The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#16951
Arend Heyting
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Arend Heyting was a Dutch mathematician and logician. Biography Heyting was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to the formalisation of certain intuitionistic principles .
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Giordano Bruno
1548 - 1600 (52 years)
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets , and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
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Nicolas Malebranche
1638 - 1715 (77 years)
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian Catholic priest and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is best known for his doctrines of vision in God, occasionalism and ontologism.
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Swami Vivekananda
1863 - 1902 (39 years)
Swami Vivekananda , born Narendranath Datta , was an Indian <!--'Bengali' is linked in next paragraph. DO NOT ADD here, please.-->Hindu monk, philosopher, author, religious teacher, and the chief disciple of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. He was a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world, and the Father of modern Indian nationalism who is credited with raising interfaith awareness and bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion.
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Charles Hartshorne
1897 - 2000 (103 years)
Charles Hartshorne was an American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics, but also contributed to ornithology. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument. Hartshorne is also noted for developing Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into process theology.
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Bernard Bolzano
1781 - 1848 (67 years)
Bernard Bolzano was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1908 - 1961 (53 years)
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
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Thomas More
1478 - 1535 (57 years)
Sir Thomas More PC , venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state.
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Theophrastus
371 BC - 287 BC (84 years)
Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher and the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. He was a native of Eresos in Lesbos. His given name was ; his nickname was given by Aristotle, his teacher, for his "divine style of expression".
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Max Scheler
1874 - 1928 (54 years)
Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Given that school's utopian ambitions of re-founding all of human knowledge, Scheler was nicknamed the "Adam of the philosophical paradise" by José Ortega y Gasset.
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Alexander of Aphrodisias
200 - 215 (15 years)
Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle. He was a native of Aphrodisias in Caria and lived and taught in Athens at the beginning of the 3rd century, where he held a position as head of the Peripatetic school. He wrote many commentaries on the works of Aristotle, extant are those on the Prior Analytics, Topics, Meteorology, Sense and Sensibilia, and Metaphysics. Several original treatises also survive, and include a work On Fate, in which he argues against the Stoic doctrine of necessity; and one On the Soul.
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Mulla Sadra
1571 - 1641 (70 years)
Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, more commonly known as Mullā Ṣadrā , was a Persian Twelver Shi'i Islamic mystic, philosopher, theologian, and ‘Ālim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century. According to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years.
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Nikolai Berdyaev
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person. Alternative historical spellings of his surname in English include "Berdiaev" and "Berdiaeff", and of his given name "Nicolas" and "Nicholas". Russian paleontologist and Christian apologist Alexander V. Khramov attributes his ideas about an atemporal human fall to Berdyaev and Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy.
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Al-Ghazali
1058 - 1111 (53 years)
Al-Ghazali , full name , and known in Persian-speaking countries as or in Medieval Europe by the Latinized as Algazelus or Algazel, was a Sunni Muslim polymath. He is known as one of the most prominent and influential jurisconsult, legal theoretician, mufti, philosopher, theologian, logician and mystic in Islamic history.
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Paul Deussen
1845 - 1919 (74 years)
Paul Jakob Deussen was a German Indologist and professor of philosophy at University of Kiel. Strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, Deussen was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and Swami Vivekananda. In 1911, he founded the Schopenhauer Society . Professor Deussen was the first editor, in 1912, of the scholarly journal Schopenhauer Yearbook .
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Anaximenes of Miletus
585 BC - 525 BC (60 years)
Anaximenes of Miletus was an Ancient Greek, Pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Anatolia . He was the last of the three philosophers of the Milesian School, after Thales and Anaximander. These three are regarded by historians as the first philosophers of the Western world. Anaximenes is known for his belief that air is the arche, or the basic element of the universe from which all things are created. Little is known of Anaximenes' life and work, as all of his original texts are lost. Historians and philosophers have reconstructed information about Anaximenes by interpreting texts about him by later writers.
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Roger Bacon
1220 - 1292 (72 years)
Roger Bacon , also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discove...
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Eugène Delacroix
1798 - 1863 (65 years)
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.
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Abhinavagupta
950 - 1020 (70 years)
Abhinavagupta was a philosopher, mystic and aesthetician from Kashmir. He was also considered an influential musician, poet, dramatist, exegete, theologian, and logician – a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture.
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Evald Ilyenkov
1924 - 1979 (55 years)
Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov was a Marxist author and Soviet philosopher. Biography Evald Ilyenkov did original work on the materialist development of Hegel's dialectics, notable for his account of concrete universals. His works include Dialectical Logic , Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism and The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital . Ilyenkov committed suicide in 1979.
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Arthur Koestler
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Arthur Koestler, was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism.
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George Henry Lewes
1817 - 1878 (61 years)
George Henry Lewes was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theatre. He was also an amateur physiologist. American feminist Margaret Fuller called Lewes a "witty, French, flippant sort of man". He became part of the mid-Victorian ferment of ideas which encouraged discussion of Darwinism, positivism, and religious skepticism. However, he is perhaps best known today for having openly lived with Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, as soulmates whose lives and writings were enriched by their relationship, though they never married each other.
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Jean-Marie Guyau
1854 - 1888 (34 years)
Jean-Marie Guyau was a French philosopher and poet. Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry and literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.
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John Austin
1790 - 1859 (69 years)
John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.
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Gustav Shpet
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Gustav Gustavovich Shpet was a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, psychologist, art theoretician, and interpreter of German-Polish descent. He was a student of a well-known Russian psychologist and philosopher George Chelpanov, a follower of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, who introduced Husserlian phenomenology to Russia, modifying the phenomenology which he found in Husserl. Shpet was a Vice president of the Russian State Academy of Arts in Moscow . Shpet is an author of many books, including his famous A View on the History of Russian philosophy and The Hermeneutics and its pr...
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Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa
770 - 830 (60 years)
was an Indian philosopher known for his radical skepticism who most likely flourished between 800-840 probably in southern India. He was the author of one of the most extraordinary philosophical works in Indian history, the Tattvopaplavasiṃha in which he professed radical skepticism, which posits the impossibility of knowledge. In his work, he attempts to show the contradictions of various philosophical positions as well as the counter positions. He is loosely affiliated to the materialist Cārvāka/Lokāyata school of philosophy but his affiliation with charvaka is disputed among scholars. H...
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Speusippus
407 BC - 339 BC (68 years)
Speusippus was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, c. 348 BC, Speusippus inherited the Academy, near age 60, and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, Speusippus frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimate principle, Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to h...
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Arrian
89 - 175 (86 years)
Arrian of Nicomedia was a Greek historian, public servant, military commander, and philosopher of the Roman period. The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian is considered the best source on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Scholars have generally preferred Arrian to other extant primary sources, though this attitude has changed somewhat in light of modern studies into Arrian's method.
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Nae Ionescu
1890 - 1940 (50 years)
Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.
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Maurice Solovine
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Maurice Solovine was a Romanian philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his association with Albert Einstein. Biography Solovine was born in Iași, a university city in eastern Romania, near the border with Moldova. As a young student of philosophy in Bern, Solovine applied to study physics with Albert Einstein in response to an advertisement. The two men struck up a close relationship and Einstein was said to say to Solovine a few days after meeting him: "It is not necessary to give you lessons in physics. The discussion about the problems which we face in physics today is much more interesting; simply come to me when you wish.
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Cato the Younger
95 BC - 46 BC (49 years)
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , also known as Cato the Younger , was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. His conservative principles were focused on the preservation of what he saw as old Roman values in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a powerful political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day.
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T. H. Green
1836 - 1882 (46 years)
Thomas Hill Green , known as T. H. Green, was an English philosopher, political radical and temperance reformer, and a member of the British idealism movement. Like all the British idealists, Green was influenced by the metaphysical historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. He was one of the thinkers behind the philosophy of social liberalism.
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Fernand Léger
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art.
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Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
1150 - 1210 (60 years)
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī or Fakhruddin Razi , often known by the sobriquet Sultan of the Theologians, was an influential Muslim polymath, scientist and one of the pioneers of inductive logic. He wrote various works in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, literature, theology, ontology, philosophy, history and jurisprudence. He was one of the earliest proponents and skeptics that came up with the concept of multiverse, and compared it with the astronomical teachings of Quran. A rejector of the geocentric model and the Aristotelian notions of a single universe revolvin...
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Hadi Sabzavari
1797 - 1873 (76 years)
Hadi Sabzavari or Hajj Molla Hadi Sabzavari was an Iranian philosopher, mystic theologian and poet. Historical background Molla Hadi lived in the Qajar period. According to his description, this period was along with descend of Hikmah; he also complained of his period for the sake of lacking knowledge and philosophy. This kind of thinking was common among Islamic philosophers. There was an intellectual and spiritual turmoil in the Qajar period. In fact, in this period, Iranian encountered with new European thought and revival of traditional thinking; also in this period we can see the divers...
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Piero Martinetti
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Piero Martinetti was an Italian philosopher. Martinetti was professor of theoretical and moral philosophy. He was one of the few university professors, as well as the only Italian academic philosopher, to refuse to swear an oath of allegiance to the Fascist Party.
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John Dee
1527 - 1608 (81 years)
John Dee was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated the foundation of English colonies in the New World to form a "British Empire", a term he is credited with coining.
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Gaunilo of Marmoutiers
994 - 1083 (89 years)
Gaunilo or Gaunillon was a Benedictine monk of Marmoutier Abbey in Tours, France. He is best known for his contemporary criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God which appeared in St Anselm's Proslogion. In his work In Behalf of the Fool, Gaunilo contends that St Anselm's ontological argument fails because logic of the same kind would force one to conclude many things exist which certainly do not. An empiricist, Gaunilo thought that the human intellect is only able to comprehend information provided by the senses.
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Agrippa the Skeptic
100 - 100 (0 years)
Agrippa was a Pyrrhonist philosopher who probably lived towards the end of the 1st century CE. He is regarded as the author of "The Five Tropes of Agrippa", which are purported to establish the necessity of suspending judgment . Agrippa's arguments form the basis of the Agrippan trilemma.
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Ernst Mally
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Ernst Mally was an Austrian analytic philosopher, initially affiliated with Alexius Meinong's Graz School of object theory. Mally was one of the founders of deontic logic and is mainly known for his contributions in that field of research. In metaphysics, he is known for introducing a distinction between two kinds of predication, better known as the dual predication approach.
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Bodhidharma
483 - 540 (57 years)
Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary Buddhist monk who lived during the 5th or 6th century CE. He is traditionally credited as the transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, and is regarded as its first Chinese patriarch. According to a 17th-century apocryphal story found in a manual called Yijin Jing, he began the physical training of the monks of Shaolin Monastery that led to the creation of Shaolin kungfu. He is known as Dámó in China and as Daruma in Japan. His name means "dharma of awakening " in Sanskrit.
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Ivan Ilyin
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin or Il'in was a Russian jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and conservative monarchist. He perceived the February Revolution as a "temporary disorder" and the October Revolution as a "national catastrophe", and actively joined the struggle against the Bolshevik regime. He became a white émigré journalist, a Slavophile, and an ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union, which believed that force was the only means by which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
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Alfred Edward Taylor
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Alfred Edward Taylor , usually cited as A. E. Taylor, was a British idealist philosopher most famous for his contributions to the philosophy of idealism in his writings on metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and the scholarship of Plato. He was a fellow of the British Academy and president of the Aristotelian Society from 1928 to 1929. At Oxford he was made an honorary fellow of New College in 1931. In an age of universal upheaval and strife, he was a notable defender of Idealism in the Anglophone world.
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Adolf Reinach
1883 - 1917 (34 years)
Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach was a German philosopher, phenomenologist and law theorist. Life and work Adolf Reinach was born into a prominent Jewish family in Mainz, Germany, on 23 December 1883.
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Jonathan Edwards
1703 - 1758 (55 years)
Jonathan Edwards was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian. A leading figure of the American Enlightenment, Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians. Edwards' theological work is broad in scope but rooted in the paedobaptist Puritan heritage as exemplified in the Westminster and Savoy Confessions of Faith. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central the Age of Enlightenment was to his mindset.
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Léon Robin
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Léon Robin was a French philosopher and scholar of Greek philosophy, professor of history of ancient philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1924 to 1936. Robin, the son of a merchant, began teaching in the Faculty of Letters at Paris in 1913. In 1924 he took up the chair of history of ancient philosophy, which had lapsed after the death of Louis Rodier in 1913. In 1927 he was visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. On his retirement from the Paris chair, his successor was Pierre-Maxime Schuhl. Robin subsequently served as Director of the International Institute of Philosophy.
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Vallabha
1479 - 1531 (52 years)
Vallabhacharya Mahaprabhu , also known as Vallabha, Mahaprabhuji and Vishnuswami, or Vallabha Acharya, was an Indian saint and philosopher. He founded the Krishna-centered Pushtimarg sect of Vaishnavism in the Braj region of India, and propounded the philosophy of Śuddhādvaita.
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Hasdai Crescas
1340 - 1410 (70 years)
Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas was a Spanish-Jewish philosopher and a renowned halakhist . Along with Maimonides , Gersonides , and Joseph Albo, he is known as one of the major practitioners of the rationalist approach to Jewish philosophy.
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Samuel von Pufendorf
1632 - 1694 (62 years)
Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist and historian. He was born Samuel Pufendorf and ennobled in 1694; he was made a baron by Charles XI of Sweden a few months before his death at age 62. Among his achievements are his commentaries and revisions of the natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.
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John Lemmon
1930 - 1966 (36 years)
Edward John Lemmon was a British logician and philosopher born in Sheffield, England. He is most well known for his work on modal logic, particularly his joint text with Dana Scott published posthumously .
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