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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#17301
Ernst Kurth
1886 - 1946 (60 years)
Ernst Kurth was a Swiss music theorist of Austrian origin. Career Kurth studied musicology with Guido Adler in Vienna, and earned his Ph.D. with a thesis about Christoph Willibald Gluck's operatic style. In a relatively short publishing career of about 15 years, Kurth wrote four enormously influential works: Grundlagen des Linearen Kontrapunkts , Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners "Tristan" , Bruckner, and Musikpsychologie. Since the 1940s, Kurth was gradually eclipsed by other theorists . However, his concept of "developmental motif" has remained influential. A developmental motif is one which gradually changes or grows, becoming a structural carrier of formal developments.
Go to Profile#17302
Garegin Nzhdeh
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Garegin Ter-Harutyunyan, better known by his nom de guerre Garegin Nzhdeh , was an Armenian statesman, military commander and nationalist political thinker. As a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, he was involved in the national liberation struggle and revolutionary activities during the First Balkan War and World War I and became one of the key political and military leaders of the First Republic of Armenia . He is widely admired as a charismatic national hero by Armenians.
Go to Profile#17303
Dimitar Dimov
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Dimitar Todorov Dimov was a Bulgarian dramatist, novelist and veterinary surgeon. Biography Born in Lovech, Dimov is best known for his best-selling novel Tobacco which was made into the 1962 film Tobacco directed by Nikola Korabov. The plot of Dimov's Tobacco deals with the fates of a number of characters connected to a major tobacco factory. The central thread of the plot is the story of Boris, an ambitious youth of poor origins who renounces his first love Irina to marry Maria, the heiress of the tobacco business. He proceeds to steer the business with great greed and ruthlessness. His wi...
Go to Profile#17304
Samuel Haughton
1821 - 1897 (76 years)
Samuel Haughton was an Irish clergyman, medical doctor, and scientific writer. Biography The scientist Samuel Haughton was born in Carlow, the son of another Samuel Haughton and grandson of the three-times-married Samuel Pearson Haughton , a Quaker.
Go to Profile#17305
David Renaud Boullier
1699 - 1759 (60 years)
David Renaud Boullier was a Dutch Huguenot theologian, Protestant minister and philosopher. Biography Boullier was born in Utrecht on 24 March 1699. He was educated at Utrech University. He was a Protestant pastor in Amsterdam and was active in London for several years.
Go to Profile#17306
Karl Albert Scherner
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
Karl Albert Scherner was a German philosopher and psychologist. Life Karl Albert Scherner was born on 26 July 1825 in Deutsch-Krawarn, a village on the then border between Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia , near the district capital of Ratibor . He studied at the Gymnasium in Ratibor and in May 1846 went up to the university in Breslau , where he studied Catholic theology. In 1858 he became a Docent in the Philosophy Department of the same university, a position which he held until the winter term of 1871–72. He is said to have given up his university career because of a severe throat condition.
Go to Profile#17307
Samuel de Sorbiere
1615 - 1670 (55 years)
Samuel Sorbière was a French physician and man of letters, a philosopher and translator, who is best known for his promotion of the works of Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi, in whose view of physics he placed his support, though unable to refute René Descartes, but who developed a reputation in his own day for a truculent and disputatious nature. Sorbière is regarded often by his position on ethics and disclosure about medical mistakes. In 1672 Sorbière considered the idea of being honest and upfront about a mistake having been made in medicine but thought that it might seriously jeopard...
Go to Profile#17308
Lala Lajpat Rai
1865 - 1928 (63 years)
Lala Lajpat Rai was an Indian revolutionary, politician, and author, generally known as Lala Lajpat Rai. He was popularly known as Punjab Kesari. He was one of the three members of the Lal Bal Pal trio. He died of severe head trauma injuries sustained 18 days earlier during a baton charge by police in Lahore, when he led a peaceful protest march against the all-British Simon Commission Indian constitutional reforms.
Go to Profile#17309
Marianne Brandt
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.
Go to Profile#17310
Karl Landsteiner
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of fifty five for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.
Go to Profile#17311
Götz Briefs
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Götz Briefs was a Catholic social theorist, social ethicist, social philosopher and political economist, who together with Gustav Gundlach, SJ influenced the social teachings of Pope Pius XI. Biography In 1908, Briefs began to study history and philosophy at the University of Munich. As it was customary in German academic circles at the time, he frequently switched universities, moving in 1909 to Bonn, and later in 1911 to Freiburg. In Freiburg, he became a member of K.D.St. V. Wildenstein Freiburg im Breisgau, a Catholic student fraternity that belong to the Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen.
Go to Profile#17312
John Major
1467 - 1550 (83 years)
John Major was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, and historian who was much admired in his day and was an acknowledged influence on all the great thinkers of the time. A renowned teacher, his works were much collected and frequently republished across Europe. His "sane conservatism" and his sceptical, logical approach to the study of texts such as Aristotle or the Bible were less prized in the subsequent age of humanism, when a more committed and linguistic/literary approach prevailed.
Go to Profile#17313
Johann Martin Chladenius
1710 - 1759 (49 years)
Johann Martin Chladni was a German philosopher, theologian, and historian, who is seen as one of the founders of Hermeneutics. Life He was the son of Martin Chladenius , a professor of theology at Wittenberg University. He attended the Casimirianum Gymnasium in Coburg and enrolled in 1731, at the Wittenberg University, where he received his master's degree in philosophy, and taught after his studies. He went to the University of Leipzig, where he became an associate professor of church antiquities in 1742.
Go to Profile#17314
Joseph Sapiano
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Joseph Sapiano was a Maltese theologian and minor philosopher. In philosophy he was mostly interested in epistemology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta between 1953 and 1971.
Go to Profile#17315
Marjorie Silliman Harris
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Marjorie Silliman Harris was an American philosopher who wrote on the problem of determining meaningfulness in life. Influenced by Auguste Comte, Henri Bergson, and Francisco Romero, she addressed questions related to individual experience and its assimilation or transcendence.
Go to Profile#17316
Cristoforo Landino
1424 - 1498 (74 years)
Cristoforo Landino was an Italian humanist and an important figure of the Florentine Renaissance. Biography From a family with ties to the Casentino, Landino was born in Florence in 1424. He studied law and Greek . Against his father's will he turned away from a career in the law and decided to study philosophy instead, a decision he would not have been able to make but for the patronage of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici. Landino's wife Lucrezia was a member of the Alberti family.
Go to Profile#17317
Sukhlal Sanghvi
1880 - 1978 (98 years)
Sukhlal Sanghvi , also known as Pandit Sukhlalji, was a Jain scholar and philosopher. He belonged to the Sthanakvasi sect of Jainism. Pandit Sukhlal lost his eyesight at the age of sixteen on account of smallpox. However, he persisted and became profoundly versed in Jain logic and rose to become a professor at Banaras Hindu University. Paul Dundas calls him one of the most incisive modern interpreters of Jain philosophy. Dundas notes that Sanghavi represents what now seems to be a virtually lost scholarly and intellectual world. He was a mentor for famous Jain scholar Padmanabh Jaini. During h...
Go to Profile#17318
Nicolaus Taurellus
1547 - 1606 (59 years)
Nicolaus Taurellus was a German philosopher and medical academic. Life He was born in the County of Mömpelgard, then part of the Duchy of Württemberg. With support from Duke Georg I. of Württemberg-Mömpelgard, he read theology at University of Tübingen and medicine at the University of Basel, where he lectured on physical science. He subsequently became professor of medicine at the University of Altdorf. There he died in 1606 from the plague, despite treatment by Ernst Soner.
Go to Profile#17319
Valerie J. Lund
#17320
Lydia Maria Child
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.
Go to Profile#17321
Guarino da Verona
1374 - 1460 (86 years)
Guarino Veronese or Guarino da Verona was an Italian classical scholar, humanist, and translator of ancient Greek texts during the Renaissance. In the republics of Florence and Venice he studied under Manuel Chrysoloras , renowned professor of Greek and ambassador of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, the first scholar to hold such course in medieval Italy.
Go to Profile#17322
Charles Francis O'Connor
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Charles Francis "Frank" O'Connor was an American actor, painter, and rancher and the husband of novelist Ayn Rand. Frank O'Connor performed in several films, typically as an extra, during the silent and early sound eras until about 1934. While working on the set of the 1927 The King of Kings, O'Connor met Rand, and they eventually dated each other steadily. They married in 1929. When O'Connor and Rand moved to California so Rand could work on the movie adaptation of her novel The Fountainhead, O'Connor purchased and managed a ranch in the San Fernando Valley for several years. In addition to ...
Go to Profile#17323
Karol Estreicher
1827 - 1908 (81 years)
Karol Józef Teofil Estreicher was a Polish bibliographer and librarian who was a founder of the Polish Academy of Learning. While he is known as the "father of Polish bibliography", he is also considered the founder of the bibliographical method in literary research. His "monumental work", is called the "most outstanding bibliography of Polish books, and probably one of the most famous bibliographies in the world".
Go to Profile#17324
Rıza Tevfik Bölükbaşı
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Rıza Tevfik Bey was an Ottoman and later Turkish philosopher, poet, politician of liberal signature and a community leader of the late-19th-century and early-20th-century. A polyglot, he is most remembered in Turkey for being one of the four Ottoman signatories of the disastrous Treaty of Sèvres, for which reason he was included in 1923 among the 150 of Turkey, and he spent 20 years in exile until he was given amnesty by Turkey in 1943.
Go to Profile#17325
Johann Bernhard Merian
1723 - 1807 (84 years)
Johann Bernhard Merian or Jean-Bernard Mérian was a Swiss philosopher active in the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Merian studied at the University of Basle, gaining his doctorate in 1740. He became a member of the Class for Speculative Philosophy of the Berlin Academy in 1750, and director of the Class for Belles-Lettres in 1771. From 1797 he was permanent Secretary of the Academy.
Go to Profile#17326
Wolfgang Cramer
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Wolfgang Cramer was a German philosopher and mathematician. Biography Early Years Cramer, the son of a governmental master builder, was born in Hamburg and spent his school time in Breslau . After his Abitur in 1920 he studied three semesters of philosophy directed by Richard Hönigswald and Siegfried Marck at the University of Breslau. A friend from this time was Moritz Löwi. At the University of Heidelberg he studied another semester of philosophy directed by Karl Jaspers. Afterwards he worked as a bank officer. In the winter term 1924/25 he started to study again and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Breslau.
Go to Profile#17327
Leon Wyczółkowski
1852 - 1936 (84 years)
Leon Jan Wyczółkowski was one of the leading painterss of the Young Poland movement, as well as the principal representative of Polish Realism in art of the Interbellum. From 1895 to 1911 he served as professor of the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and from 1934, ASP in Warsaw. He was a founding member of the Society of Polish Artists "Sztuka" .
Go to Profile#17328
Léon Denis
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Léon Denis was a notable French spiritist philosopher, and, with Gabriel Delanne and Camille Flammarion, one of the principal exponents of spiritism after the death of Allan Kardec. Denis lectured throughout Europe at international conferences of spiritism and spiritualism, promoting the idea of survival of the soul after death and the implications of this for human relations. He is known as the apostle of French spiritism.
Go to Profile#17329
Sheldon H. Preskorn
#17330
Amico Bignami
#17331
Carlo Amoretti
1741 - 1816 (75 years)
Carlo Amoretti was an ecclesiastic, scholar, writer, and scientist. He entered the Augustinian order in 1757. To further his studies, he went to Pavia and Parma where he also taught ecclesiastical law.
Go to Profile#17332
Franciscus Sylvius
1614 - 1672 (58 years)
Franciscus Sylvius , born Franz de le Boë, was a Dutch physician and scientist who was an early champion of Descartes', Van Helmont's and William Harvey's work and theories. He was one of the earliest defenders of the theory of circulation of the blood in the Netherlands, and commonly falsely cited as the inventor of gin – others pinpoint the origin of gin to Italy.
Go to Profile#17333
John Nichols
1745 - 1826 (81 years)
John Nichols was an English printer, author and antiquary. He is remembered as an influential editor of the Gentleman's Magazine for nearly 40 years; author of a monumental county history of Leicestershire; author of two compendia of biographical material relating to his literary contemporaries; and as one of the agents behind the first complete publication of Domesday Book in 1783.
Go to Profile#17334
Julije Makanec
1904 - 1945 (41 years)
Julije Makanec was a Croatian politician, teacher, philosopher and writer. During the World War II in Yugoslavia, he was the Minister of Education of the Independent State of Croatia and a high-ranking member of the Ustashas.
Go to Profile#17335
Catharine Macaulay
1731 - 1791 (60 years)
Catharine Macaulay , was an English Whig republican historian. Early life Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge and his wife Elizabeth Wanley of Olantigh. Sawbridge was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry.
Go to Profile#17336
Adam Ignacy Zabellewicz
1784 - 1831 (47 years)
Adam Ignacy Zabellewicz was a professor of philosophy at Warsaw University. Life Zabellewicz was professor of philosophy at Warsaw University from 1818 to 1823. Zabellewicz was one of nearly all the university professors of philosophy in Poland before the November 1830–31 Uprising who held a position that shunned both Positivism and metaphysical speculation, affined to the Scottish philosophers but linked in certain respects to Kantianian critique.
Go to Profile#17337
Leonid Sher
#17338
Constantijn Huygens
1596 - 1687 (91 years)
Sir Constantijn Huygens, Lord of Zuilichem , was a Dutch Golden Age poet and composer. He was also secretary to two Princes of Orange: Frederick Henry and William II, and the father of the scientist Christiaan Huygens.
Go to Profile#17339
George Jardine
1742 - 1827 (85 years)
Rev George Jardine FRSE was a Scottish minister of religion, philosopher, academic and educator. He was Professor at the University of Glasgow, of Greek from 1774, and then Professor of Logic and Rhetoric 1787 to 1824. He was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783 and co-founder of Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1792.
Go to Profile#17340
Michail Papageorgiou
1727 - 1796 (69 years)
Michail Papageorgiou was a Greek philosopher. He was born in Siatista in 1727. He studied philosophy in the Maroutsaia School of Ioannina under Eugenios Voulgaris. Later he visited Germany where he studied philosophy and medicine. He taught in his birthplace Siatista, and also in Selitsa, Meleniko, Vienna and Budapest. He died in Vienna on 1796.
Go to Profile#17341
Swami Satprakashananda
1888 - 1979 (91 years)
Swami Satprakashananda was an Indian philosopher, monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and religious teacher. Biography Swami Satprakashananda was born in Dhaka in April 1888 in what has been described as a "pious Hindu family". His premonastic name was Harish, and his father died when he was young. Harish joined the Ramakrishna Order in 1924 in Dhaka after postgraduate work at the University of Calcutta. He had been initiated by Swami Brahmananda in 1908, later receiving monastic orders from Swami Shivananda in 1927. Satprakashananda served for a time as an associate editor of Prabuddha Bharata...
Go to Profile#17342
Kenneth L. Melmon
#17343
Joseé E. Leysen
#17344
Antonin Poncet
1849 - 1913 (64 years)
Antonin Poncet was a French surgeon. Son of Jean Joseph Poncet and Catherine Jeanne Chabalier, he was inspired by his grandfather Jean-Pierre Antoine Chabalier, surgeon in the Imperial Army. He studied medicine in Lyon, where he served as interne des hôpitaux. He was a member of the Lyon ambulance corps during the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1878 became a member of the surgical section of the Lyon faculty of medicine. In 1883 he attained the chair of operative medicine in Lyon.
Go to Profile#17345
Alexander Galich
1783 - 1848 (65 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Galich was a Russian teacher, philosopher, and writer. Galich was a teacher of Latin and Russian literature at the German Saint Peter's School in St. Petersburg, a professor at St. Petersburg University, a teacher of Alexander Pushkin, and a writer and philosopher who was one of the first followers of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in Russia.
Go to Profile#17346
Germain Sée
1818 - 1896 (78 years)
Germain Sée was a French clinician who was a native of Ribeauvillé, Haut-Rhin. He studied medicine in Paris, obtaining his doctorate in 1846 with a dissertation on ergotism . In 1852 he became a physician of hospitals in Paris, and subsequently worked at La Rochefoucauld , Beaujon , Pitié and Charité hospitals. In 1866 he succeeded Armand Trousseau as chair of therapeutics at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and in 1876 attained the chair of clinical medicine at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris.
Go to Profile#17347
Jacopo Stellini
1699 - 1770 (71 years)
Jacopo Stellini was an Italian abbot, polymath writer and philosopher. Born in Cividale del Friuli to a family of modest means; his father was a tailor. Stellini was first educated by the Somaschi order, and he joined the order in 1718. He moved to Venice where he studied in the seminary in Murano, and was made a priest in 1722. In Venice, he served as a tutor to the prominent Emo family, and the patronage in 1739 helped him land a professor position teaching "moral philosophy" at the University of Padua.
Go to Profile#17348
Apollonius Cronus
350 BC - 350 BC (0 years)
Apollonius Cronus from Cyrene was a philosopher of the Megarian school. Very little is known about him. He was the pupil of Eubulides, and was the teacher of Diodorus Cronus, as Strabo relates: Apollonius Cronus, was from Cyrene, ... being the teacher of Diodorus the Dialectician, who also was given the appellation "Cronus," certain persons having transferred the epithet of the teacher to the pupil.
Go to Profile#17349
Johann Christian Lossius
1743 - 1813 (70 years)
Johann Christian Lossius was a German materialist philosopher who made contributions to philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of mind, and physiognomy. Life Lossius studied philosophy at Jena. Appointed professor of philosophy at Erfurt in 1770, he became professor of theology there in 1772.
Go to Profile#17350
Christoph Meiners
1747 - 1810 (63 years)
Christoph Meiners was a German racialist, philosopher, historian, and writer born in Warstade. He supported the polygenist theory of human origins. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
Go to Profile