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
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
1540 - 1640 (100 years)
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī was an Indian philosopher in the Advaita Vedānta tradition and devotee of Krishna. He was the disciple of Viśveśvara Sarasvatī and Mādhava Sarasvatī, and is the most celebrated name in the annals of the great debate between Dvaita and Advaita schools of Vedanta. The Nyayamṛta of Vyasatirtha, a text criticising the Advaita view, caused a furore in the Advaita community resulting in a series of scholarly debates over centuries. Madhusūdana composed Advaitasiddhi, a line-by-line refutation of Nyayamṛta. In response to Advaitasiddhi, the Dvaita scholars, Vyasa Ramacharya, an...
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Karl Fortlage
1806 - 1881 (75 years)
Karl Fortlage was a German philosopher. Biography Born in Osnabrück, Fortlage taught in Heidelberg and Berlin before becoming professor of philosophy at Jena in 1846 , a post he held until his death. Originally a follower of Hegel, he turned to Fichte and the psychologist Friedrich Eduard Beneke, agreeing with his assertion that psychology is the basis of all philosophy. The fundamental idea of his psychology is impulse, which combines representation and feeling . Reason is the highest thing in nature, i.e. it is divine in its nature. God is the absolute Ego, and the empirical egos are his i...
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Havelock Ellis
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Henry Havelock Ellis was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He developed the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.
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René Laennec
1781 - 1826 (45 years)
René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was a French physician and musician. His skill at carving his own wooden flutes led him to invent the stethoscope in 1816, while working at the Hôpital Necker. He pioneered its use in diagnosing various chest conditions. He became a lecturer at the Collège de France in 1822 and professor of medicine in 1823. His final appointments were that of head of the medical clinic at the Hôpital de la Charité and professor at the Collège de France. He went into a coma and subsequently died of tuberculosis on August 13, 1826 at age 45.
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Paul-Louis Couchoud
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Paul-Louis Couchoud was a French philosopher, a graduate from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a physician, a man of letters, and a poet. He became well known as an adapter of Japanese haiku into French, an editor of Reviews, a translator, and a writer promoting the German thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus Christ.
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Antoine Galland
1646 - 1715 (69 years)
Antoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, which he called Les mille et une nuits. His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
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Leonidas Polk
1806 - 1864 (58 years)
Lieutenant-General Leonidas Polk was a bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and founder of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America, which separated from the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. He was a planter in Maury County, Tennessee, and a second cousin of President James K. Polk. He resigned his ecclesiastical position to become a major-general in the Confederate States Army, when he was called "Sewanee's Fighting Bishop". His official portrait at the University of the South depicts him as a bishop with his army uniform hanging nearby. He is often erroneously referred to as "Leonidas K.
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Daniel Maichel
1693 - 1752 (59 years)
Daniel Maichel was a German professor of philosophy, theology, logic, physics, rights and politics. He studied protestant theology in Tübingen and earned a master's degree in 1713. Maichel was born in Stuttgart and died in Königsbronn.
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Otto Buek
1873 - 1966 (93 years)
Otto Buek was a German philosopher and translator born in St. Petersburg. He studied philosophy, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Heidelberg, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Marburg. Later he worked as a journalist in Berlin, where he translated works of Tolstoy, Unamuno and Alexander Herzen. Additionally, with Kurt Wildhagen , he edited works by Turgenev, Gogol and two volumes of Ernst Cassirer's edition of Kant's collected writings. During the 1920s, he worked as a correspondent for the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
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Benedykt Dybowski
1833 - 1930 (97 years)
Benedykt Tadeusz Dybowski was a Polish naturalist and physician. Life Benedykt Dybowski was born in Adamaryni, within the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire to Polish nobility. He was the brother of naturalist Władysław Dybowski and the cousin of the French explorer Jean Dybowski.
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Sallustius of Emesa
450 - Present (1576 years)
Sallustius of Emesa was a Cynic philosopher, who lived in the latter part of the 5th century AD. Biography Sallustius' father Basilides was a Syrian; his mother Theoclea a native of Emesa, where probably Sallustius was born, and where he lived during the earlier part of his life. He applied himself first to the study of jurisprudence, and studied the art of oratory under the tuition of Eunoius at Emesa. He subsequently abandoned his forensic studies, and took up the profession of a sophist. He directed his attention especially to the Attic orators, and learnt all the orations of Demosthenes by heart.
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Wilmar Maarten Wiersinga
#16863
Maria Bezobrazova
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Maria Vladimirovna Bezobrazova was a philosopher, historiographer, educator, journalist and women's rights activist from the Russian Empire. She was "the first among Russian women to receive training in philosophy".
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Nariman Narimanov
1870 - 1925 (55 years)
Nariman Karbalayi Najaf oghlu Narimanov was an Azerbaijani Bolshevik revolutionary, writer, publicist, politician and statesman. For just over one year beginning in May 1920, Narimanov headed the government of Soviet Azerbaijan. He was subsequently elected chairman of the Union Council of the Transcaucasian SFSR. He was also Party Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union from 30 December 1922 until the day of his death.
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Isaak Iselin
1728 - 1782 (54 years)
Isaak Iselin was a Swiss philosopher of history and politics. Iselin studied law and philosophy at the University of Basel and the University of Göttingen. In 1756 he became secretary of the republic of Basel. He was a co-founder of the Helvetic Society, the first national Swiss reform society.
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Teodoro de Almeida
1722 - 1804 (82 years)
Teodoro de Almeida was a Portuguese Catholic priest, member of the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, a writer and philosopher, and a leading personage of the Portuguese Enlightenment.
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Johann Friedrich Flatt
1759 - 1821 (62 years)
Johann Friedrich Flatt was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher. Life Johann Friedrich Flatt was born in Tübingen. His brother, Karl Christian Flatt , was also a theologian. He studied philosophy and theology in Tübingen, afterwards continuing his education in Göttingen. In 1785 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where in 1792 he was appointed an associate professor of theology. In 1798 he succeeded Gottlob Christian Storr as a full professor of theology at Tübingen.
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Hendrik van Eikema Hommes
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Hendrik Jan van Eikema Hommes was a noted Dutch legal scholar and successor to Herman Dooyeweerd in the post of philosopher and judicial scholar at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Van Eikema Hommes wrote an Introduction to the Philosophy of Dooyeweerd, along with numerous legal studies. He was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.
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Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen
1663 - 1727 (64 years)
Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen was a 17th-century German philologist. Biography He received his master's degree from the University of Leipzig in 1685. His dissertation, titled Disputationem Moralem de Divortiis Secundum Jus Naturae , was written under the direction of his father in law and advisor Otto Mencke. He was from 1692 until the time of his death a professor of Near Eastern languages and university librarian at the University of Wittenberg, and gave courses there in Philosophy and Hebrew.
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Oliva Sabuco
1562 - 1622 (60 years)
Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera was a Spanish writer in holistic medical philosophy in the late 16th – early 17th century. She was interested in the interaction between the physical and psychological phenomena; therefore she wrote a collection of medical and psychological treatises that target human nature and explain the effects of emotions on the body and soul. She analyzed theoretical claims of ancient philosophers and wrote an early theory of what is now considered applied psychology.
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Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff
1782 - 1863 (81 years)
Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff was a German philosopher and theologian. Life He was born in Berlin. The son of a musician, from the age of twelve Trahndorff attended the school in Oels , where his father had been appointed chapel director by the Prinz von Brunswick-Lüneburg, Frederick August I. From 1801 he studied theology and philology in Königsberg, and on completion of his studies he began a career as a high-school teacher, mostly at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin but with several years in Białystok .
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Alton Ochsner
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Alton Ochsner Sr. was an American surgeon and medical researcher who worked at Tulane University and other New Orleans hospitals before he established The Ochsner Clinic. Now known as Ochsner Medical Center, the clinic is the flagship hospital of Ochsner Health System. Among its many services are heart transplants.
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Giuseppe Rensi
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Giuseppe Rensi was an Italian philosopher. Early life and education Giuseppe Rensi's father Gaetano was a doctor; his mother was Emilia Wallner, and he also had a sister, Teresa. He attended high school in Verona, then studied law, first in Padua and then in Rome, where he graduated in 1893. As a young man he began to collaborate on socialist-inspired periodicals, for example the Rivista popolare, directed by Napoleone Colajanni, and the Critica Sociale, directed by Filippo Turati. At Turati's invitation he moved to Milan where he began regularly to frequent socialist circles. He also worked...
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Damaris Cudworth Masham
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham was an English writer, philosopher, theologian, and advocate for women's education who is often characterized as a proto-feminist. She overcame some weakness of eyesight and lack of access to formal higher education to win high regard among eminent thinkers of her time. With an extensive correspondence, she published two works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life . She is particularly noted for her long, mutually-influential friendship with the philosopher John Locke.
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Brian Houghton Hodgson
1800 - 1894 (94 years)
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.
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Francesco Robortello
1516 - 1567 (51 years)
Francesco Robortello was a Renaissance humanist, nicknamed Canis grammaticus for his confrontational and demanding manner. As scholar Robortello, who was born in Udine, was an editor of rediscovered works of Antiquity, who taught philosophy and rhetoric, as well as ethics , and Latin and Greek, roving from Padua through universities at Lucca, Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna before finally returning to Padua in 1560.
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C. E. M. Joad
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was an English philosopher, author, teacher and broadcasting personality. He appeared on The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio wartime discussion programme. He popularised philosophy and became a celebrity, before his downfall in a scandal over an unpaid train fare in 1948.
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Khalifa Abdul Hakim
1893 - 1959 (66 years)
Khalifa Abdul Hakeem was a Pakistani philosopher, poet, critic, researcher, philologist, translator, and former professor of philosophy at Osmania University. He was the former director of Islamic Culture Institute, Lahore.
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Bolus of Mendes
300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)
Bolus of Mendes was a philosopher, a neopythagorean writer of works of esoterica and medicine, in Ptolemaic Egypt. Both the Suda, and a later work mistakenly attributed to Eudokia Makrembolitissa—; Bed of Violets, probably a 16th-century forgery by Constantine Paleocappa—write of a Pythagorean philosopher of Mendes in Egypt. He is described as one who wrote on marvels, potent remedies, and astronomical phenomena. The Suda, however, also describes a separate Bolus who was a philosopher of the school of Democritus, who wrote Inquiry, and Medical Art, containing "natural medical remedies from so...
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Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet
1707 - 1782 (75 years)
Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet was a British physician who has been called the "father of military medicine" . Biography Youth and early career John Pringle was the youngest son of Sir John Pringle, 2nd Baronet, of Stichill, Roxburghshire , by his spouse Magdalen , daughter of Sir Gilbert Eliott, 3rd Baronet, of Stobs.
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Miura Baien
1723 - 1789 (66 years)
In Japanese names here, surname is first. "Baien" was a pen-name, "plum garden". was a Japanese philosopher and scholar of the Tokugawa era. Life Born as Miura Susumu into the family of a village physician in the present Ōita Prefecture on the island of Kyūshū, he became himself a physician and declined invitations to take office in the service of a local feudal lord. Complex and enigmatic, his philosophical work fell into obscurity after his death until the two volumes of Baien Zenshū were published in 1912. They received little attention apart from the 1953 publication of Saegusa Hiroto...
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Ernst Marcus
1856 - 1928 (72 years)
Ernst Moses Marcus was a German lawyer and philosopher. He developed a theory of aether based on Immanuel Kant's posthumous work Opus Postumum, however sharply disagreeing with Erich Adickes interpretation. He used this to mount a criticism of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. He was a major influence on Salomo Friedlaender.
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Roberto Bernabei
#16884
Gómez Pereira
1500 - 1567 (67 years)
Gómez Pereira was a Spanish philosopher, doctor, and natural humanist from Medina del Campo. Pereira worked hard to dispel medieval concepts of medicine and proposed the application of empirical methods; as for his philosophy, it is of the standard direction and his reasonings are a clear precedent of René Descartes. He was the first to propose the famous "Cogito ergo sum", in 1554, commonly attributed to Descartes. He was famous for his practice of medicine, although he had many diverse occupations, such as owning businesses, engineering, and philosophy.
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Hendrik Verwoerd
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd , also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, scholar, and newspaper editor who served as Prime Minister of South Africa and is commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid. Verwoerd played a significant role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies, as Minister of Native Affairs and then as prime minister . Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership.
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Hermann Conring
1606 - 1681 (75 years)
Hermann Conring was a German intellectual. He made significant contributions to the study of medicine, politics and law. Descended from Lutheran clergy on both sides of his family, second-youngest of ten children, Conring showed early promise as a student. During his life as a professor in North Germany, Conring addressed himself first to medicine, producing significant studies on blood circulation, and later in his career addressed himself to politics.
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Tafazzul Husain Kashmiri
1727 - 1801 (74 years)
Tafazzul Husain Khan Kashmiri , also known as Khan-e-Allama, was a Twelver Shia scholar, physicist, and philosopher. He produced an Arabic translation of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia. Some of his descendants who are currently living in Lucknow are Husain Abbas, Asher Husain, Muntazir Abbas, Amaan Ali Abbas, Ali Jafar, Rahbar Abbas, Wasif Abbas, Furqan Abbas, Salman Abbas, Nadeem Abbas, etc.
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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
1783 - 1840 (57 years)
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz was a French 19th-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a young man in the United States, ultimately settling in Ohio in 1815, where he made notable contributions to botany, zoology, and the study of prehistoric earthworks in North America. He also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics, in addition to work he had already completed in Europe.
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Arulenus Rusticus
35 - 93 (58 years)
Quintus Junius Arulenus Rusticus was a Roman Senator and a friend and follower of Thrasea Paetus, and like him an ardent admirer of Stoic philosophy. Arulenus Rusticus attained a suffect consulship in the nundinium of September to December 92 with Gaius Julius Silanus as his colleague. He was one of a group of Stoics who opposed the perceived tyranny and autocratic tendencies of certain emperors, known today as the Stoic Opposition.
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Christopher John Bulpitt
#16891
Katharine Gilbert
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
Katharine Everett Gilbert , an American philosopher who studied aesthetics, was one of the first women to be president of the American Philosophical Society. She was also the first female professor at Duke University and, during her lifetime, the only female chairman of a liberal arts department.
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Heber C. Kimball
1801 - 1868 (67 years)
Heber Chase Kimball was a leader in the early Latter Day Saint movement. He served as one of the original twelve apostles in the early Church of the Latter Day Saints, and as first counselor to Brigham Young in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for more than two decades, from 1847 until his death.
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Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi
1236 - 1311 (75 years)
Qotb al-Din Mahmoud b. Zia al-Din Mas'ud b. Mosleh Shirazi was a 13th-century Persian polymath and poet who made contributions to astronomy, mathematics, medicine, physics, music theory, philosophy and Sufism.
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Joseph Škoda
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Joseph Škoda was an Austrian physician, medical professor and dermatologist. Together with Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, he was the founder of the Modern Medical School of Vienna. Life Škoda was born in Pilsen, Kingdom of Bohemia, Austrian Empire, as the second son of a locksmith. He attended the gymnasium at Pilsen, entered the University of Vienna in 1825, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine on 10 July 1831.
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Pierre Lemonnier
1675 - 1757 (82 years)
Pierre Lemonnier was a French astronomer, a professor of Physics and Philosophy at the Collège d'Harcourt , and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Lemonnier published the 6-volume Latin university textbook Cursus philosophicus ad scholarum usum accommodatus which consisted of the following volumes :Volume 1 - LogicaVolume 2 - MetaphysicaVolume 3 - Physica Generalis including mechanics and geometryVolume 4 - Physica Particularis including astronomy , optics, chemistry, gravity, and Newtonian versus Cartesian dynamicsVolume 5 - Physica Particularis including fluid mechanics, human ...
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Irving Thalberg Jr.
1930 - 1987 (57 years)
Irving Grant Thalberg Jr. was an author and the son of 1930s Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and Academy Award-winning actress Norma Shearer. Thalberg was six years old when his father died from pneumonia at the age of 37. He was educated at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and attended Stanford University. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago until he died of cancer on August 21, 1987, four days before his 57th birthday. He left a wife and three daughters. Prior to the University of Illinois, he was briefly a professor at the University of Washington.
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William H. Welch
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Henry Welch was an American physician, pathologist, bacteriologist, and medical-school administrator. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and was also the founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country. Welch was more known for his cogent summations of current scientific work, than his own scientific research. The Johns Hopkins medical school library is also named after Welch. In his lifetime, he was called the "...
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Robert Steele
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Robert Steele was a British scholar, best known for editing between c. 1905 and 1941 the 16-volume Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Bacon. Early in his life Steele was a disciple of William Morris, who was apparently influential in directing young Steele's attention towards studying medieval writings, and also attracted Steele's political views towards socialism. After studying chemistry, Steele was for a brief time a teacher of this subject at Bedford School. He soon abandoned this job and moved to London where he worked as a freelance journalist, writing for various literary and socialist publications.
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Víctor Li-Carrillo Chía
1929 - 1988 (59 years)
Víctor Li-Carrillo Chía was a Peruvian philosopher. Education and influences He studied at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, then in France and Germany . On these trips he met Victor Goldschmidt and Martin Heidegger, among other famous names in philosophy and world culture. In this first part of his life his philosophical interests were focused on ancient Greek philosophy and language, as well as being heavily influenced by Heidegger, whom he recognizes as a teacher.
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Franz Xaver Winterhalter
1805 - 1873 (68 years)
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a German painter and lithographer, known for his flattering portraits of royalty and upper-class society in the mid-19th century. His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture. Among his best known works are Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting and the portraits he made of Empress Elisabeth of Austria .
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