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,
#17001
František Klácel
1808 - 1882 (74 years)
František Matouš Klácel was a Czech author, philosopher, pedagogue, and journalist. Since 1827 he was an Augustinian friar in Brno, co-brother of Gregor Mendel. A Varied Man During his rich and varied life Klácel used several pseudonyms He also called himself Matouš František K.- Matouš had been his monastic name. He was born into a poor family, and his father was a cobbler. After basic school in Třebová and junior school he went to grammar school in Litomyšl and after graduating spent the next two years studying philosophy. In 1827 he went to the Augustinian monastery in Brno where he became a member of the order and spent the years 1829–32 studying at the Brno theological institute.
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Abraham Tucker
1705 - 1774 (69 years)
Abraham Tucker was an English country gentleman, who devoted himself to the study of philosophy. He wrote The Light of Nature Pursued under the name of Edward Search. Biography Tucker was born in London of a Somerset family, the son of a wealthy city merchant. His parents died during his infancy, and he was brought up by his uncle, Sir Isaac Tillard. In 1721, he entered Merton College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, and studied philosophy, mathematics, French, Italian and music. He afterwards studied laws at the Inner Temple, but was never called to the bar.
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Olive Schreiner
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Olive Schreiner was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm , which has been highly acclaimed. It deals boldly with such contemporary issues as agnosticism, existential independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women, and the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier.
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Ioan Zalomit
1823 - 1885 (62 years)
Ioan Zalomit was a Romanian philosopher, professor and rector of the University of Bucharest. Biography Ioan Zalomit was born in Bucharest, in a family of merchants. His parents were probably of Greek origin, but they were born in Wallachia.
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Adam of Bockenfield
1220 - Present (806 years)
Adam of Bockenfield was an English Franciscan philosopher, who taught at the University of Oxford in the early 1240s. He was an early commentator on a number of Aristotle's works, in particular those dealing with natural philosophy.
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Benjamin Paul Blood
1832 - 1919 (87 years)
Benjamin Paul Blood was an American philosopher, mystic and poet. His idiosyncratic work explored his development of his pluralist philosophy, culminating in the posthumously published book Pluriverse.
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Gustav Hartlaub
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
Karel Johan Gustav Hartlaub was a German physician and ornithologist. Hartlaub was born in Bremen, and studied at Bonn and Berlin before graduating in medicine at Göttingen. In 1840, he began to study and collect exotic birds, which he donated to the Bremen Natural History Museum. He described some of these species for the first time. In 1852, he set up a new journal with Jean Cabanis, the Journal für Ornithologie. He wrote with Otto Finsch, Beitrag zur Fauna Centralpolynesiens: Ornithologie der Viti-, Samoa und Tonga- Inseln. Halle, H. Schmidt. This 1867 work which has handcoloured lithographs was based on bird specimens collected by Eduard Heinrich Graeffe for Museum Godeffroy.
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Alfred Barratt
1844 - 1881 (37 years)
Alfred Barratt was an English barrister and philosopher. He trained in law at the University of Oxford, and published his first book, Physical Ethics, in 1869 while studying there. He died an early death in 1881 from overwork as a barrister, secretary to the Oxford University Commission, and philosopher. His second book, Physical Metempiric, was published posthumously in 1883.
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Petrus Ramus
1515 - 1572 (57 years)
Petrus Ramus was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Early life He was born at the village of Cuts, Picardy; his father was a farmer. He gained admission at age twelve to the Collège de Navarre, working as a servant. A reaction against scholasticism was in full tide, at a transitional time for Aristotelianism. On the occasion of receiving his M.A. degree in 1536, Ramus allegedly took as his thesis Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse , which Walter J. Ong paraphrases as follows:
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Rajab Ali Tabrizi
1650 - 1670 (20 years)
Rajab Ali Tabrizi was an Iranian and Shiat philosopher and mystic of the 17th century. He was educated in the Sheikh Lotf Allah school. Books 1- Resaleh-ye2- "Al Osul ol Asfiyeh" or "Asl ol Osul".3- "A book in theology".4- "The interpretation of Ayatolkorsi"5- "The divine instructions"6- His book of poetry
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Dada Dharmadhikari
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Shankar Trimbak Dharmadhikari , better known as Dada Dharmadhikari, was an Indian freedom fighter, and a leader of social reform movements in India. He was a strong adherent of Mahatma Gandhi's principles. His eldest daughter was married to Adv. Tamasskar of Bemetara, now in Chattisgarh. His second child, son by name Pradyumna was also a freedom fighter and lived life as a common man. His third child, a son by name Yashwanth Shankar Dharmadhikari served as the Advocate-general of Madhya Pradesh and his youngest son Chandrashekhar Shankar Dharmadhikari served as judge of Bombay High Court.
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Karl Friedrich Heinrich Marx
1796 - 1877 (81 years)
Karl Friedrich Heinrich Marx was a German physician and college lecturer. Despite sharing the same name, he was not related to Karl Marx, the founder of Marxism. Life and works Marx was born on 10 March 1796 in Karlsruhe, the son of a Jewish antiquarian, and attended the Karlsruhe Lyceum, where he was taught by Johann Peter Hebel and Karl Christian Gmelin. In 1813 he began studies in philosophy and medicine in Heidelberg, where, in 1817, he participated in the Old Heidelberg Burschenschaft as a friend of Heinrich Carl Alexander Pagenstecher. He had contacts with Jean Paul and attended inter alia lectures by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, becoming a follower of his.
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John Constance Parnis
1695 - 1735 (40 years)
John Constance Parnis was a major Maltese mediaeval philosopher who specialised mainly in metaphysics, physics, and logic. Life Parnis was born at Mdina, Malta, in 1695. He began studying philosophy before he joined the Franciscans. His name at that time was John Baptist, and between 1712 and 1715 he followed courses given by Constance Vella at the Franciscans’ College of Philosophy and Literature at Rabat, Malta.
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Gaston Milhaud
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Gaston Milhaud was a French philosopher and historian of science. Gaston Milhaud studied mathematics with Gaston Darboux at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1881 he took a teaching post at the University of Le Havre. In 1891 he became professor of mathematics at Montpellier University, and in 1895 became professor of philosophy there. In 1909 a chair in the history of philosophy in its relationship to the sciences was created for him at the Sorbonne. Milhaud's successor in the chair was Abel Rey.
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Gregory the Illuminator
252 - 329 (77 years)
Gregory the Illuminator was the founder and first official head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. He converted Armenia from Zoroastrianism to Christianity in the early fourth century , making Armenia the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. He is venerated as a saint in the Armenian Apostolic Church and in some other churches.
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Hartley Burr Alexander
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
Hartley Burr Alexander, PhD , was an American philosopher, writer, educator, scholar, poet, and iconographer. Family and early years Alexander was born in Syracuse, Nebraska, on April 9, 1873. His father, the Rev. George Sherman Alexander , was a Methodist minister and pioneer newspaper editor in Nebraska. These twin sources were to implant in young Hartley a delight in the written word and a distrust of Christianity. His mother, Abigail Smith Alexander , died when he was three and in 1877 his father remarried Susan Godding . Ms. Godding had been a teacher and chairperson in the Methodist Scho...
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Mazu Daoyi
709 - 788 (79 years)
Mazu Daoyi was an influential abbot of Chan Buddhism during the Tang dynasty. He is known as the founder of the Hongzhou school of Zen. The earliest recorded use of the term "Chan school" is from his Extensive Records.
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Ahmet Arvasi
1932 - 1988 (56 years)
Ahmet Arvasi , commonly known as Seyyid Ahmet Arvasi, was a writer and philosopher of Arabic origin. He is known for expounding upon the ideology of the "Turkish-Islamic Synthesis Doctrine" and its effect on Turkey. He was born in Doğubeyazıt district of Ağrı, Turkey. His family is from Van Province. His father Seyyid Abdulhakim Arvasi was a Sunni Islamic scholar during the late Ottoman and early Republic periods of Turkey.
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Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi
1834 - 1904 (70 years)
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a French sculptor and painter. He is best known for designing Liberty Enlightening the World, commonly known as the Statue of Liberty. Early life and education Bartholdi was born in Colmar, France, 2 August 1834. He was born to a family of Alsatian Protestant heritage, with his family name adopted from Barthold. His parents were Jean Charles Bartholdi and Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi . Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was the youngest of their four children, and one of only two to survive infancy, along with the oldest brother, Jean-Charles, who became a lawyer and e...
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Andrea del Verrocchio
1435 - 1488 (53 years)
Andrea del Verrocchio , born Andrea di Michele di Francesco de' Cioni, was a sculptor, Italian painter and goldsmith who was a master of an important workshop in Florence. He apparently became known as Verrocchio after the surname of his master, a goldsmith. Few paintings are attributed to him with certainty, but important painters were trained at his workshop. His pupils included Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi. His greatest importance was as a sculptor and his last work, the Equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, is generally accepted as a masterpiece.
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Andreas Joseph Hofmann
1752 - 1849 (97 years)
Andreas Joseph Hofmann was a German philosopher and revolutionary active in the Republic of Mainz. As Chairman of the Rhenish-German National Convention, the earliest parliament in Germany based on the principle of popular sovereignty, he proclaimed the first republican state in Germany, the Rhenish-German Free State, on 18 March 1793. A strong supporter of the French Revolution, he argued for an accession of all German territory west of the Rhine to France and served in the administration of the department Mont-Tonnerre under the French Directory and the French Consulate.
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Richard Kilvington
1305 - 1361 (56 years)
Richard Kilvington was an English scholastic theologian and philosopher at the University of Oxford. His surviving works are lecture notes from the 1320s and 1330s. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He was involved in a controversy over the nature of the infinite, with Richard FitzRalph, of Balliol College.
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Judah ben Nissim
1260 - Present (766 years)
Judah ben Nissim al-Malkah was a Moroccan, Jewish writer and philosopher living in the 13th century. His main work is Uns al-Gharīb . He also wrote a commentary on the Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer and Tafsīr al-Salawāt, a commentary on liturgy and a work on astrology, which probably bore the title Kitāb al-Miftāh .
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Johann Chrysostom Magnenus
1590 - 1679 (89 years)
Johann Chrysostom Magnenus was a physician and advocate of atomism. He was born at Luxeuil in Burgundy. He took a medical degree at the University of Dôle. He joined the medical faculty at the University of Pavia, where he published his scientific work Democritus reviviscens sive de atomis in 1646. He cited Daniel Sennert, but his ideas were distinct from Sennert's and those of Democritus. He considered that atoms were the indivisible parts of three of the classical elements: earth, water and fire.
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Louis Farrugia
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
Louis Farrugia was a Maltese theologian and minor philosopher. In philosophy he was mostly interested in Scholasticism and literature. No portrait of him has been identified up till now. Life Farrugia was born at Valletta, Malta, in 1857. After becoming a diocesan priest, he occupied various high offices both in the local Catholic Church and at the University of Malta. His ecclesiastical services were recognised by more than one Pope. He was also private secretary to the Bishop of Malta, Peter Pace, and President of the Ecclesiastical Tribunals in Malta.
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Lynne Warner. Stevenson
#17027
Pontormo
1494 - 1556 (62 years)
Jacopo Carucci or Carrucci , usually known as Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo , was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine School. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.
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Blasius of Parma
1355 - 1416 (61 years)
Blasius of Parma was an Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer. He popularised English and French philosophical work in Italy, where he associated both with scholastics and with early Renaissance humanists.
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Caspar Barlaeus
1584 - 1648 (64 years)
Caspar Barlaeus was a Dutch polymath and Renaissance humanist, a theologian, poet, and historian. Life Born Caspar van Baerle in Antwerp, Barlaeus' parents fled the city when it was occupied by Spanish troops shortly after his birth. They settled in Zaltbommel, where his father eventually would become head of the Latin school. Caspar studied theology and philosophy at the University of Leiden. After his study, he preached for 1.5 years in the village of Nieuwe-Tonge, before returning to Leiden in 1612 as an under-regent of a college. From 1617 he also was professor in philosophy at the university.
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Gonzalo Arango
1931 - 1976 (45 years)
Gonzalo Arango Arias was a Colombian writer, poet, and journalist. In 1958 he led a modern literary and cultural movement known as Nadaism , inspired by surrealism, French existentialism, beat generation, dadaism, and influenced by the Colombian writer and philosopher Fernando González Ochoa.
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Li Ao
772 - 841 (69 years)
Li Ao , courtesy name Xizhi , was Chinese philosopher and prose writer of the Tang Dynasty. Biography Li was born in present-day Tianshui, Gansu, but some accounts relate he was from Zhao, Hebei. After achieving the degree of Jinshi in 798, he joined the imperial bureaucracy and served in the history department at Changan.
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Archibald Arthur
1744 - 1797 (53 years)
Archibald Arthur FRSE was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. An alumnus of the University of Glasgow, he served as University chaplain from 1774 – 1794, and librarian from 1780 - 1794. Between 1780 and 1794 he worked as an assistant to Professor of Moral Philosophy Thomas Reid, taking on the latter's teaching duties, and succeeding him in 1796.
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Johann Konrad Dippel
1673 - 1734 (61 years)
Johann Konrad Dippel, also spelled Johann Conrad Dippel , was a German Pietist theologian, physician, alchemist and occultist. Life Dippel was born at Castle Frankenstein near Mühltal and Darmstadt, and therefore once at his school the addendum Franckensteinensis and once at his university the addendum Franckensteina-Strataemontanus was used.
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Andrej Dudrovich
1782 - 1830 (48 years)
Andrej Dudrovich was a Russian philosopher, professor and president of Kharkov University during the Age of Enlightenment. Biography Andrej Dudrovich was born in Serbia, then part of the Austrian Empire before emigrating to Imperial Russia. Like many intellectuals of his generation who received an education abroad, he became influenced by Immanuel Kant's moral teachings. His chief work was a doctoral dissertation dealing with Kant while in the class of Johann Baptist Schad, a Benedictine monk who converted to Protestanism and became one of Kant's disciples in Imperial Russia. Dudrovich was a...
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Melissa
280 BC - 210 BC (70 years)
Melissa was a Pythagorean philosopher. Her name derives from the Greek word melli meaning honey. Nothing is known about her life. She is known only from a letter written to another woman named Cleareta . The letter is written in a Doric Greek dialect dated to around the 3rd century BC. The letter discusses the need for a wife to be modest and virtuous, and stresses that she should obey her husband. The content has led to the suggestion that it was written pseudonymously by a man. On the other hand, the author of the letter does not suggest that a woman is naturally inferior or weak, or that s...
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Metrocles
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Metrocles was a Cynic philosopher from Maroneia. He studied in Aristotle’s Lyceum under Theophrastus, and eventually became a follower of Crates of Thebes, who married Metrocles’ sister Hipparchia. Very little survives of his writings, but he is important as one of the first Cynics to adopt the practice of writing moral anecdotes about Diogenes and other Cynics.
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Daniel M. Albert
#17038
Ludwig Marcuse
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Ludwig Marcuse was a German philosopher and writer of Jewish origin. From 1933 to 1940 Marcuse lived in France, settling with other German exiles in Sanary-sur-Mer. From 1940 to 1950 he lived in Los Angeles. He returned to Germany at the end of his life.
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Kikuo Chishima
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Kikuo Chishima was a Japanese medical researcher who promoted a variant of the Soviet medical biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya's pseudoscientific cellular theories, known as neo-Haematology, now largely discredited.
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George Caruana
1831 - 1872 (41 years)
George Caruana was a Maltese minor philosopher mostly interested in epistemology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta . Life Caruana was a diocesan priest. He was born in Victoria, Gozo in 1831, and dedicated his relatively short life to academic work. He studied at the bishop’s seminary in Gozo, and then at the Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, from where he graduated as Doctor of Ecclesiastical Studies. Back in the Maltese islands, in 1858 Caruana was appointed Rector at the bishop’s seminary of Malta. Here he taught philosophy and mathematics. A few months later, in 1859, he was appointed Professor of the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta.
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Richard Rudolf Walzer
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Richard Rudolf Walzer, FBA was a German-born British scholar of Greek philosophy and of Arabic philosophy. Education: Werner-Siemens-Realgymnasium, Berlin-Schöneberg; Frederick William University of Berlin.
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Marcus Elieser Bloch
1723 - 1799 (76 years)
Marcus Elieser Bloch was a German physician and naturalist who is best known for his contribution to ichthyology through his multi-volume catalog of plates illustrating the fishes of the world. Brought up in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family, he learned German and Latin and studied anatomy before settling in Berlin as a physician. He amassed a large natural history collection, particularly of fish specimens. He is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologistss of the 18th century, and wrote many papers on natural history, comparative anatomy, and physiology.
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Fyodor Khaskhachikh
1907 - 1942 (35 years)
Fyodor Ignatyevich Khaskhachikh was a Soviet philosopher and dean of philosophy at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History from 1939 to 1941. He worked on the history of epistemology and problems of epistemology within the framework of dialectical materialism.
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Isaac Rülf
1831 - 1902 (71 years)
Isaac Rülf was a Jewish teacher, journalist and philosopher. He became widely known for his aid work and as a prominent early Zionist. Rülf was born in Rauischholzhausen, Hesse, Germany. He received a teaching certificate in 1849, became an assistant to the county rabbi and then taught in other small communities. He received his rabbinical certificate in 1854 from the University of Marburg and his Ph.D in 1865 at the University of Rostock. That year he became the rabbi of Memel, East Prussia.
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Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi
787 - 886 (99 years)
Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi, Latinized as Albumasar , was an early Persian Muslim astrologer, thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium.
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Erich von Hornbostel
1877 - 1935 (58 years)
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs.
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Ernst L. Wynder
#17048
Persaeus
306 BC - 243 BC (63 years)
Persaeus of Citium, son of Demetrius, was a Greek Stoic philosopher, and a friend and favourite student of Zeno of Citium. Life He lived in the same house as Zeno. Later writers wrote that Persaeus had been Zeno's slave, who had perhaps originally been an amanuensis sent to Zeno by King Antigonus II Gonatas; however, the source of this story seems to be due to a sarcastic remark made about Persaeus by Bion of Borysthenes who, upon seeing a statue of Persaeus inscribed: "Persaeus the pupil of Zeno", sneered that it ought to have been: "Persaeus the Servant of Zeno".
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Austin Woodbury
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Austin M. Woodbury was an Australian Catholic philosopher. Biography Austin Maloney Woodbury S.M. was born on 2 March 1899 at Lower Mangrove , New South Wales, Australia. He was the sixth child of Austin Herbert Woodbury and his wife Margaret, nee Maloney, who had eleven children. His family was devoutly Catholic. Four of his sisters joined religious orders. From an early age Woodbury showed great intellectual promise and a love of learning. He discerned a vocation to the religious life and entered the Society of Mary in 1918, completing his secondary studies at the juniorate in Sydney and Mittagong .
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Jay DeFeo
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”
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