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,
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Alan Watts
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
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Stanisław Leśniewski
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Stanisław Leśniewski was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician. Life He was born on 28 March 1886 at Serpukhov, near Moscow, to father Izydor, an engineer working on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and mother Helena . Leśniewski went to a high school in Irkutsk. Later he attended lectures by Hans Cornelius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and lectures by Wacław Sierpiński at Lviv University.
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André Malraux
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency .
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Eric Voegelin
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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Aenesidemus
80 BC - 10 BC (70 years)
Aenesidemus was a 1st-century BC Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher from Knossos who revived the doctrines of Pyrrho and introduced ten skeptical "modes" for the suspension of judgment. He broke with the Academic Skepticism that was predominant in his time, synthesizing the teachings of Heraclitus and Timon of Phlius with philosophical skepticism. Although his primary work, the Pyrrhonian Discourses, has been lost, an outline of the work survives from the later Byzantine empire, and the description of the modes has been preserved by few ancient sources.
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Gustav Bergmann
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Gustav Bergmann was an Austrian-born American philosopher. He studied at the University of Vienna and was a member of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann was influenced by the philosophers Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and Rudolf Carnap, who were members of the Circle. In the United States, he was a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Iowa.
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Paracelsus
1493 - 1541 (48 years)
Paracelsus , born Theophrastus von Hohenheim , was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology". Paracelsus also had a substantial influence as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 17th century. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.
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Ralph Cudworth
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew , 26th Master of Clare Hall , and 14th Master of Christ's College . A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe .
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Alexander von Humboldt
1769 - 1859 (90 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
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Friedrich Pollock
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Friedrich Pollock was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory.
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Paul Arthur Schilpp
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Paul Arthur Schilpp was an American philosopher and educator. Biography Schilpp was born in Dillenburg, Germany and immigrated to the United States prior to World War I. Schilpp taught at Northwestern University, University of Puget Sound, UC Santa Barbara, University of the Pacific and spent the last years of his professional career teaching undergraduate philosophy courses at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Schilpp was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association .
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Lewis Carroll
1832 - 1898 (66 years)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass . He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.
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Chanakya
375 BC - 283 BC (92 years)
Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Vishnugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century.
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Jiddu Krishnamurti
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher, speaker, writer, and spiritual figure. Adopted by members of the Theosophical tradition as a child, he was raised to fill the advanced role of World Teacher, but in adulthood he rejected this mantle and distanced himself from the related religious movement. He spent the rest of his life speaking to groups and individuals around the world; many of these talks have been published. He also wrote many books, among them The First and Last Freedom and Commentaries on Living . His last public talk was in January 1986, a month before his death at his hom...
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Charles Kay Ogden
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Charles Kay Ogden was an English linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language. He is typically defined as a linguistic psychologist, and is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English.
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Kiyoshi Miki
1897 - 1945 (48 years)
Kiyoshi Miki was a Japanese philosopher, literary critic, scholar and university professor. He was an esteemed student of Nishida Kitarō and a prominent member of the Kyoto School. Miki was a prolific academic and social critic of his time. He also had tense relations with both and the Imperial government at various stages of his career.
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Paul Valéry
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction , his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.
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Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
700 - 700 (0 years)
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa was a Hindu philosopher and a scholar of Mimamsa school of philosophy from early medieval India. He is famous for many of his various theses on Mimamsa, such as Mimamsaslokavarttika. Bhaṭṭa was a staunch believer in the supreme validity of Vedic injunction, a champion of Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā and a confirmed ritualist. The Varttika is mainly written as a subcommentary of Sabara's commentary on Jaimini's Purva Mimamsa Sutras. His philosophy is classified by some scholars as existential realism.
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Gaudapada
550 - Present (1476 years)
Gauḍapāda , also referred as Gauḍapādācārya , was an early medieval era Hindu philosopher and scholar of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy. While details of his biography are uncertain, his ideas inspired others such as Adi Shankara who called him a Paramaguru .
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Will Durant
1885 - 1981 (96 years)
William James Durant was an American historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy , described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
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Sergei Bulgakov
1871 - 1944 (73 years)
Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, and economist. Orthodox writer and scholar David Bentley Hart has said that Bulgakov was "the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century." Father Sergei Bulgakov also served as a spiritual father and confessor to Mother Maria Skobtsova .
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Xun Kuang
313 BC - 238 BC (75 years)
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Johann Eduard Erdmann
1805 - 1892 (87 years)
Johann Eduard Erdmann was a German religious pastor, historian of philosophy, and philosopher of religion, of which he wrote on the mediation of faith and knowledge. He was known to be a follower of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he studied under August Carlblom , and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he regarded as his mentor. Erdmann also studied the works of Karl Daub. Historians of philosophy usually include Erdmann as a member of the Right Wing of the Hegelian movement, a group of thinkers who were also referred to variously as the Right Hegelians , the Hegelian Right , and/or as the O...
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Eduard Zeller
1814 - 1908 (94 years)
Eduard Gottlob Zeller was a German philosopher and Protestant theologian of the Tübingen School of theology. He was well known for his writings on Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Pre-Socratic Philosophy, and most of all for his celebrated, multi-volume historical treatise The Philosophy of Greeks in their Historical Development . Zeller was also a central figure in the revival of neo-Kantianism.
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Monroe Beardsley
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Monroe Curtis Beardsley was an American philosopher of art. Biography Beardsley was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University , where he received the John Addison Porter Prize. He taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Mount Holyoke College and Yale University, but most of his career was spent at Swarthmore College and Temple University . His wife and occasional coauthor, Elizabeth Lane Beardsley, was also a philosopher at Temple.
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James Hayden Tufts
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
James Hayden Tufts , an influential American philosopher, was a professor of the then newly founded Chicago University. Tufts was also a member of the Board of Arbitration, and the chairman of a committee of the social agencies of Chicago. The work Ethics in 1908 was a collaboration of Tufts and John Dewey. Tufts believed in a conception of mutual influences which he saw as opposed in both Marxism and idealism.
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Joseph Dietzgen
1828 - 1888 (60 years)
Peter Josef Dietzgen was a German socialist philosopher, Marxist and journalist. Dietzgen was born in Blankenberg in the Rhine Province of Prussia. He was the first of five children of father Johann Gottfried Anno Dietzgen and mother Anna Margaretha Lückerath . He was, like his father, a tanner by profession; inheriting his uncle's business in Siegburg. Entirely self-educated, he developed the notion of dialectical materialism independently from Marx and Engels as an independent philosopher of socialist theory. He had one son, Eugene Dietzgen.
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Amos Bronson Alcott
1799 - 1888 (89 years)
Amos Bronson Alcott was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a plant-based diet. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights.
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Albrecht Dürer
1471 - 1528 (57 years)
Albrecht Dürer , sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
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William of Moerbeke
1215 - 1286 (71 years)
William of Moerbeke, O.P. , was a prolific medieval translator of philosophical, medical, and scientific texts from Greek into Latin, enabled by the period of Latin rule of the Byzantine Empire. His translations were influential in his day, when few competing translations were available, and are still respected by modern scholars.
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The Buddha
563 BC - 483 BC (80 years)
<noinclude></noinclude> Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha , was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism.
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Georg Friedrich Meier
1718 - 1777 (59 years)
Georg Friedrich Meier was a German philosopher and aesthetician. A follower of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, he reformed the philosophy of Christian Wolff by introducing elements of John Locke's empiricist theory of knowledge.
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George Stout
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
George Frederick Stout , usually cited as G. F. Stout, was a leading English philosopher and psychologist. Biography Born in South Shields on 6 January 1860, Stout studied psychology at the University of Cambridge under James Ward. Like Ward, Stout employed a philosophical approach to psychology and opposed the theory of associationism.
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W. K. C. Guthrie
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
William Keith Chambers Guthrie , usually cited as W. K. C. Guthrie, was a Scottish classical scholar, best known for his History of Greek Philosophy, published in six volumes between 1962 and his death. He served as Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1952 to 1973 and as master of Downing College, Cambridge from 1957 to 1972.
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Sun Tzu
544 BC - 496 BC (48 years)
Sun Tzu was a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Eastern Zhou period . Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, an influential work of military strategy that has affected both Western and East Asian philosophy and military thinking. Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and military figure. His birth name was Sun Wu and he was known outside of his family by his courtesy name Changqing . The name Sun Tzuby which he is more popularly knownis an honorific which means "Master Sun".
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Raïssa Maritain
1883 - 1960 (77 years)
Raïssa Maritain was a French poet and philosopher. She was the wife of Jacques Maritain, with whom she worked and whose companion she was for more than half a century, at the center of a circle of French Catholic intellectuals. Her memoir, Les Grandes Amitiés, which won the prix du Renouveau français, chronicles this. Jacques Maritain, Raïssa and her sister Vera formed what would be called "the three Maritains".
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Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
1802 - 1872 (70 years)
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and philologist. Life He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was placed in a gymnasium in Eutin, which was under the direction of , a philologist influenced by Immanuel Kant.
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Antisthenes
444 BC - 365 BC (79 years)
Antisthenes was a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. Antisthenes first learned rhetoric under Gorgias before becoming an ardent disciple of Socrates. He adopted and developed the ethical side of Socrates' teachings, advocating an ascetic life lived in accordance with virtue. Later writers regarded him as the founder of Cynic philosophy.
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Ibn al-Nafis
1210 - 1288 (78 years)
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Abī Ḥazm al-Qarashī , known as Ibn al-Nafīs , was an Arab polymath whose areas of work included medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic studies, jurisprudence, and philosophy. He is known for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The work of Ibn al-Nafis regarding the right sided circulation pre-dates the later work of William Harvey's De motu cordis. Both theories attempt to explain circulation. 2nd century Greek physician Galen's theory about the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged unt...
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Moses Hess
1812 - 1875 (63 years)
Moses Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, early communist and Zionist thinker. His socialist theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor Zionism.
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William Kingdon Clifford
1845 - 1879 (34 years)
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry.
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Heinrich Blücher
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.
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Maurice Cornforth
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Maurice Campbell Cornforth was a British Marxist philosopher. Life Cornforth was born in Willesden, London, in 1909, and educated at University College School, where he was friends with Stephen Spender. In 1925 he went up to University College London, graduating in 1929, and then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the only student on a specialised course in logic, taught by Moore, Braithwaite, and Wittgenstein. In 1931, after graduating, Cornforth was awarded a three-year research scholarship at Trinity. In the summer of the same year he joined the Communist Party, setting up...
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Richard Montague
1930 - 1971 (41 years)
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory . For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.
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Śāntarakṣita
725 - 788 (63 years)
, whose name translates into English as "protected by the One who is at peace" was an important and influential Indian Buddhist philosopher, particularly for the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Śāntarakṣita was a philosopher of the Madhyamaka school who studied at Nalanda monastery under Jñānagarbha, and became the founder of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet.
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Francis Picabia
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada. When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic". After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921. He was later briefly assoc...
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Christian Garve
1742 - 1798 (56 years)
Christian Garve was one of the best-known philosophers of the late Enlightenment along with Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn. Life Christian Garve was born into a family of manual workers and died aged 56 in his parental home. He studied in Frankfurt an der Oder and Halle . In 1766 he gained his master's degree in philosophy. From 1770 until 1772 he was extraordinary professor of mathematics and logic in Leipzig. From 1772 he was in Breslau, where he was active as a bookseller. The greatest part of his life was however spent staying with his mother in Breslau. In this city he also became a...
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David Hartley
1705 - 1757 (52 years)
David Hartley was an English philosopher and founder of the Associationist school of psychology. Early life and family history David Hartley was born in 1705 in the vicinity of Halifax, Yorkshire. His mother died three months after his birth. His father, an Anglican clergyman, died when David was fifteen. Hartley was educated at Bradford Grammar School and in 1722 was admitted as a Sizar to Jesus College, Cambridge where he was a Rustat scholar. He received his BA in 1726 and MA in 1729. In April 1730 he became the first layperson to be Master of Magnus Grammar School , Newark, and it was there that he began to practise medicine.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712 - 1778 (66 years)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher , writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
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Bernard Bosanquet
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Bernard Bosanquet was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work influenced but was later subject to criticism by many thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bernard was the husband of Helen Bosanquet, the leader of the Charity Organisation Society.
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