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,
#1751
Zenon Pylyshyn
#2229
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He developed visual indexing theory which hypothesizes a pre-conceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. His very influential multiple object tracking experiment methodology emerged from this work.
Go to Profile#1752
Dewi Zephaniah Phillips
#20594
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Dewi Zephaniah Phillips , known as D. Z. Phillips or simply DZ, was a Welsh philosopher. He was a leading proponent of the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. He had an academic career spanning five decades, and at the time of his death he held the Danforth Chair in Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, California, and was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swansea University.
Go to Profile#1753
David Macarthur
#21881
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art . He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Go to Profile#1754
Martin Rhonheimer
#14413
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Martin Rhonheimer is a Swiss political philosophy professor and priest of the Catholic personal prelature Opus Dei. he is teaching professor at the Opus Dei-affiliated Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
Go to Profile#1755
Martin Nakata
#14908
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Martin Nakata is an Australian academic, researcher and scholar in the field of Indigenous education, knowledge, and studies. He is the first aboriginal/indigenous person from the Torres Strait Islands to obtain a doctoral degree. He is also a proponent of indigenous standpoint theory. As of 2021, he is Deputy Vice-Chancellor of James Cook University. In 2020 he was conferred with Member of the Order of Australia for "significant service to tertiary education, and to learning outcomes for Indigenous students". An asteroid in the Koronis family has been named in his honour as 7547 Martinnakata...
Go to Profile#1756
Joseph Cropsey
#9489
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Joseph Cropsey was an American political philosopher and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago, where he was also associate director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy.
Go to Profile#1757
Divya Dwivedi
#11259
Overall Influence
Divya Dwivedi is an Indian philosopher and author. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work includes a focus on philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, and the political thought of Gandhi. She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics.
Go to Profile#1758
Paul Gochet
#15446
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Paul Gochet was a Belgian logician, philosopher, and emeritus professor of the University of Liège. His research was mainly in the fields of logic and analytic philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his works on Quine's philosophy.
Go to Profile#1759
Julien Benda
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Julien Benda was a French philosopher and novelist, known as an essayist and cultural critic. He is best known for his short book, La Trahison des Clercs from 1927 . Life Born into a Jewish family in Paris, Benda had a secular upbringing. He was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. After a period at the École Centrale Paris, he turned to history, and graduated at the Sorbonne in 1894.
Go to Profile#1760
Oskar Becker
1889 - 1964 (75 years)
Oscar Becker was a German philosopher, logician, mathematician, and historian of mathematics. Early life Becker was born in Leipzig, where he studied mathematics. His dissertation under Otto Hölder and Karl Rohn was On the Decomposition of Polygons in non-intersecting triangles on the Basis of the Axioms of Connection and Order.
Go to Profile#1761
John Broome
#11377
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Broome is a British philosopher and economist. He was the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Biography Broome was educated at the University of Cambridge, at the University of London and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in economics. Before arriving at Oxford he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and, prior to that, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has held visiting posts at the University of Virginia, the Aust...
Go to Profile#1762
Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi
1155 - 1191 (36 years)
"Shihāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī was a philosopher and founder of the Iranian school of Illuminationism, an important school in Islamic philosophy. The "light" in his "Philosophy of Illumination" is the source of knowledge. He is referred to by the honorific title Shaikh al-ʿIshraq "Master of Illumination" and Shaikh al-Maqtul "the Murdered Master", in reference to his execution for heresy. Mulla Sadra, the Persian sage of the Safavid era described Suhrawardi as the "Reviver of the Traces of the Pahlavi Sages", and Suhrawardi, in his magnum opus "The Philosophy of Illumination", thought of himself as a reviver or resuscitator of the ancient tradition of Persian wisdom.
Go to Profile#1763
Santiago Zabala
#16981
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Santiago Zabala is a philosopher and ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University. His books have been translated into several languages and his articles have been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets.
Go to Profile#1764
Alan Chalmers
#12508
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Alan Francis Chalmers is a British-Australian philosopher of science and associate professor at the University of Sydney. His son, David Chalmers, is also a noted philosopher, working in philosophy of mind at NYU.
Go to Profile#1765
Emil Lask
1875 - 1915 (40 years)
Emil Lask was a German philosopher. A student of Heinrich Rickert at Freiburg University, he was a member of the Southwestern school of neo-Kantianism. Biography Lask was born in Austrian Galicia, as a son of Jewish parents. After completing his philosophical education at Freiburg, he was made lecturer at Heidelberg in 1905, and he was elected professor there just before the outbreak of World War I. When war began in 1914 Lask immediately volunteered. Since, as a Heidelberg professor, he would have been regarded as indispensable on the home front, he did not have to enlist. But, conscientious and idealistic, Lask believed that he had an obligation to serve his country.
Go to Profile#1766
Thomas of Erfurt
1300 - 1350 (50 years)
Thomas of Erfurt was a German philosopher, the most important of the so-called Modistae. He was probably a native of Erfurt. He had some connection to the University of Paris as a teacher or student. He later taught at St Severus' Church and the Schottenkirche in Erfurt.
Go to Profile#1767
William O. Stephens
#13440
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
William O. Stephens , is an American philosopher and scholar of Stoicism. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Creighton University after retiring from teaching at their Omaha Campus in 2020. Biography Stephens was born in Lafayette, Indiana and grew up in West Lafayette where he attended West Lafayette Senior High School and began his study of ancient civilizations and Latin. He studied Philosophy at the College of Wooster for two years before transferring to Earlham College, where he earned his undergraduate degree. Stephens completed his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under Charles H.
Go to Profile#1768
Olga Hahn-Neurath
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Olga Hahn-Neurath was an Austrian mathematician and philosopher. She is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle. She was sister of the mathematician Hans Hahn. Biography Born in Vienna, Hahn enrolled as a student for math and philosophy studies at the University of Vienna in 1902. She became blind in 1904, when she was 22. In 1911, she became the third ever female graduate in philosophy at Vienna University. Her doctoral thesis, published in 1911, received great compliments from her instructor, Adolf Stöhr, the successor to the chair of Ludwig Boltzmann. Her main interest in math w...
Go to Profile#1769
Elisabeth of the Palatinate
1618 - 1680 (62 years)
Elisabeth of the Palatinate , also known as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate, or Princess-Abbess of Herford Abbey, was the eldest daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine , and Elizabeth Stuart. Elisabeth of the Palatinate was a philosopher best known for her correspondence with René Descartes. She was critical of Descartes' dualistic metaphysics and her work anticipated the metaphysical concerns of later philosophers.
Go to Profile#1770
Solomon Dodashvili
1805 - 1836 (31 years)
Solomon Dodashvili , also known as Solomon Ivanovich Dodaev-Mogarsky , was a Georgian philosopher, journalist, historian, grammarian, belletrist and enlightener. Dodashvili was born in Magharo, Kakheti, Georgia, then part of Imperial Russia. Having graduated from St Petersburg University in 1827, he obtained a Magister degree in philosophy there in 1828. During his stay in the Russian capital, he was close to Decembrist ideas and witnessed their 1825 mutiny. In 1828, Dodashvili returned to Tiflis, where he worked as an educator. He composed histories, grammars, and summaries of philosophy for his young pupils and led them into political opposition to the Russian rule.
Go to Profile#1771
James Seth
1860 - 1925 (65 years)
James Seth was a Scottish philosopher. His older brother was Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, also a philosopher. Their father, Smith Kimont Seth, was the son of a farmer from the Scottish region of Fife and a bank clerk in the head office of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Their mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Andrew Little, a farmer from Berwickshire. An elder brother died in infancy. Seth was born in Edinburgh and attended George Watsons College. He was a student of Alexander Campbell Fraser and Henry Calderwood, and won two scholarships. He then went on to Divinity and ordination via ...
Go to Profile#1772
Jeff McMahan
#17049
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014. Education and career McMahan completed a B.A. degree in English literature at the University of the South . He completed a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, then did graduate work in philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his M.A. at the University of Oxford. He was offered a research studentship at St. John's College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1983. He studied first under Jonathan Glover an...
Go to Profile#1773
Julius Bahnsen
1830 - 1881 (51 years)
Julius Friedrich August Bahnsen was a German philosopher. Bahnsen is usually considered the originator of characterology and a real-dialectical method of philosophical reflection which he laid down in his two-volume Contributions to Characterology and developed forth with his following works, amongst others his magnum opus The Contradiction in the Knowledge and Being of the World .
Go to Profile#1774
Amia Srinivasan
#15181
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher noted for her work in epistemology and feminist philosophy. Since January 2020, she has been Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#1775
Ibn Tufayl
1110 - 1185 (75 years)
Ibn Ṭufayl was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath: a writer, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, astronomer, and vizier. As a philosopher and novelist, he is most famous for writing the first philosophical novel, , considered a major work of Arabic literature emerging from Al-Andalus. As a physician, he was an early supporter of dissection and autopsy, which was expressed in his novel.
Go to Profile#1776
Dale Jamieson
#21799
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Dale Jamieson is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at New York University, a scholar of environmental ethics and animal rights, and an analyst of climate change discourse. He also serves as a faculty affiliate for the NYU School of Law and as director of NYU's Animal Studies Initiative, which was funded by Brad Goldberg with a $1 million donation in 2010. In addition to his affiliation with the NYU Departments of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Jamieson also holds positions at The Dickson Poon School of Law and at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
Go to Profile#1777
Piergiorgio Odifreddi
#11991
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Piergiorgio Odifreddi is an Italian mathematician, logician, student of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
Go to Profile#1778
Ludwig Noiré
1829 - 1889 (60 years)
Ludwig Noiré was a German philosopher, known for his studies involving the philosophy of language. He was born in Alzey. He received his education at the University of Giessen, and later relocated to Mainz, where he worked as a grammar school teacher.
Go to Profile#1779
Käte Hamburger
1896 - 1992 (96 years)
Käte Hamburger was a Germanist, literary scholar and philosopher. She was a professor at the University of Stuttgart. Hamburger earned her doctorate in 1922 in Munich. Expelled by the Nazis because of her Jewish heritage, she immigrated to Sweden in 1934, where she lived until 1956, earning her living as a language teacher, journalist and writer. She resumed her university career on her return to Germany, writing about Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
Go to Profile#1780
Lawrence Stepelevich
#20822
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Lawrence S. Stepelevich was an Americann philosopher associated with a renewed interest in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, with less emphasis placed on Karl Marx's interpretations than had previously been the case. Stepelevich also wrote on the works of Max Stirner.
Go to Profile#1781
Carolyn Korsmeyer
#19124
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carolyn Korsmeyer is an author and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo in New York. She is generally recognized for her study and research on aesthetics, feminism, and emotion theory.
Go to Profile#1782
Simon Glendinning
#23017
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Simon Glendinning is an English philosopher. Glendinning is Professor of European Philosophy and Head of department in the European Institute at the London School of Economics. Academic career Glendinning studied philosophy at the University of Oxford and at the University of York, since which he has held a series of positions:1993–1997: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Kent1997–2004: Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Reading2004–2013: Reader in European Philosophy, European Institute, LSE2014–present: Professor of European Philosophy, European Institut...
Go to Profile#1783
Siger of Brabant
1235 - 1284 (49 years)
Siger of Brabant was a 13th-century philosopher from the southern Low Countries who was an important proponent of Averroism. Life Early life Little is known about many of the details of his life. In 1266, he was attached to the Faculty of Arts in the University of Paris at the time when a riot erupted between the French and Picard "nations" of students—a series of loosely organized fraternities. The papal legate threatened Siger with execution as the ringleader of the Picard attack on the French, but no further action was taken.
Go to Profile#1784
Gila Sher
#24669
Overall Influence
Gila Sher is an American logician and professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She has worked extensively in the theory of truth and philosophy of logic. Sher is a leading advocate of foundational holism, a holistic theory of epistemology.
Go to Profile#1785
Mark Steiner
#14384
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Mark Steiner was an American-born Israeli professor of philosophy. He taught philosophy of mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Steiner died after contracting COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Go to Profile#1786
Joseph Maréchal
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Joseph Maréchal, SJ was a Belgian Jesuit priest, philosopher, theologian and psychologist. He taught at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leuven and was the founder of the school of thought called transcendental Thomism, which attempted to merge the theological and philosophical thought of St. Thomas Aquinas with that of Immanuel Kant.
Go to Profile#1787
Susan Sherwin
#17422
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Susan Sherwin is a Canadian philosopher. Her pioneering work has shaped feminist theory, ethics and bioethics, and she is considered one of the world's foremost feminist ethicists. Education Sherwin received a B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from York University and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University . Her dissertation, “Moral Foundations of Feminism”, was written under the supervision of Thomas Schwartz, and was the first dissertation in the United States on feminist ethics. Sherwin also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Moral Problems of Medicine Project at Case ...
Go to Profile#1788
Günter Grass
#856
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig . As a teenager, he was drafted into the military and served from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS. He was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.
Go to Profile#1789
Arthur F. Bentley
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Arthur Fisher Bentley was an American political scientist and philosopher who worked in the fields of epistemology, logic and linguistics and who contributed to the development of a behavioral methodology of political science.
Go to Profile#1790
Hugo Riemann
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Karl Wilhelm Julius Hugo Riemann was a German musicologist and composer who was among the founders of modern musicology. The leading European music scholar of his time, he was active and influential as both a music theorist and music historian. Many of his contributions are now termed as Riemannian theory, a variety of related ideas on many aspects of music theory.
Go to Profile#1791
Carl Dahlhaus
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Carl Dahlhaus was a German musicologist who was among the leading postwar musicologists of the mid to late 20th-century. A prolific scholar, he had broad interests though his research focused on 19th- and 20th-century classical music, both areas in which he made significant advancements. However, he remains best known in the English-speaking world for his writings on Wagner. Dahlhaus wrote on many other composers, including Josquin, Gesualdo, Bach and Schoenberg.
Go to Profile#1792
Jean Arp
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp , better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist. Early life Arp was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp to a French mother and a German father in Straßburg during the period between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, when the city and surrounding region was under control of the German Empire. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law required Arp to adopt a French name, and he legally became Jean Arp, although he continued referring to himself as "H...
Go to Profile#1793
Shin'ichi Hisamatsu
1889 - 1980 (91 years)
Shin'ichi Hisamatsu was a philosopher, Zen Buddhist scholar, and Japanese tea ceremony master. He was a professor at Kyoto University and received an honorary doctoral degree from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1794
Georges Sorel
1847 - 1922 (75 years)
Georges Eugène Sorel was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist. He has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson , and later William James. His notion of the power of myth in collective agency inspired socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and fascists. Together with his defense of violence, the power of myth is the contribution for which he is most often remembered.
Go to Profile#1795
Markus Herz
1747 - 1803 (56 years)
Markus Herz was a German Jewish physician and lecturer on philosophy. Biography Born in Berlin to very poor parents, Herz was destined for a mercantile career, and in 1762 went to Königsberg, East Prussia. He soon gave up his position as clerk and attended the University of Königsberg, becoming a pupil of Immanuel Kant, but was obliged to discontinue his studies for want of means. He thereupon became secretary to the wealthy Russian Ephraim, travelling with him through the Baltic Provinces.
Go to Profile#1796
John Fiske
1842 - 1901 (59 years)
John Fiske was an American philosopher and historian. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and applied Spencer's concepts of evolution to his own writings on linguistics, philosophy, religion, and history.
Go to Profile#1797
Lucien Sève
#13513
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Lucien Sève was a French philosopher, communist and political activist. He was an active member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 2010. His 1969 work Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité has been translated into 25 different languages. Sève died on 23 March 2020 of Coronavirus disease 2019
Go to Profile#1798
Mary Whiton Calkins
1863 - 1930 (67 years)
Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.
Go to Profile#1799
Alan Ross Anderson
1925 - 1973 (48 years)
Alan Ross Anderson was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. A frequent collaborator with Nuel Belnap, Anderson was instrumental in the development of relevance logic and deontic logic.
Go to Profile#1800
Pietro Pomponazzi
1462 - 1525 (63 years)
Pietro Pomponazzi was an Italian philosopher. He is sometimes known by his Latin name, Petrus Pomponatius. Biography Pietro Pomponazzi was born in Mantua and began his education there. He completed his studies at the University of Padua, where he became a medical doctor in 1487. In 1488 he was elected extraordinary professor of philosophy at Padua, where he was a colleague of Alessandro Achillini, the Averroist. From about 1495 to 1509 he occupied the chair of natural philosophy until the closing of the schools of Padua, when he took a professorship at Ferrara where he lectured on the Aristotle's De anima and entelechy.
Go to Profile