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,
#16851
Joaquim Carreras i Artau
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Joaquim Carreras i Artau was a Catalan philosopher. He began his studies of scholastic philosophy at the Girona Seminary, where he stayed for ten years. Later he graduated from the University of Barcelona with BAs in Law and Philosophy. The thesis Ensayo sobre el voluntarismo de J. Duns Scoto gave him a Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Madrid. He taught both at secondary schools and at the University of Barcelona from 1939 to 1964, first as a teaching assistant and, for the last twelve years, as professor.
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Hans Joachim Moser
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Hans Joachim Moser was a German musicologist, composer and singer. Moser was the son of the music-professor Andreas Moser , a pupil and important early biographer of Joseph Joachim. He studied the History of Music , German philology and Philosophy in Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig, and studied violin with his father. With the work Musical Confederations in the German Middle Ages he obtained his doctorate in 1910 at Rostock.
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Terpsion
450 BC - Present (2476 years)
Terpsion of Megara is a speaker in Plato's dialogues. In the frame story which serves as the prologue to Plato's Theaetetus, Terpsion asks his friend Euclid of Megara to recount the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus. Terpsion also appears in the Phaedo as one of the people who was present at the death of Socrates. Debra Nails states that nothing else reliable can be determined about Terpsion, and all later sources that mention him, such as Plutarch and the pseudonymous Socratic letters, are derived from the account in Plato's dialogues.
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Saint Lucy
283 - 304 (21 years)
Lucia of Syracuse , also called Saint Lucia was a Roman Christian martyr who died during the Diocletianic Persecution. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox churches. She is one of eight women explicitly commemorated by Catholics in the Canon of the Mass. Her traditional feast day, known in Europe as Saint Lucy's Day, is observed by Western Christians on 13 December. Lucia of Syracuse was honored in the Middle Ages and remained a well-known saint in early modern England. She is one of the best known virgin martyrs, along with Agatha of Sicily,...
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Giuseppe Furlani
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Giuseppe Furlani was an Italian archaeologist, orientalist, philologist, and historian of religions, and the founder of Italian Assyriology and Hittite studies. Biography Giuseppe Furlani was born on 10 November 1885 in Pula in Croatia, at the time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Francesco and Luigia Damiani. In 1908, he graduated in law, and in 1913 in philosophy at the University of Graz.
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Seo Gyeong-deok
1489 - 1546 (57 years)
Seo Gyeong-deok was a Korean Neo-Confucianist philosopher during the Joseon Dynasty. His philosophy studied materialism and phenomenology based on ancient taoist philosophy theories absorbed by neoconfucianism, like Yin and Yang and Ki.
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Joseph Hillebrand
1788 - 1871 (83 years)
Joseph Hillebrand was a German novelist, philosopher and historian of literature. Biography He was originally a Catholic, studied at Hildesheim and at Göttingen, and in 1815 entered the priesthood and taught at Hildesheim, but resigned his position on accepting Protestant views. Upon Hegel's departure from the University of Heidelberg in 1818, he was appointed a professor of philosophy there, and in 1822 took a like position at the University of Giessen. He was elected to the lower house of the Hessian chamber in 1847, where he took the side of the liberals and became president in 1848. When ...
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Menedemus
340 BC - 265 BC (75 years)
Menedemus of Eretria was a Greek philosopher and founder of the Eretrian school. He learned philosophy first in Athens, and then, with his friend Asclepiades, he subsequently studied under Stilpo and Phaedo of Elis. Nothing survives of his philosophical views apart from a few scattered remarks recorded by later writers.
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Hayashi Gahō
1618 - 1688 (70 years)
Hayashi Gahō, also known as Hayashi Shunsai|林 春斎|, was a Japanese Neo-Confucian philosopher and writer in the system of higher education maintained by the Tokugawa bakufu during the Edo period. He was a member of the Hayashi clan of Confucian scholars.
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Paul the Persian
550 - 600 (50 years)
Paul the Persian or Paulus Persa was a 6th-century East Syriac theologian and philosopher who worked at the court of the Sassanid king Khosrau I. He wrote several treatises and commentaries on Aristotle, which had some influence on medieval Islamic philosophy. He is identified by some scholars with Paulus of Nisibis and with Paul of Basra. According to Jackson, he was "a Christian who may have studied Greek philosophy in the schools of Nisibis and Gundeshapur". He is remembered for his writings in Syriac for his royal patron. These include his notes in Syriac on Aristotle's Logic, in which he...
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Emil Filla
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Emil Filla was a Czech painter. He was a leader of the avant-garde in Prague between World War I and World War II and was an early Cubist painter. Early life Filla was born in Chropyně, Moravia, and spent his childhood in Brno, but later moved to Prague. Beginning in 1903, he studied at , but he left the school in 1906.
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David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville
1770 - 1849 (79 years)
David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville was a Dutch artist and art scholar. He was a draughtsman, lithographer, etcher, and portrait painter, and also wrote treatises on art, including the influential work Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l'art . His 1815 painting of the jurist and statesman Johan Melchior Kemper is now part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
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Louis de La Forge
1632 - 1666 (34 years)
Louis de La Forge was a French philosopher who in his Tractatus de mente humana expounded a doctrine of occasionalism. He was born in La Flèche and died in Saumur. He was a friend of Descartes, and one of the most able interpreters of Cartesianism.
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Richard Swineshead
Richard Swineshead was an English mathematician, logician, and natural philosopher. He was perhaps the greatest of the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, where he was a fellow certainly by 1344 and possibly by 1340. His magnum opus was a series of treatises known as the Liber calculationum , written c. 1350, which earned him the nickname of The Calculator.
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Manwel Dimech
1860 - 1921 (61 years)
Manwel Dimech, also known as Manuel Dimech was a Maltese socialist, philosopher, journalist, writer, poet and social revolutionary. Born in Valletta and brought up in extreme poverty and illiteracy, Dimech spent significant portions of his early life in the Maltese prison system, mostly on charges of petty theft. At the age of seventeen, Dimech was arrested for the crime of involuntary murder, and sentenced to seventeen years in jail. After being thrown in jail, Dimech started to educate himself and became a man of letters.
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Howard Atwood Kelly
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Howard Atwood Kelly was an American gynecologist. He obtained his B.A. degree and M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He, William Osler, William Halsted, and William Welch together are known as the "Big Four", the founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He is credited with establishing gynecology as a specialty by developing new surgical approaches to gynecological diseases and pathological research. He also developed several medical innovations, including the improved cystoscope, Kelly's clamp, Kelly's speculum, and Kelly's forceps. Because Kell...
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Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck
1776 - 1858 (82 years)
Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck was a prolific German botanist, physician, zoologist, and natural philosopher. He was a contemporary of Goethe and was born within the lifetime of Linnaeus. He described approximately 7,000 plant species . His last official act as president of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina was to admit Charles Darwin as a member. He was the author of numerous monographs on botany and zoology. His best-known works deal with fungi.
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Thomas Bartholin
1616 - 1680 (64 years)
Thomas Bartholin was a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian. He discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of refrigeration anesthesia, being the first to describe it scientifically.
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Wilbur Kitchener Jordan
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Wilbur Kitchener Jordan , was an American historian, specializing in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain. Raised in Lynnville, Indiana, Jordan received a bachelor's degree from Oakland City College in 1923, before earning a master's and doctoral degree from Harvard University. Jordan went on to become a leading historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, accruing many honors, and producing books, including Men of Substance: Revolutionary Thinkers of 1640 , Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 , and a two-volume study of the reign of Edward VI .
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Girolamo Fracastoro
1478 - 1553 (75 years)
Girolamo Fracastoro was an Italian physician, poet, and scholar in mathematics, geography and astronomy. Fracastoro subscribed to the philosophy of atomism, and rejected appeals to hidden causes in scientific investigation. His studies of the mode of syphilis transmission are an early example of epidemiology.
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Franklin Merrell-Wolff
1887 - 1985 (98 years)
Franklin Merrell-Wolff was an American mystic and esoteric philosopher. After formal education in philosophy and mathematics at Stanford and Harvard, Wolff devoted himself to the goal of transcending the normal limits of human consciousness. After exploring various mystical teachings and paths, he dedicated himself to the path of jnana yoga and the writings of Shankara, the expounder of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy.
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Xu Xing
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Xu Xing was a Chinese philosopher and one of the most notable advocates of the egalitarian political philosophy of agriculturalism. With a group of followers he settled in the state of Teng in about 315 BC. A disciple of his visited the Confucian philosopher Mencius, and a short report of their conversation discussing Xu Xing's philosophy survives.
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Bernard Nieuwentyt
1654 - 1718 (64 years)
Bernard Nieuwentijt, Nieuwentijdt, or Nieuwentyt was a Dutch philosopher, mathematician, physician, magistrate, mayor , and theologian. Career As a philosopher, Nieuwentyt was a follower of Descartes and an opponent of Spinoza. In 1695 he was involved in a controversy over the foundations of infinitesimal calculus with Leibniz. Nieuwentijt advocated 'nilsquare' infinitesimals , whereas Leibniz was uncertain about explicitly adopting such a rule - they did however come to be used throughout physics from then on.
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William Morgan
1750 - 1833 (83 years)
William Morgan, FRS was a British physician, physicist and statistician, who is considered the father of modern actuarial science. He is also credited with being the first to record the "invisible light" produced when a current is passed through a partly evacuated glass tube: "the first x-ray tube".
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Friedrich Jäger von Jaxtthal
1784 - 1871 (87 years)
Christoph Friedrich Jäger Ritter von Jaxtthal was an Austrian ophthalmologist who was a native of Kirchberg an der Jagst. Early life and education He studied medicine in Vienna and Landshut, and in 1809 became a physician in the Napoleonic Wars. He later returned to Vienna, where in 1812 he received his medical degree at the university.
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Vasily Anisimoff
1878 - 1938 (60 years)
Vasily Onisimovich Afanasiev was a revolutionary and a propagandist of Marxism as well as a prominent activist and supporter of the Russian and international Socialist movement. He was among the active members of the RSDLP and was a Menshevik. In 1925, Anisimoff became the deputy head of the economic department of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy of the RSFSR, managing the "Exportles" trust.
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William Stewart Halsted
1852 - 1922 (70 years)
William Stewart Halsted, M.D. was an American surgeon who emphasized strict aseptic technique during surgical procedures, was an early champion of newly discovered anesthetics, and introduced several new operations, including the radical mastectomy for breast cancer. Along with William Osler , Howard Atwood Kelly and William H. Welch , Halsted was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. His operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital is in Ward G, and was described as a small room where medical discoveries and miracles took place. According to an intern who once...
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Anastasio Cuschieri
1876 - 1962 (86 years)
Anastastio Cuschieri was a Maltese poet, politician, and minor philosopher. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta . In philosophy he was mostly interested in ethics. Life Beginnings Cuschieri was born at Valletta, Malta, on 27 January 1876. He joined the Carmelite Order on 25 April 1891, at 19 years of age. That same year he began pursuing his institutional studies in philosophy and theology at the University of Malta. He made his religious profession on 28 August 1892. On completion of his university courses in 1898, Cuschieri was ordained a priest, and sent to Rome, Italy, to pursue studies in philosophy and theology at the Jesuits' Gregorian University.
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Bryson of Achaea
450 BC - 400 BC (50 years)
Bryson of Achaea was an ancient Greek philosopher. Very little information is known about him. He was said to have been a pupil of Stilpo and Clinomachus, which would mean that he was a philosopher of the Megarian school. He was said to have taught Crates the Cynic, Pyrrho the Skeptic, and Theodorus the Atheist. Diogenes Laërtius includes him among a list of philosophers who left no writings.
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Henri François Marion
1846 - 1896 (50 years)
Henri François Marion was a French philosopher and educationalist. Life He was born in Saint-Parize-en-Viry, Nièvre department, on 9 September 1846. He studied at Nevers, and at the École Normale, where he graduated in 1868. After occupying several minor positions, he returned to Paris in 1875 as professor of the Lycée Henri IV, and in 1880 he became Docteur ès lettres. In the same year he was elected a member of the Council of Public Instruction, and devoted himself to improving the scheme of French education, especially in girls' schools. He was largely instrumental in the foundation of eco...
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Theombrotus
Theombrotus was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Cynic school who is said to have thrown himself to his death from a high wall after reading Plato's work on the immortality of the soul and concluding that he would be better off in the next life.
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Ernst Kurth
1886 - 1946 (60 years)
Ernst Kurth was a Swiss music theorist of Austrian origin. Career Kurth studied musicology with Guido Adler in Vienna, and earned his Ph.D. with a thesis about Christoph Willibald Gluck's operatic style. In a relatively short publishing career of about 15 years, Kurth wrote four enormously influential works: Grundlagen des Linearen Kontrapunkts , Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners "Tristan" , Bruckner, and Musikpsychologie. Since the 1940s, Kurth was gradually eclipsed by other theorists . However, his concept of "developmental motif" has remained influential. A developmental motif is one which gradually changes or grows, becoming a structural carrier of formal developments.
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Garegin Nzhdeh
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Garegin Ter-Harutyunyan, better known by his nom de guerre Garegin Nzhdeh , was an Armenian statesman, military commander and nationalist political thinker. As a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, he was involved in the national liberation struggle and revolutionary activities during the First Balkan War and World War I and became one of the key political and military leaders of the First Republic of Armenia . He is widely admired as a charismatic national hero by Armenians.
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Dimitar Dimov
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Dimitar Todorov Dimov was a Bulgarian dramatist, novelist and veterinary surgeon. Biography Born in Lovech, Dimov is best known for his best-selling novel Tobacco which was made into the 1962 film Tobacco directed by Nikola Korabov. The plot of Dimov's Tobacco deals with the fates of a number of characters connected to a major tobacco factory. The central thread of the plot is the story of Boris, an ambitious youth of poor origins who renounces his first love Irina to marry Maria, the heiress of the tobacco business. He proceeds to steer the business with great greed and ruthlessness. His wi...
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Samuel Haughton
1821 - 1897 (76 years)
Samuel Haughton was an Irish clergyman, medical doctor, and scientific writer. Biography The scientist Samuel Haughton was born in Carlow, the son of another Samuel Haughton and grandson of the three-times-married Samuel Pearson Haughton , a Quaker.
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David Renaud Boullier
1699 - 1759 (60 years)
David Renaud Boullier was a Dutch Huguenot theologian, Protestant minister and philosopher. Biography Boullier was born in Utrecht on 24 March 1699. He was educated at Utrech University. He was a Protestant pastor in Amsterdam and was active in London for several years.
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Karl Albert Scherner
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
Karl Albert Scherner was a German philosopher and psychologist. Life Karl Albert Scherner was born on 26 July 1825 in Deutsch-Krawarn, a village on the then border between Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia , near the district capital of Ratibor . He studied at the Gymnasium in Ratibor and in May 1846 went up to the university in Breslau , where he studied Catholic theology. In 1858 he became a Docent in the Philosophy Department of the same university, a position which he held until the winter term of 1871–72. He is said to have given up his university career because of a severe throat condition.
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Samuel de Sorbiere
1615 - 1670 (55 years)
Samuel Sorbière was a French physician and man of letters, a philosopher and translator, who is best known for his promotion of the works of Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi, in whose view of physics he placed his support, though unable to refute René Descartes, but who developed a reputation in his own day for a truculent and disputatious nature. Sorbière is regarded often by his position on ethics and disclosure about medical mistakes. In 1672 Sorbière considered the idea of being honest and upfront about a mistake having been made in medicine but thought that it might seriously jeopard...
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Lala Lajpat Rai
1865 - 1928 (63 years)
Lala Lajpat Rai was an Indian revolutionary, politician, and author, generally known as Lala Lajpat Rai. He was popularly known as Punjab Kesari. He was one of the three members of the Lal Bal Pal trio. He died of severe head trauma injuries sustained 18 days earlier during a baton charge by police in Lahore, when he led a peaceful protest march against the all-British Simon Commission Indian constitutional reforms.
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Marianne Brandt
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.
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Karl Landsteiner
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of fifty five for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.
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Götz Briefs
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Götz Briefs was a Catholic social theorist, social ethicist, social philosopher and political economist, who together with Gustav Gundlach, SJ influenced the social teachings of Pope Pius XI. Biography In 1908, Briefs began to study history and philosophy at the University of Munich. As it was customary in German academic circles at the time, he frequently switched universities, moving in 1909 to Bonn, and later in 1911 to Freiburg. In Freiburg, he became a member of K.D.St. V. Wildenstein Freiburg im Breisgau, a Catholic student fraternity that belong to the Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen.
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John Major
1467 - 1550 (83 years)
John Major was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, and historian who was much admired in his day and was an acknowledged influence on all the great thinkers of the time. A renowned teacher, his works were much collected and frequently republished across Europe. His "sane conservatism" and his sceptical, logical approach to the study of texts such as Aristotle or the Bible were less prized in the subsequent age of humanism, when a more committed and linguistic/literary approach prevailed.
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Johann Martin Chladenius
1710 - 1759 (49 years)
Johann Martin Chladni was a German philosopher, theologian, and historian, who is seen as one of the founders of Hermeneutics. Life He was the son of Martin Chladenius , a professor of theology at Wittenberg University. He attended the Casimirianum Gymnasium in Coburg and enrolled in 1731, at the Wittenberg University, where he received his master's degree in philosophy, and taught after his studies. He went to the University of Leipzig, where he became an associate professor of church antiquities in 1742.
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Joseph Sapiano
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Joseph Sapiano was a Maltese theologian and minor philosopher. In philosophy he was mostly interested in epistemology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta between 1953 and 1971.
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Marjorie Silliman Harris
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Marjorie Silliman Harris was an American philosopher who wrote on the problem of determining meaningfulness in life. Influenced by Auguste Comte, Henri Bergson, and Francisco Romero, she addressed questions related to individual experience and its assimilation or transcendence.
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Cristoforo Landino
1424 - 1498 (74 years)
Cristoforo Landino was an Italian humanist and an important figure of the Florentine Renaissance. Biography From a family with ties to the Casentino, Landino was born in Florence in 1424. He studied law and Greek . Against his father's will he turned away from a career in the law and decided to study philosophy instead, a decision he would not have been able to make but for the patronage of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici. Landino's wife Lucrezia was a member of the Alberti family.
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Sukhlal Sanghvi
1880 - 1978 (98 years)
Sukhlal Sanghvi , also known as Pandit Sukhlalji, was a Jain scholar and philosopher. He belonged to the Sthanakvasi sect of Jainism. Pandit Sukhlal lost his eyesight at the age of sixteen on account of smallpox. However, he persisted and became profoundly versed in Jain logic and rose to become a professor at Banaras Hindu University. Paul Dundas calls him one of the most incisive modern interpreters of Jain philosophy. Dundas notes that Sanghavi represents what now seems to be a virtually lost scholarly and intellectual world. He was a mentor for famous Jain scholar Padmanabh Jaini. During h...
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Nicolaus Taurellus
1547 - 1606 (59 years)
Nicolaus Taurellus was a German philosopher and medical academic. Life He was born in the County of Mömpelgard, then part of the Duchy of Württemberg. With support from Duke Georg I. of Württemberg-Mömpelgard, he read theology at University of Tübingen and medicine at the University of Basel, where he lectured on physical science. He subsequently became professor of medicine at the University of Altdorf. There he died in 1606 from the plague, despite treatment by Ernst Soner.
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