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,
#17501
Jan Baptist van Helmont
1577 - 1644 (67 years)
Jan Baptist van Helmont was a chemist, physiologist, and physician from Brussels. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry". Van Helmont is remembered today largely for his 5-year willow tree experiment, his introduction of the word "gas" into the vocabulary of science, and his ideas on spontaneous generation.
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Paul C. Bucy
#17503
Xenocrates
396 BC - 314 BC (82 years)
Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements. He distinguished three forms of being: the sensible, the intelligible, and a third compounded of the two, to which correspond respectively, sense, intellect and opinion. He considered unity and duality to be gods which rule the universe, and the soul a self-moving number. God pervades all things, and there are daemonical powers, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, which consist in conditions of the soul.
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Ken Gemes
1900 - Present (126 years)
Ken Gemes is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His primary interests are Nietzsche and philosophy of science. Education and career Gemes earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with a dissertation in philosophy of science working with Clark Glymour and Wesley Salmon. He taught at Yale University for ten years before moving to Birkbeck in 2000.
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Cesare Beccaria
1738 - 1794 (56 years)
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist and politician, who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments , which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
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Vladimir Jankélévitch
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher and musicologist. Biography Jankélévitch was the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France. In 1922 he started studying philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris, under Professor Bergson. In 1924 he completed his DES thesis on Le Traité : la dialectique. Ennéade I 3 de Plotin under the direction of Émile Bréhier.
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Aubrey Beardsley
1872 - 1898 (26 years)
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.
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Roger Caillois
1913 - 1978 (65 years)
Roger Caillois was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, ludology and philosophy by focusing on diverse subjects such as games and play as well as the sacred. He was also instrumental in introducing Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Ángel Asturias to the French public. After his death, the French Literary award Prix Roger Caillois was named after him in 1991.
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Dong Zhongshu
179 BC - 104 BC (75 years)
Dong Zhongshu was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer of the Han dynasty. He is traditionally associated with the promotion of Confucianism as the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state. He apparently favored heaven worship over the tradition of cults celebrating the five elements. Ultimately banished to the Chancellery of Weifang by his adversary Gongsun Hong, Gongsun effectively promoted Dong's partial retirement from political life, and his teachings were transmitted from there. However, he apparently enjoyed great influence in the court in the last decades of his life l...
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Bertrando Spaventa
1817 - 1883 (66 years)
Bertrando Spaventa was a leading Italian philosopher of the 19th century whose ideas had an important influence on the changes that took place during the unification of Italy and on philosophical thought in the 20th century.
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Philo the Dialectician
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Philo the Dialectician was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He is sometimes called Philo of Megara although the city of his birth is unknown. He is most famous for the debate he had with his teacher Diodorus Cronus concerning the idea of the possible and the criteria of the truth of conditional statements.
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Cleobulus
630 BC - 560 BC (70 years)
Cleobulus was a Greek poet and a native of Lindos. He is one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Life Cleobulus was the son of Evagoras and a citizen of Lindus in Rhodes. Clement of Alexandria called Cleobulus king of the Lindians, and Plutarch spoke of him as the tyrant. The letter quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, in which Cleobulus invites Solon to Lindus as a democratic place of refuge from the tyrant Peisistratus in Athens, is undoubtedly a later forgery. Cleobulus is also said to have studied philosophy in Egypt. He had a daughter, Cleobulina, who found fame as a poet, composing riddles in hexameter verse.
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Jizang
549 - 623 (74 years)
Jizang was a Persian-Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar who is often regarded as the founder of East Asian Mādhyamaka. He is also known as Jiaxiang or Master Jiaxiang because he acquired fame at the Jiaxiang Temple.
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Utpaladeva
900 - 950 (50 years)
Utpaladeva was an Indian philosopher and theologian from Kashmir. He belonged to the Trika Shaiva tradition and is the most important thinker of the Pratyabhijñā school of monistic idealism. His Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā were the most important and central work of the Pratyabhijñā school. Utpaladeva was a major influence on the great exegete Abhinavagupta, whose works later overshadowed those of Utpaladeva. However, according to the Indologist Raffaele Torella "most of Abhinavagupta’s ideas are just the development of what Utpaladeva had already expounded."
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Johann Jakob Brucker
1696 - 1770 (74 years)
Johann Jakob Brucker was a German historian of philosophy. Life He was born at Augsburg. He was destined for the Lutheran Church, and graduated at the University of Jena in 1718. He returned to Augsburg in 1720, but became parish minister of Kaufbeuren in 1723.
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Cesare Cremonini
1550 - 1631 (81 years)
Cesare Cremonini , sometimes Cesare Cremonino, was an Italian professor of natural philosophy, working rationalism and Aristotelian materialism inside scholasticism. His Latinized name was Cæsar Cremoninus or Cæsar Cremonius.
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Philo of Larissa
145 BC - 79 BC (66 years)
Philo of Larissa was a Greek philosopher. It is very probable that his actual name was Philio - with a second iota. He was a pupil of Clitomachus, whom he succeeded as head of the Academy. During the Mithridatic wars which would see the destruction of the Academy, he travelled to Rome where Cicero heard him lecture. None of his writings survive. He was an Academic sceptic, like Clitomachus and Carneades before him, but he offered a more moderate view of skepticism than that of his teachers, permitting provisional beliefs without certainty.
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John Anderson
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
John Anderson was a Scottish philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism.
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Favorinus
85 - 200 (115 years)
Favorinus was a Roman sophist and skeptic philosopher who flourished during the reign of Hadrian and the Second Sophistic. Early life He was of Gaulish ancestry, born in Arelate . He received a refined education, first in Gallia Narbonensis and then in Rome, and at an early age began his lifelong travels through Greece, Italy and the East.
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Nasir Khusraw
1004 - 1088 (84 years)
Nasir Khusraw was a Isma'ili poet, philosopher, traveler, and missionary for the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate. Despite being one of the most prominent Isma'ili philosophers and theologians of the Fatimids and the writer of many philosophical works intended for only the inner circle of the Isma'ili community, Nasir is best known to the general public as a poet and writer who ardently supported his native Persian tongue as an artistic and scientific language. All of Nasir's philosophical Isma'ili works are in Persian, a rarity in the Isma'ili literature of the Fatimids, which primarily used Arab...
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William Henry Channing
1810 - 1884 (74 years)
William Henry Channing was an American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher. Biography William Henry Channing was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Channing's father, Francis Dana Channing, died when he was an infant, and responsibility for the young man's education was assumed by his uncle, William Ellery Channing, the pre-eminent Unitarian theologian of the early nineteenth century. The younger William graduated from Harvard College in 1829 and from Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was ordained and installed over the Unitarian church in Cincinnati in 1835. He became warmly interested in the schemes of Charles Fourier and others for social reorganization.
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Ivan Kireyevsky
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Ivan Vasilyevich Kireyevsky was a Russian literary critic and philosopher who, together with Aleksey Khomyakov, is credited as a co-founder of the Slavophile movement. Early life and career Ivan Kireyevsky and his brother Pyotr were born into a cultivated noble family of considerable means. Their father was known for hating French atheism so passionately that he would burn heaps of Voltaire's books, acquired specifically for the purpose. He contracted a fatal case of typhus while treating wounded soldiers during the French invasion of Russia. The boy was just six at the time of his death; he ...
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Harvey Cushing
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Harvey Williams Cushing was an American neurosurgeon, pathologist, writer, and draftsman. A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of physician William Osler in three volumes.
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Czesław Znamierowski
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Czesław Znamierowski was a Polish philosopher, jurist and sociologist. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Poznań and chaired its Department of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law. Znamierowski is noted in Polish law for his contributions to social sciences and jurisprudence, particularly the concept of legal system which is similar to H.L.A. Hart's ideas, but was published almost forty years before Hart's The Concept of Law.
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Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer
1768 - 1852 (84 years)
Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer was a German philosopher and physician. Life He was born at Neuenbürg in Württemberg in 1768. After receiving his early education at the Caroline academy of Stuttgart, he entered the University of Tübingen, where he was given the degree of doctor of medicine. He practised for some time as a physician at Sulz, and then at Kirchheim, and in 1811 he was chosen extraordinary professor of philosophy and medicine at Tübingen. In 1818 he became ordinary professor of practical philosophy, but in 1836 he resigned and took up his residence at Kirchheim, where he devoted...
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Ruhollah Khomeini
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was an Iranian Islamic revolutionary, politician and religious leader who served as the first supreme leader of Iran from 1979 until his death. He was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ended the Iranian monarchy.
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Bruno Leoni
1913 - 1967 (54 years)
Bruno Leoni was an Italian classical-liberal political philosopher and lawyer. Whilst the war kept Leoni away from teaching, in 1945 he became Full professor of Philosophy of Law. Leoni was also appointed Dean of the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pavia from 1948 to 1960.
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André Derain
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse. Biography Early years Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1895 he began to study on his own, contrary to claims that meeting Vlaminck or Matisse began his efforts to paint, and occasionally went to the countryside with an old friend of Cézanne's, Father Jacomin along with his two sons. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière, and there met Matisse. In 1900, he met and shar...
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Charles Lalo
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Charles Lalo was a French writer on aesthetics. Education and career Lalo studied philosophy at the University of Paris, gaining a doctorate in 1908. After being a schoolmaster, he succeeded Victor Basch in the chair of aesthetics at the Sorbonne, which he held from 1933 until his death.
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Henri Michaux
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Henri Michaux was a Belgian-born French poet, writer and painter. Michaux is renowned for his strange, highly original poetry and prose, and also for his art: the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York had major shows of his work in 1978 . His texts chronicling his psychedelic experiments with LSD and mescaline, which include Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones, are well known. So are his idiosyncratic travelogues and books of art criticism. Michaux is also known for his stories about Plume – "a peaceful man" – perhaps the most unenterprising hero in the history of literature, and his many misfortunes.
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Giovanni Vailati
1863 - 1909 (46 years)
Giovanni Vailati was an Italian proto-analytic philosopher, historian of science, and mathematician. Life Vailati was born in Crema, Lombardy, and studied engineering at the University of Turin. He went on to lecture in the history of mechanics there from 1896 to 1899, after working as assistant to Giuseppe Peano and Vito Volterra. He resigned his university post in 1899 so that he could pursue his independent studies, making a living from high-school mathematics teaching. During his lifetime he became internationally known, his writings having been translated into English, French, and Polish, though he was largely forgotten after his death in Rome.
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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
1881 - 1938 (57 years)
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or Mustafa Kemal Pasha until 1921, and Ghazi Mustafa Kemal from 1921 until 1934 , was a Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and socio-political theories became known as Kemalism. Due to his military and political accomplishments, Atatürk is regarded as one of the most importa...
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Antoine Béchamp
1816 - 1908 (92 years)
Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp was a French scientist now best known for breakthroughs in applied organic chemistry and for a bitter rivalry with Louis Pasteur. Béchamp developed the Béchamp reduction, an inexpensive method to produce aniline dye, permitting William Henry Perkin to launch the synthetic-dye industry. Béchamp also synthesized the first organic arsenical drug, arsanilic acid, from which Paul Ehrlich later synthesized salvarsan, the first chemotherapeutic drug.
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Salomo Friedlaender
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
Salomo Friedlaender was a German-Jewish philosopher, poet, satirist and author of grotesque and fantastic literature. He published his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona, which is the German word for "anonymous" spelled backward. He is known for his philosophical ideas on dualism drawing on Immanuel Kant, and his avant garde poetry and fiction. Almost none of his work has been translated into English.
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Yamaga Sokō
1622 - 1685 (63 years)
Yamaga Sokō was a Japanese military writer and philosopher under the Tokugawa shogunate of Edo period in Japan. As a scholar he applied the Confucian idea of the "superior man" to the samurai class of Japan. This became an important part of the samurai way of life and code of conduct.
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W. H. Walsh
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
William Henry Walsh was a 20th-century British philosopher and classicist. He was an expert on Immanuel Kant. Life Walsh was born in Leeds on 10 December 1913, the son of Fred Walsh and his wife May Stephens. His father was a Baptist and his mother a Catholic, but he was raised with no religion in his life. He was one of three children, with two sisters Mary and Muriel. The family moved to Baildon near Bradford in his infancy. Walsh was educated at Bradford and Leeds Grammar School on a scholarship.
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Wendell Phillips
1811 - 1884 (73 years)
Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney. According to George Lewis Ruffin, a Black attorney, Phillips was seen by many Blacks as "the one white American wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice". According to another Black attorney, Archibald Grimké, as an abolitionist leader he is ahead of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner. From 1850 to 1865 he was the "preeminent figure" in American abolitionism.
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Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1709 - 1751 (42 years)
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his 1747 work L'homme machine . La Mettrie is most remembered for taking the position that humans are complex animals and no more have souls than other animals do. He considered that the mind is part of the body and that life should be lived so as to produce pleasure . His views were so controversial that he had to flee France and settle in Berlin.
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Paul Janet
1823 - 1899 (76 years)
Paul Alexandre René Janet was a French philosopher and writer. Biography Born in Paris, he became professor of moral philosophy at Bourges and Strasbourg , and of logic at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris . In 1864 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and elected a member of the academy of moral and political sciences.
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George Trumbull Ladd
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
George Trumbull Ladd was an American philosopher, educator and psychologist. Biography Early life and ancestors Ladd was born in Painesville, Ohio, on January 19, 1842, the son of Silas Trumbull Ladd and Elizabeth Williams.
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Theodore Brameld
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Theodore Brameld was a philosopher and educator who supported the educational philosophy of social reconstructionism. His philosophy originated in 1928 when he enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the field of philosophy where he trained under the progressive philosopher and politician, T.V. Smith. After becoming intrigued by John Dewey’s philosophy of education, Brameld developed his own theory of schools being the ultimate source to bring about political and social change.
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Francesco Algarotti
1712 - 1764 (52 years)
Count Francesco Algarotti was an Italian polymath, philosopher, poet, essayist, anglophile, art critic and art collector. He was a man of broad knowledge, an expert in Newtonianism, architecture and opera. He was a friend of Frederick the Great and leading authors of his times: Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis and the atheist Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Lord Chesterfield, Thomas Gray, George Lyttelton, Thomas Hollis, Metastasio, Benedict XIV and Heinrich von Brühl were among his correspondents.
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Joachim Jungius
1587 - 1657 (70 years)
Joachim Jungius was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher of science. Life Jungius was a native of Lübeck. He studied metaphysics at the Universities of Rostock and Giessen, where in 1608 he earned his degree.
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Jean Anouilh
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. His plays are less experimental than those of his contemporaries, having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromi...
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Lucien Goldmann
1913 - 1970 (57 years)
Lucien Goldmann was a French philosopher and sociologist of Jewish-Romanian origin. A professor at the EHESS in Paris, he was a Marxist theorist. His wife was sociologist Annie Goldmann. Biography Goldmann was born in Bucharest, Romania, but grew up in Botoşani. He studied law at the University of Bucharest and the University of Vienna under the Austromarxist jurist Max Adler. In 1934, he went to the University of Paris to study political economy, literature, and philosophy. He moved to Switzerland in November 1942, where he was placed in a refugee camp until 1943.
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William Ernest Hocking
1873 - 1966 (93 years)
William Ernest Hocking was an American idealist philosopher at Harvard University. He continued the work of his philosophical teacher Josiah Royce in revising idealism to integrate and fit into empiricism, naturalism and pragmatism. He said that metaphysics has to make inductions from experience: "That which does not work is not true." His major field of study was the philosophy of religion, but his 22 books included discussions of philosophy and human rights, world politics, freedom of the press, the philosophical psychology of human nature; education; and more. In 1958 he served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America.
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Ganganath Jha
1872 - 1941 (69 years)
Mahamahopadhyaya Sir Gaṅgānāth Jhā was a scholar of Sanskrit, Indian philosophy and Buddhist philosophy. He is considered to have probably translated the most Sanskrit philosophical texts than any other scholar and notable examples of texts he has translated include the Slokavartika , the Tantravarttika and the Sabara-Bhashya . As per the Dutch orientalist, Jan Willem de Jong, his translations cannot be described as 'elegant or literal" though they render "well enough the general ideas expressed in the text."
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Mikhail Tukhachevsky
1893 - 1937 (44 years)
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky , nicknamed the Red Napoleon, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician. He was later executed during the show trials of 1936-38.
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William Harry Jellema
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
William Harry Jellema was the founder of Calvin College's philosophy department. He taught at Calvin College from 1920 to 1936, transferred to Indiana University and then returned to Calvin from 1948 to 1963. Following his mandatory retirement from Calvin College, Jellema taught for a year at Haverford College and was invited by James Zumberge to found the philosophy department at Grand Valley State College in Allendale, Michigan, and continue his teaching for another five years.
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Philippe Devaux
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Philippe Devaux was a French-speaking Belgian philosopher and logician, professor at the University of Liège. Through his numerous works and translations , he played a great part in the development of analytic philosophy in French-speaking countries.
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