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,
#17051
Vicente Ferreira da Silva
1916 - 1963 (47 years)
Vicente Ferreira da Silva was a Brazilian logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He was one of first men in Brazil history to write and have published an academic book in logic and Phenomenology.
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Brion Gysin
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin ...
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Louise Michel
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.
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Howard Thurman
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Howard Washington Thurman was an American author, philosopher, theologian, mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
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Jules de Gaultier
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Jules de Gaultier , born Jules Achille de Gaultier de Laguionie, was a French philosopher and essayist. He was a contributor to Mercure de France and one of the chief advocates of "nietzscheism" in vogue in the literary circles of the day. He was known especially for his theory of "bovarysme" , by which he meant the continual need of humans to invent themselves, to lie to themselves. His books include De Kant à Nietzsche and Le Bovarysme, essai sur le pouvoir d'imaginer .
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Matthias Bel
1684 - 1749 (65 years)
Matthias Bel or Matthias Bél was a Lutheran pastor and polymath from the Kingdom of Hungary. Bel was active in the fields of pedagogy, philosophy, philology, history, and theoretical theology; he was the founder of Hungarian geographic science and a pioneer of descriptive ethnography and economy. A leading figure in pietism. He is also known as the Great Ornament of Hungary .
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Abraham de Balmes
1440 - 1523 (83 years)
Abraham de Balmes ben Meir was an Italian Jewish physician and translator of the early 16th century. A short time before his death he was physician in ordinary to the cardinal Dominico Grimani at Padua. See Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." xxi. 7 and 67; "Hebr. Uebers." p. 62; Perles, "Beiträge," pp. 193, 197, etc.
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Priscian of Lydia
500 - Present (1526 years)
Priscian of Lydia , was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. Two works of his have survived. Life A contemporary of Simplicius of Cilicia, Priscian was born in Lydia, probably in the late 5th century. He was one of the last Neoplatonists to study at the Academy when Damascius was at its head. When Justinian I closed the school in 529, Priscian, together with Damascius, Simplicius, and four other colleagues were forced to seek asylum in the court of the Persian king Chosroes. By 533 they were allowed back into the Byzantine Empire after Justinian and Chosroes concluded a peace treaty, in whic...
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Guru Tegh Bahadur
1621 - 1675 (54 years)
Guru Tegh Bahadur was the ninth of ten gurus who founded the Sikh religion and was the leader of Sikhs from 1665 until his beheading in 1675. He was born in Amritsar, Punjab, India in 1621 and was the youngest son of Guru Hargobind, the sixth Sikh guru. Considered a principled and fearless warrior, he was a learned spiritual scholar and a poet whose 115 hymns are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, which is the main text of Sikhism.
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Max Dessoir
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Maximilian Dessoir was a German philosopher, psychologist and theorist of aesthetics. Career Dessoir was born in Berlin, into a German Jewish family, his parents being Ludwig Dessoir , "Germany's most admired Shakespearean actor", and Ludwig's third wife Auguste Grünemeyer . Max earned doctorates from the universities of Berlin and Würzburg . He was a professor at Berlin from 1897 until 1933, when the Nazis forbade him to teach.
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Peter Coffey
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Peter Coffey was an Irish Roman Catholic priest and neo-scholastic philosopher. Life Coffey was educated at the Meath Diocesan Seminary in Navan, and St Patrick's College, Maynooth . He studied for his doctorate at the University of Louvain, and attended the University of Strasbourg. He was ordained in 1900.
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Dickinson S. Miller
1868 - 1963 (95 years)
Dickinson Sargeant Miller was an American philosopher best known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He worked with other philosophers including William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Giorgio Colli
1917 - 1979 (62 years)
Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher, philologist and historian. A native of Turin, he taught ancient philosophy at Pisa's university for thirty years; he edited and translated Aristotle's Organon and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for Einaudi, a major publishing house in Italy. Subsequently, he produced the first complete edition of Nietzsche's work together with his friend Mazzino Montinari. His work culminated in La Sapienza greca, an edition and translation of the "Presocratics" . Interrupted by his death in January 1979, it was supposed to be in eleven volumes.
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Jean Charlot
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Louis Henri Jean Charlot was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States. Life Charlot was born in Paris. His father, Henri, owned an import-export business and was a Russian-born émigré, albeit one who supported the Bolshevik cause. His mother Anna was an artist. His mother's family originated from Mexico City; his grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo. His great-grandfather had immigrated to Mexico in the 1820s shortly after the country's independence from Spain, and married a woman who was half-Aztec. This was likely the source of a myth ...
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Bion of Borysthenes
325 BC - Present (2351 years)
Bion of Borysthenes was a Greek philosopher. After being sold into slavery, and then released, he moved to Athens, where he studied in almost every school of philosophy. It is, however, for his Cynic-style diatribes that he is chiefly remembered. He satirized the foolishness of people, attacked religion, and eulogized philosophy.
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Richard Wahle
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Richard Wahle was professor of philosophy at the Universities of Czernowitz and Vienna. Wahle pronounced in his Tragicomedy of Wisdom on what he acknowledged as only "definite, agnostic, absolute critique of knowledge" and psychology as surviving, or rather maintained that critiques of knowledge, logic and psychology have nothing to do with philosophy. As a consequence of his fundamental attitude, Wahle did not recognize the ego as a nucleus of forces but only as an imprint in the texture of the universe.
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Giovanni Battista Piranesi
1720 - 1778 (58 years)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian classical archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" . He was the father of Francesco Piranesi, Laura Piranesi and Pietro Piranesi.
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Danko Grlić
1923 - 1984 (61 years)
Danko Grlić was a Marxist humanist, and a member of the Praxis school of SFR Yugoslavia. He was born in Gračanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He moved to Zagreb with his family in 1931. During the Second World War he joined the anti-fascist struggle. He appreciated freedom above all, so due to his liberal expression, he often came to conflict with the government, which ended very badly for him. Because he opposed the resolution of Cominform, he was sentenced to three months in the prison camp Goli otok in 1948. Grlic did not accept the resolution, but for one part he held that it was correct, - where it says there is not enough democracy in the Yugoslav Communist Party.
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Gareth Evans
1946 - 1980 (34 years)
Michael Gareth Justin Evans was a British philosopher who made substantial contributions to logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his posthumous work The Varieties of Reference , edited by John McDowell. The book considers different kinds of reference to objects, and argues for a number of conditions that must obtain for reference to occur.
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Antonio Maria Valsalva
1666 - 1723 (57 years)
Antonio Maria Valsalva , was an Italian anatomist born in Imola. His research focused on the anatomy of the ears. He coined the term Eustachian tube and he described the aortic sinuses of Valsalva in his writings, published posthumously in 1740. His name is associated with the Valsalva antrum of the ear and the Valsalva maneuver, which is used as a test of circulatory function. Anatomical structures bearing his name are Valsalva’s muscle and taeniae Valsalvae. He observed that when weakness of one side of the body is caused by a lesion in the brain, the culprit lesion tends to be on the si...
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K. N. Jayatilleke
1920 - 1970 (50 years)
Kulatissa Nanda Jayatilleke was an internationally recognised authority on Buddhist philosophy whose book Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge has been described as "an outstanding philosophical interpretation of the Buddha's teaching" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher. He was Darwinian in outlook and the author of several influential theological and philosophical books.
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Juan Luis Vives
1492 - 1540 (48 years)
Juan Luis Vives March was a Spanish scholar and Renaissance humanist who spent most of his adult life in the southern Hapsburg Netherlands. His beliefs on the soul, insight into early medical practice, and perspective on emotions, memory and learning earned him the title of the "father" of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key ideas that established how psychology is perceived today.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Apollodorus of Seleucia
150 BC - Present (2176 years)
Apollodorus of Seleucia , or Apollodorus Ephillus, was a Stoic philosopher, and a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon. Apollodorus is famous for describing Cynicismism as "the short path to virtue", and he may have been the first Stoic after the time of Zeno and Aristo to systematically attempt to reconcile Stoicism with Cynicism. The lengthy account of Cynicism given by Diogenes Laërtius, which is presented from a Stoic point of view, may be derived from Apollodorus, and it is possible that he was the first Stoic to promote the idea of a line of Cynic succession from Socrates to Zeno .
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Pope Alexander VI
1431 - 1503 (72 years)
Pope Alexander VI was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 11 August 1492 until his death in 1503. Born into the prominent Borgia family in Xàtiva under the Crown of Aragon , Rodrigo studied law at the University of Bologna. He was ordained deacon and made a cardinal in 1456 after the election of his uncle as Pope Callixtus III, and a year later he became vice-chancellor of the Catholic Church. He proceeded to serve in the Curia under the next four popes, acquiring significant influence and wealth in the process. In 1492, Rodrigo was elected pope, taking the name Ale...
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Edward Kelley
1555 - 1590 (35 years)
Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot , was an English Renaissance occultist and scryer. He is known for working with John Dee in his magical investigations. Besides the professed ability to see spirits or angels in a "shew-stone" or mirror, which John Dee so valued, Kelley also said that he possessed the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, the goal of alchemy, as well as the philosopher's stone itself.
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John Grierson
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
John Grierson was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert J. Flaherty's Moana.
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Thomas Spencer Baynes
1823 - 1887 (64 years)
Thomas Spencer Baynes was an English philosopher. Life Baynes was born in Wellington, Somerset to a Baptist minister. He intended to study for Baptist ministry, and was at a theological seminary at Bath with that view but, being strongly attracted to philosophical studies, left it and went to Edinburgh, where he became the favourite pupil of Sir William Hamilton, of whose philosophical system he continued an adherent.
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Maitreya-nātha
270 - 350 (80 years)
Maitreya-nātha is a name whose use was pioneered by Buddhist scholars Erich Frauwallner, Giuseppe Tucci, and Hakuju Ui to distinguish one of the three founders of the Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, along with Asanga and Vasubandhu. Some scholars believe this Maitreya to be a historical person in India. The traditions themselves have held that it is referring to Maitreya, the future buddha.
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Petrus de Ibernia
1101 - 1201 (100 years)
Petrus de Ibernia, also known as Peter of Ireland, was a 13th-century writer and lecturer who is believed to have taught logic and natural philosophy to Thomas Aquinas. Peter of Ireland is mentioned by the Aquinas' biographers Wilhelm of Tocco and Peter Calo.
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David Gozal
#17083
Zef Jubani
1818 - 1880 (62 years)
Zef Jubani or Giuseppe Jubany in Italian was an Albanian folklorist and activist of the Albanian National Awakening. He is known for the publication of a Collection of Albanian Folk Songs and Rhapsodies in the Gheg Albanian dialect. Jubani advocated the creation of a unique alphabet of the Albanian language. For his political activities, which often were anti-clericalist, Jubani was denounced to the Holy See by the Jesuit missionaries of Shkodër.
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Eduardo Nicol
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Eduardo Nicol was a Mexican-Catalan philosopher. He arrived in Mexico in 1939, obtained his major in philosophy from National Autonomous University of Mexico , the biggest university in Mexico, where he taught from 1940. While at UNAM, he became the chairs of adolescent psychology and the history of psychology following .
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Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link
1767 - 1851 (84 years)
Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link was a German naturalist and botanist. Biography Link was born at Hildesheim as a son of the minister August Heinrich Link , who taught him love of nature through collection of 'natural objects'. He studied medicine and natural sciences at the Hannoverschen Landesuniversität of Göttingen, and graduated as MD in 1789, promoting on his thesis "Flora der Felsgesteine rund um Göttingen" . One of his teachers was the famous natural scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach . He became a private tutor in Göttingen.
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Richard von Schubert-Soldern
1852 - 1924 (72 years)
Richard Ritter von Schubert-Soldern was a philosopher in Austria-Hungary and later Austria. Schubert-Soldern earned a doctorate at the University of Prague in 1879 and habilitated at Leipzig University in 1882 with a thesis titled Ueber Trancendenz des Objects und Subjects .
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Christian Krohg
1852 - 1925 (73 years)
Christian Krohg was a Norwegian naturalist painter, illustrator, author and journalist. Krohg was inspired by the realism art movement and often chose motifs from everyday life. He was the director and served as the first professor at the Norwegian Academy of Arts from 1909 to 1925.
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Tang Chun-i
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Tang Chun-I or Tang Junyi was a Chinese philosopher who was one of the leading exponents of New Confucianism. Born in Sichuan, he moved to Hong Kong in 1949 due to the establishment of the People's Republic of China and co-founded New Asia College with the dual objective of modernizing China while upholding its traditional values.
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Aristobulus of Alexandria
200 BC - Present (2226 years)
Aristobulus of Alexandria also called Aristobulus the Peripatetic and once believed to be Aristobulus of Paneas, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the Peripatetic school, though he also used Platonic and Pythagorean concepts. Like his successor, Philo, he attempted to fuse ideas in the Hebrew Scriptures with those in Greek thought.
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William H. Dietz
#17091
Christoph Schrempf
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Christoph Schrempf was a German evangelical theologian and philosopher. Life Christoph Schrempf was a pastor and writer from Besigheim, Germany. He had a difficult childhood due to his father's alcoholism. His mother suffered from the violence until she fled, taking the children. Perhaps this made the young Christoph Schrempf sensitive to all forms of violence, including hidden violence. In his youth, Schrempf was an avid Bible reader. He studied religion and was vicar and assistant teacher in Tübingen. The normal path of a Protestant Württemberg Pastor seemed predetermined. He read the Bible with a critical scientific eye and explored the historical background of biblical texts.
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Philipp Spitta
1841 - 1894 (53 years)
Julius August Philipp Spitta was a German music historian and musicologist best known for his 1873 biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. Life He was born in , near Hoya, and his father, also called Philipp Spitta, was a theologian and wrote the Protestant collection of hymns entitled Psalter und Harfe. As a child, the younger Spitta learnt the piano, pipe organ, and musical composition. He studied theology and classical philology at the University of Göttingen from 1860, graduating in 1864 with a Ph.D. for a dissertation on Tacitus . While at university, he composed, wrote a biography of Robert Schumann, and became friends with Johannes Brahms.
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Thomas Willis
1621 - 1675 (54 years)
Thomas Willis FRS was an English physician who played an important part in the history of anatomy, neurology and psychiatry, and was a founding member of the Royal Society. Life Willis was born on his parents' farm in Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, where his father held the stewardship of the manor. He was a kinsman of the Willys baronets of Fen Ditton, Cambridgeshire. He graduated M.A. from Christ Church, Oxford in 1642. In the Civil War years he was a Royalist, dispossessed of the family farm at North Hinksey by Parliamentary forces. In the 1640s, Willis was one of the royal physicians to Charles I.
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Kanji Swami
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Kanji Swami was a teacher of Jainism. He was deeply influenced by the Samayasāra of Kundakunda in 1932. He lectured on these teachings for 45 years to comprehensively elaborate on the philosophy described by Kundakunda and others. He was given the title of "Koh-i-Noor of Kathiawar" by the people who were influenced by his religious teachings and philosophy.
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Władysław Mieczysław Kozłowski
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Władysław Mieczysław Kozłowski was a Polish philosopher. Life Kozłowski lectured at Brussels' Université Nouvelle and at Geneva University. In 1919–28 he was professor of the theory and methodology of science at Poznań University.
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Howard Selsam
1903 - 1970 (67 years)
Howard Selsam was an American Marxist philosopher. Background Howard Brillinger Selsam was born on 28 June 1903 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His parents were John T. Selsam, a grocer, and his mother was Flora Emig Selsam.
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Eugeniu Sperantia
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Eugeniu Sperantia was a Romanian poet, aesthetician, essayist, sociologist and philosopher. He was born in Bucharest to folklorist Theodor Speranția and his wife Elena , a relative of poet Mihail Cruceanu. He attended primary and high school in his native city, graduating in 1906. That year, he made his published debut, in Ovid Densusianu's Vieața Nouă. Prior to that, he had frequented Alexandru Macedonski's circle. In 1910, he graduated from the philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest. Two years later, he received a doctorate in literature and philosophy; his thesis dealt with pragmatic apriorism.
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Austin Farrer
1904 - 1968 (64 years)
Austin Marsden Farrer was an English Anglican philosopher, theologian, and biblical scholar. His activity in philosophy, theology, and spirituality led many to consider him one of the greatest figures of 20th-century Anglicanism. He served as Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1960 to 1968.
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Christoph Gottfried Bardili
1761 - 1808 (47 years)
Christoph Gottfried Bardili was a German philosopher and cousin of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. He was critical of Kantian idealism and proposed his own system of philosophy known as rational realism, a view based purely upon "thinking as thinking".
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Simon Foucher
1644 - 1696 (52 years)
Simon Foucher was a French polemic philosopher. His philosophical standpoint was one of Academic skepticism: he did not agree with dogmatism, but didn't resort to Pyrrhonism, either. Life He was born in Dijon, the son of a merchant, and appears to have taken holy orders at a very early age. For some years he held the position of honorary canon at Dijon, but he resigned in order to take up his residence in Paris. He graduated at the Sorbonne, having studied theology, and spent the remainder of his life in literary work in Paris, where he died.
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