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,
#17101
Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongovius
1764 - 1855 (91 years)
Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongovius was a Protestant pastor, writer, philosopher, distinguished linguist, and translator. Mrongovius was a noted defender of the Polish language in Warmia and Mazury. Biography Mrongovius, son of Bartholomeus, was born in Hohenstein, Kingdom of Prussia . Mrongovius attended a school in Saalfeld , and then studied at the cathedral school in Königsberg. He matriculated on 21 March 1782 at Königsberg University. During his second semester, he attended Immanuel Kant's metaphysics lectures, followed by theology, logic, anthropology and moral philosophy, and physics.
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Joseph Kleutgen
1811 - 1883 (72 years)
Joseph Wilhelm Karl Kleutgen was a German Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He was a member of the Society of Jesus, and contributed significantly to the establishment of Neo-scholasticism. Life Kleutgen was born in Dortmund, Westphalia. He began his studies with the intention of becoming a priest, but owing to the Protestant atmosphere of the school which he attended, his zeal for religion gradually cooled. From 28 April 1830, to 8 January 1831, he studied philology at the University of Munich. He was intensely interested in Plato's philosophy and the Greek tragic poets. As member of the ...
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August Ludwig Hülsen
1765 - 1809 (44 years)
August Ludwig Hülsen , also known by the pseudonym Hegekern, was a German philosopher, writer and pedagogue of early German Romanticism. His thought played a role in the development of German idealism.
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Lin Yutang
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Lin Yutang was a Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator. He had an informal style in both Chinese and English, and he made compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English. Some of his writings criticized the racism and imperialism of the West.
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Friedrich Eduard Beneke
1798 - 1854 (56 years)
Friedrich Eduard Beneke was a German psychologist and post-Kantian philosopher. Life Beneke was born in Berlin. He studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin, and served as a volunteer in the War of 1815. After studying theology under Schleiermacher and de Wette, he turned to pure philosophy, studying English writers and the German modifiers of Kantianism, such as Jacobi, Fries and Schopenhauer. In 1820, he published Erkenntnisslehre, Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens, and his inaugural dissertation De Veris Philosophiae Initiis. His marked opposition to the philosophy o...
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Jacques-André Naigeon
1738 - 1810 (72 years)
Jacques-André Naigeon was a French artist, atheist–materialist philosopher, editor and man of letters best known for his contributions to the Encyclopédie and for reworking Baron d'Holbach's and Diderot's manuscripts.
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Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy
1862 - 1905 (43 years)
Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy was a Russian religious philosopher. He was the son of Prince Nikolai Petrovitch Trubetskoy, co-founder of the Moscow Conservatory, and Sophia Alekseievna Lopouchina, who was a big influence on his religious thought. Trubetskoy and his brother, Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy , continued Vladimir Solovyov's work on developing a modern Christian philosophy of the world. He was also a professor of philosophy at Moscow University and a founding member of the underground discussion circle Beseda.
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Yorick Smythies
1917 - 1980 (63 years)
Yorick Smythies was a student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein known for his notes of the philosopher's lectures. He was also a friend of, and character inspiration for, the novelist Iris Murdoch.
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J. W. Dunne
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
John William Dunne was a British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher. As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War, before becoming a pioneering aeroplane designer in the early years of the 20th century. Dunne worked on automatically stable aircraft, many of which were of tailless swept wing design, to achieve the first aircraft demonstrated to be stable. He later developed a new approach to dry fly fishing before turning to speculative philosophy, where he achieved some prominence and literary influence through his "serialism" theory on the nature of time and consciousness, fi...
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Eudemus of Rhodes
370 BC - 300 BC (70 years)
Eudemus of Rhodes was an ancient Greek philosopher, considered the first historian of science, who lived from c. 370 BCE until c. 300 BCE. He was one of Aristotle's most important pupils, editing his teacher's work and making it more easily accessible. Eudemus' nephew, Pasicles, was also credited with editing Aristotle's works.
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Ibn al-Khammar
942 - Present (1084 years)
Abū al-Khayr al-Ḥasan ibn Suwār ibn Bābā ibn Bahnām, called Ibn al-Khammār , was an East Syriac Christian philosopher and physician who taught and worked in Baghdad. He was a prolific translator from Syriac into Arabic and also wrote original works of philosophy, ethics, theology, medicine and meteorology.
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Anioł Dowgird
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Anioł Dowgird was a philosopher of Polish Enlightenment and Lithuanian Enlightenment. Dowgird studied in Jesuit and Piarist schools, then joined the Piarist Order and took holy orders. Subsequently, he taught at Piarist schools and for a time was a professor of logic and ethics at Vilnius University.
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Julie Favre
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Julie Velten Favre , sometimes called Madame Jules Favre, was a French philosopher and educator. She is known for her work educating young women and for advancing a moral philosophy that advocated living a virtuous life, rather than one based on rules and punishment.
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Isidore of Alexandria
450 - 520 (70 years)
Isidore of Alexandria was a Greek philosopher and one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He lived in Athens and Alexandria toward the end of the 5th century AD. He became head of the school in Athens in succession to Marinus, who followed Proclus.
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A. J. Muste
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Abraham Johannes Muste , usually cited as A. J. Muste, was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, antiwar movement, and civil rights movement.
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Alexis Kagame
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet and Catholic priest. His main contributions were in the fields of ethnohistory and "ethnophilosophy" . As a professor of theology, he carried out wide research into the oral history, traditions and literature of Rwanda, and wrote several books on the subject, both in French and Kinyarwanda. He also wrote poetry, which was also published.
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Henryk Struve
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Henryk Struve was a Polish philosopher. He has been called "perhaps the most remarkable person in logic in Warsaw in the 19th century". Struve taught philosophy at Warsaw University from 1862 to 1903. He wrote works in Polish, German and Russian.
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Samuel Hahnemann
1755 - 1843 (88 years)
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician, best known for creating the pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine called homeopathy. Early life Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born in Meissen, Saxony, near Dresden. His father Christian Gottfried Hahnemann was a painter and designer of porcelain, for which the town of Meissen is famous.
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Samuel Morse
1791 - 1872 (81 years)
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of Morse code in 1837 and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
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Pavel Kopnin
1922 - 1971 (49 years)
Pavel Vasilyevich Kopnin was a Soviet philosopher, epistemologist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.
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Borden Parker Bowne
1847 - 1910 (63 years)
Borden Parker Bowne was an American Christian philosopher, Methodist minister and theologian. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. Life Bowne was born on January 14, 1847, near Leonardville in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In 1876 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he taught for more than thirty years. He later served as the first dean of the graduate school. Bowne was an acute critic of mechanistic determinism, positivism, and naturalism. He categorized his views as Kantianizedianized Berkeleyanismanism, transcendental empiricism, and, fi...
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Thomas Young
1773 - 1829 (56 years)
Thomas Young FRS was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
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Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
1744 - 1811 (67 years)
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was a Spanish neoclassical statesman, author, philosopher and a major figure of the Age of Enlightenment in Spain. Life and influence of his works Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was born at Gijón in Asturias, Spain. Selecting law as his profession, he studied at Oviedo, Ávila, and the University of Alcalá, before becoming a criminal judge at Seville in 1767.
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Antoine Destutt de Tracy
1754 - 1836 (82 years)
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". Biography The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born in Paris. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France in 1420 and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army and when the French Revolution broke out he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais.
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Rudolf Seydel
1835 - 1892 (57 years)
Rudolf Seydel was a German philosopher and theologian born in Dresden. In 1860 he received his habilitation at the University of Leipzig, where in 1867 he became an associate professor of philosophy. He was a disciple of Christian Hermann Weisse , and is remembered for his studies involving parallels between Buddhism and Christianity. Seydel died in Leipzig on December 8, 1892.
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Étienne de La Boétie
1530 - 1563 (33 years)
Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie was a French magistrate, classicist, writer, poet and political theorist, best remembered for his intense and intimate friendship with essayist Michel de Montaigne. His early political treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was posthumously adopted by the Huguenot movement and is sometimes seen as an early influence on modern anti-statist, utopian and civil disobedience thought.
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Theon of Smyrna
70 - 135 (65 years)
Theon of Smyrna was a Greek philosopher and mathematician, whose works were strongly influenced by the Pythagorean school of thought. His surviving On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato is an introductory survey of Greek mathematics.
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Edward Bullough
1880 - 1934 (54 years)
Edward Bullough was an English aesthetician and scholar of modern languages, who worked at the University of Cambridge. He did experimental work on the perception of colours, and in his theoretical work introduced the concept of psychical distance: that which "appears to lie between our own self and its affections" in aesthetic experience. In languages, Bullough was a dedicated teacher who published little. He came to concentrate on Italian, and was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in 1933.
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Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari
838 - 870 (32 years)
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari , was a Persian Muslim scholar, physician and psychologist, who produced one of the first Islamic encyclopedia of medicine titled Firdaws al-Hikmah . Ali ibn Sahl spoke Syriac and Greek, the two sources of the medical tradition of Antiquity which had been lost by medieval Europe, and transcribed in meticulous calligraphy. His most famous student was the physician and alchemist Abu Bakr al-Razi . Al-Tabari wrote the first encyclopedic work on medicine. He lived for over 70 years and interacted with important figures of the time, such as Muslim caliphs, governors, and eminent scholars.
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George Derwent Thomson
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
George Derwent Thomson was an English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language. Classical scholar Thomson studied Classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he attained First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos and subsequently won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin. At TCD he worked on his first book, Greek Lyric Metre, and began visiting Na Blascaodaí in the early nineteen-twenties. He became lecturer and then Professor of Greek at University College Galway.
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Zaki al-Arsuzi
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Zaki al-Arsuzi was a Syrian philosopher, philologist, sociologist, historian, and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement. He published several books during his lifetime, most notably The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue .
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Scott Buchanan
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Scott Buchanan was an American philosopher, educator, and foundation consultant. He is best known as the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College, at Annapolis, Maryland. Buchanan's various projects and writings may be understood as an ambitious program of social and cultural reform based on the insight that many crucial problems arise from the uncritical use of symbolism. In this sense, his program was similar to and competed with a number of contemporary movements such as Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, Otto Neurath's "Unity of Science" project, the semiotics of Charles Morris and the "orthological" projects of Charles Kay Ogden.
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Albert Schweitzer
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by faith as secondary.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
1809 - 1894 (85 years)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. Grouped among the fireside poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table . He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to his work as an author and poet, Holmes also served as a physician, professor, lecturer, inventor, and, although he never practiced it, he received formal training in law.
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Alexander Campbell Fraser
1819 - 1914 (95 years)
Alexander Campbell Fraser was a Scottish theologian and philosopher. Life He was born in the manse at Ardchattan, Argyll, the son of the parish minister, Rev Hugh Fraser, and his wife, Maria Helen Campbell. He was the eldest of twelve children.
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Timaeus of Locri
500 BC - 500 BC (0 years)
Timaeus of Locri is a character in two of Plato's dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. In both, he appears as a philosopher of the Pythagorean school. If there ever existed a historical Timaeus of Locri, he would have lived in the fifth century BC, but his historicity is dubious since he only appears as a literary figure in Plato's works; all other ancient sources are either based on Plato or are fictional accounts.
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Haridas Chaudhuri
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Haridas Chaudhuri was an Indian integral philosopher. He was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo and the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies . Early life and career He was born in May 1913 in Shyamagram in East Bengal . He studied at the Scottish Church College and later at the University of Calcutta from where he earned his doctorate in Indian philosophy. He became a professor and later the chair of philosophy at the Krishnagar College, then a constituent college of the University of Calcutta.
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Edvard Westermarck
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. Biography Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off Lutheran family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsinki as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there, obtaining his first degree in philosophy in 1886, but developing also an interest in anthropology and reading the works of Charles Darwin. His thesis, The History of...
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Johann Heinrich Abicht
1762 - 1816 (54 years)
Johann Heinrich Abicht was a German philosopher. Biography Abicht was born at . His grandfather was teacher and organist in Wilmersdorf, Gehren, and his father was a teacher in Volkstedt. Johann Abicht himself finished the college in Rudolstadt and visited the University of Erlangen in 1781. In 1784 he became controller at the house of chief equerry von Schall in Öhringen. Abicht made his magister in 1786 and his doctor in philosophy in 1790. In the same year, he was appointed adjunct and then extraordinary professor in the philosophical faculty. He became regular professor in 1796. On 4 Aug...
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Friedrich Karl Forberg
1770 - 1848 (78 years)
Friedrich Karl Forberg was a German philosopher and classical scholar. Biography Born in 1770 in Thuringia, Forberg studied under Karl Leonhard Reinhold at Jena. In 1791 he travelled to Klagenfurt, writing to Reinhold that there was much sympathy for the French Revolution, and to the followers of Immanuel Kant that the young ladies of Klagenfurt substituted Kant's writings for their prayer books.
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Eknath
1533 - 1599 (66 years)
Eknath , was an Indian Hindu saint, philosopher and poet. He was a devotee of the Hindu deity Vitthal and is a major figure of the Warkari movement. Eknath is often viewed as a spiritual successor to the prominent Marathi saints Dnyaneshwar and Namdev.
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Rufino Tamayo
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Tamayo was active in the mid-20th century in Mexico and New York, painting figurative abstraction with surrealist influences.
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Bernard of Chartres
1070 - 1130 (60 years)
Bernard of Chartres was a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist philosopher, scholar, and administrator. Life The date and place of his birth are unknown. He was believed to have been the elder brother of Thierry of Chartres and to be of Breton origin, but research has shown that this is unlikely. He is recorded at the cathedral school of Chartres by 1115 and was chancellor until 1124. There is no proof that he was still alive after 1124.
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Ford Madox Brown
1821 - 1893 (72 years)
Ford Madox Brown was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work . Brown spent the latter years of his life painting the twelve works known as The Manchester Murals, depicting Mancunian history, for Manchester Town Hall.
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Ignaz Semmelweis
1818 - 1865 (47 years)
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, and was described as the "saviour of mothers". Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth, and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated...
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Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Max Freedom Long
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Max Freedom Long was an American novelist and New Age author. Early life and career Max Freedom Long was born on October 26, 1890, in Sterling, Colorado to Toby Albert Long and his wife Jessie Diffendaffer. At the time of the 1910 census he was working as a photographer in his hometown, and was living in his grandfather's household with his parents. He attended Los Angeles State Normal School from September 1914 to June 1916, and graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in general education. After graduating, he worked briefly as an auto-mechanic in Los Angeles.
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Julian
331 - 363 (32 years)
Julian was the Caesar of the West from 355 to 360 and Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher and author in Greek. His rejection of Christianity, and his promotion of Neoplatonic Hellenism in its place, caused him to be remembered as Julian the Apostate in Christian tradition. He is sometimes referred to as Julian the Philosopher.
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Edward Dembowski
1822 - 1846 (24 years)
Edward Dembowski was a Polish philosopher, literary critic, journalist, and leftist independence activist. Life Edward Dembowski was the son of Julia, née Kochanowska, and a conservative castellan-voivode of the Congress Poland, Leon Dembowski. On account of Edward's szlachta origins and contrasting radical social views, he was called "the red castellan's-son."
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Charles Andler
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Charles Philippe Théodore Andler was a French Germanist and philosopher. Life Andler was born to a Protestant family in Strasbourg. In 1887 and 1888, Andler failed to achieve his agrégation in philosophy, judged by Jules Lachelier, inspector-general in charge of philosophy, as showing "excessive bias" towards German philosophy. He therefore changed to take the German literature agrégation in 1889, passing out top of his class. Andler became professor of German at the Sorbonne in 1901 and at the Collège de France in 1926. Amongst his works were writings on Nietzsche, a commentary on The Commun...
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