist tradition in Alexandria ; after his death the School passed into the hands of Christian Aristotelians, and was eventually moved to Constantinople. He is not to be confused with Olympiodorus the Deacon, a contemporary Alexandrian writer of Bible commentaries.
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Cheng Yi
1033 - 1107 (74 years)
Cheng Yi , also known by various other names and romanizations, was a Chinese classicist, essayist, philosopher, and politician of the Song Dynasty. He worked with his older brother Cheng Hao. Like his brother, he was a student of Zhou Dunyi, a friend of Shao Yong, and a nephew of Zhang Zai. The five of them along with Sima Guang are called the Six Great Masters by his follower Zhu Xi. He became a prominent figure in neo-Confucianism, and the philosophy of Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao and Zhu Xi is referred to as the Cheng–Zhu school or the Rationalistic School.
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Christian August Crusius
1715 - 1775 (60 years)
Christian August Crusius was a German philosopher and Protestant theologian. Biography Crusius was born in Leuna in the Electorate of Saxony. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, and became professor of theology there in 1750, and principal in 1773.
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Paramahansa Yogananda
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Paramahansa Yogananda was an Indian Hindu monk, yogi and guru who introduced millions to meditation and Kriya Yoga through his organization, Self-Realization Fellowship / Yogoda Satsanga Society of India – the only one he created to disseminate his teachings. A chief disciple of the yoga guru Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, he was sent by his lineage to spread the teachings of yoga to the West. He immigrated to America at the age of 27 to prove the unity between Eastern and Western religions and to preach a balance between Western material growth and Indian spirituality. His long-standing influen...
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J. Marion Sims
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
James Marion Sims was an American physician in the field of surgery. His most famous work was the development of a surgical technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistula, a severe complication of obstructed childbirth. He is also remembered for inventing the Sims speculum, Sims sigmoid catheter, and the Sims position. Against significant opposition, he established, in New York, the first hospital specifically for women. He was forced out of the hospital he founded because he insisted on treating cancer patients; he played a small role in the creation of the nation's first cancer hospital,...
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Ernst Meumann
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Meumann was a German educator, pedagogist and psychologist, the founder of experimental pedagogy. Works Die Sprache des Kindes Über Ökonomie und Technik des Lernens Der Verzug des Schuldners nach dem Recht des BGB für das Deutsche Reich Intelligenz und Wille. Ökonomie und Technik des Gedächtnisses Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die experimentelle Pädagogik System der Ästhetik Abriss der experimentellen Pädagogik The psychology of learning: an experimental investigation of the economy and technique of memory. 2012, Nabu press. ISBN 9781279520284
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Calcidius
350 - 350 (0 years)
Calcidius was a 4th-century philosopher who translated the first part of Plato's Timaeus from Greek into Latin around the year 321 and provided with it an extensive commentary. This was likely done for Bishop Hosius of Córdoba. Very little is otherwise known of him.
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Fritz Mauthner
1849 - 1923 (74 years)
Fritz Mauthner was an Austrian philosopher and author of novels, satires, reviews and journalistic works. He was an exponent of philosophical scepticism derived from a critique of human knowledge and of philosophy of language.
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Cebes
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Cebes of Thebes was an Ancient Greek philosopher from Thebes remembered as a disciple of Socrates. One work, known as the Pinax or Tabula, attributed to Cebes still survives, but it is believed to be a composition by a pseudonymous author of the 1st or 2nd century CE.
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Archelaus
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Archelaus was an Ancient Greek philosopher, a pupil of Anaxagoras, and may have been a teacher of Socrates. He asserted that the principle of motion was the separation of hot from cold, from which he endeavoured to explain the formation of the Earth and the creation of animals and humans.
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Christian Hermann Weisse
1801 - 1866 (65 years)
Christian Hermann Weisse was a German Protestant religious philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. He was the son of theologian . Biography Weisse was born in Leipzig, and studied at the university there, at first adhering to the Hegelian school of philosophy. In the course of time, his ideas changed, and became close to those of Schelling in his later years. He developed a new speculative theism, and became an opponent of Hegel's idealism. In his addresses on the future of the Protestant Church , he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus' conceptions of the heavenly Father, the Son of Man and the kingdom of Heaven.
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Paramartha
499 - 569 (70 years)
Paramārtha was an Indian monk from Ujjain, who is best known for his prolific Chinese translations of Buddhist texts during the Six Dynasties era. He is known as one of the four great translators in Chinese Buddhist history . He is also known for the various oral commentaries he gave on his translations which were written down by his disciples . Some of Paramārtha's influential translations include Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa, Asaṅga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha, and Dignāga's Ālambanaparīkṣā & Hastavālaprakaraṇa.
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Wonhyo
617 - 686 (69 years)
Wŏnhyo was one of the most important philosophers and commentators in East Asian Buddhism and the most prolific scholar in Korean Buddhism. As one of the most eminent scholar-monks in East Asian history, his extensive literary output runs to over 80 works in 240 fascicles. His most influential commentaries are those on buddha-nature texts like the *Vajrasamādhisūtra, the Awakening of Faith, and the Mahāparinivāṇasūtra. These works became classics widely respected throughout Korea, China and Japan.
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Arnold Gehlen
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Arnold Gehlen was an influential conservative German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist. Biography Gehlen's major influences while studying philosophy were Hans Driesch, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Max Scheler. Furthermore, he was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and US-American pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and especially George Herbert Mead.
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Eli Siegel
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Eli Siegel was a poet, critic, and educator. He founded Aesthetic Realism, a philosophical movement based in New York City. An idea central to Aesthetic Realism—that every person, place or thing in reality has something in common with all other things—was expressed in the title poem of his first volume, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. His second volume was Hail, American Development.
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Thomas Browne
1605 - 1682 (77 years)
Sir Thomas Browne was an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. His writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry and are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffused with melancholia, Browne's writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre,...
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Báb
1819 - 1850 (31 years)
The Báb was the founder of Bábism, and one of the central figures of the Baháʼí Faith. He was a merchant from Shiraz in Qajar Iran who, in 1844 at the age of 25, claimed to be a messenger of God. He was acclaimed by his followers as the Báb , a reference to the deputy of the Hidden Imam, while instigating a millenarian movement — which proposed the abrogation of Islamic laws and traditions — and the establishment of a new religion. Though he was popular among the lower classes, he faced opposition from the orthodox clergy and government, which eventually executed him and thousands of his foll...
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Hans Cornelius
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
Johannes Wilhelm Cornelius was a German neo-Kantian philosopher and psychologist. Biography Born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria on 27 September 1863. He originally studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, graduating with a Ph.D. in 1886, before turning to philosophy. In 1894, he habilitated in philosophy and subsequently held a post in philosophy at the University of Munich . In 1910, Cornelius moved as a full professor to the Akademie für Sozialwissenschaften, which four years later would become a department of the newly founded University of Frankfurt. Among his students in Frankfurt wer...
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H. Richard Niebuhr
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Helmut Richard Niebuhr is considered one of the most important Christian theological ethicists in 20th-century America, best known for his 1951 book Christ and Culture and his posthumously published book The Responsible Self. The younger brother of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Niebuhr taught for several decades at the Yale Divinity School. Both brothers were, in their day, important figures in the neo-orthodox theological school within American Protestantism. His theology has been one of the main sources of postliberal theology, sometimes called the "Yale school". He influenced suc...
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Euhemerus
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Euhemerus was a Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messina in Sicily as the most probable location, while others suggest Chios or Tegea.
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Charles Batteux
1713 - 1780 (67 years)
Charles Batteux was a French philosopher and writer on aesthetics. Biography Batteux was born in Alland'Huy-et-Sausseuil, Ardennes, and studied theology at Reims. In 1739 he came to Paris, and after teaching in the colleges of Lisieux and Navarre, was appointed to the chair of Greek and Roman philosophy in the Collège de France. His 1746 treatise Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe was an attempt to find a unity among existing theories of beauty and taste on "a single principle", and its views were widely accepted, not only in France but throughout Europe.
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Athenagoras of Athens
133 - 190 (57 years)
Athenagoras was a Father of the Church, an Ante-Nicene Christian apologist who lived during the second half of the 2nd century of whom little is known for certain, besides that he was Athenian , a philosopher, and a convert to Christianity.
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