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,
#17751
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Emil du Bois-Reymond
1818 - 1896 (78 years)
Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond was a German physiologist, the co-discoverer of nerve action potential, and the developer of experimental electrophysiology. His lectures on science and culture earned him great esteem during the latter half of the 19th century.
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Alfred Espinas
1844 - 1922 (78 years)
Alfred Victor Espinas was a French thinker noted for having been an influence on Nietzsche. He was a student of Comte and Spencer. Although initially an adherent of positivism, he later became a committed realist.
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Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis
1757 - 1808 (51 years)
Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis was a French physiologist, freemason and materialist philosopher. Life Cabanis was born at Cosnac , the son of Jean Baptiste Cabanis , a lawyer and agronomist. At the age of ten, he attended the college of Brives, where he showed great aptitude for study, but his independence of spirit was so great that he was almost constantly in a state of rebellion against his teachers and was finally expelled. He was then taken to Paris by his father and left to carry on his studies at his own discretion for two years. From 1773 to 1775 he travelled in Poland and Germany, and on his return to Paris he devoted himself mainly to poetry.
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Bahya ibn Paquda
1050 - 1120 (70 years)
Bahya ben Joseph ibn Paquda , c. 1050–1120, was a Jewish philosopher and rabbi who lived at Zaragoza, Al-Andalus . He was one of two people now known as Rabbeinu Behaye, the other being Bible commentator Bahya ben Asher.
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Moritz Lazarus
1824 - 1903 (79 years)
Moritz Lazarus , born at Filehne, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, was a German-Jewish philosopher, psychologist, and a vocal opponent of the antisemitism of his time. Life and education He was born at Filehne, Posen. The son of Aaron Levin Lazarus, a pupil of Akiba Eiger, and himself president of the bet din and the yeshiva of Filehne , he was educated in Hebrew literature and history, and subsequently in law and philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1850 he obtained his PhD degree; in the same year he married Sarah Lebenheim.
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Moses ibn Ezra
1060 - 1138 (78 years)
Rabbi Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known as Ha-Sallaḥ was an Andalusi Jewish philosopher, linguist, and poet. He was born in Granada about 1055 – 1060, and died after 1138. Ibn Ezra is considered to have had great influence in the Arabic literary world. He is considered one of Spain's greatest poets and was thought to be ahead of his time in terms of his theories on the nature of poetry. One of the more revolutionary aspects of Ibn Ezra's poetry that has been debated is his definition of poetry as metaphor and how his poetry illuminates Aristotle's early ideas. The impact of Ibn Ezra's philosop...
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Arthur Pap
1921 - 1959 (38 years)
Arthur Pap was a philosopher in the school of analytic philosophy. Pap published a number of books regarding analytical philosophy, its function within philosophy, and its impact on society. Life and works Pap was born October 1, 1921, in Zürich, Switzerland in a Jewish family. His musical talent was revealed early and his passion for playing the piano remained through all of his life. In high school Pap developed also a passion for philosophy and enrolled at Zürich University, where took courses in philosophy and logic from Karl Dürr. At the start of World War II the family fled to the United States and, in 1941, settled in New York City.
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Bronisław Trentowski
1808 - 1869 (61 years)
Bronisław Ferdynand Trentowski was a Polish "Messianist" philosopher, pedagogist, journalist and Freemason, and the chief representative of the Polish Messianist "national philosophy." Life Bronisław Trentowski was an alumnus of the Piarist college in Łuków. In his youth, he taught school in Podlasie, then fought as an ulan in the Polish November 1830–31 Uprising. After the uprising's suppression, he emigrated to Germany, eventually settling at Freiburg in Baden. He developed an interest in philosophy, became an assistant professor at Freiburg University and remained there to the end of his life.
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Shen Dao
350 BC - 275 BC (75 years)
Shen Dao was a Chinese philosopher and writer. He was a "Chinese Legalist" theoretician most remembered for his influence on Han Fei with regards to the concept of shi , though most of his book concerns the concept of fa more commonly shared among "Legalists". Compared with western schools, Shen Dao considered laws that are not good "still preferable to having no laws at all."
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Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera
1225 - 1290 (65 years)
Shem-Tov ben Joseph ibn Falaquera, also spelled Palquera was a Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet and commentator. A vast body of work is attributed to Falaquera, including encyclopedias of Arabic and Greek philosophies, maqamas, some 20,000 poetic verses, and commentaries on Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. The common theme in Falaquera’s writing was to encourage observant Jews to study philosophy and to appreciate the harmony that existed between Torah and rational truth learned in philosophy. While Falaquera did not advocate teaching the secrets of science and divine sciences to every...
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Yang Zhu
369 BC - 318 BC (51 years)
Yang Zhu , also known as Yangzi , was a Chinese philosopher during the Warring States period. An early ethical egoist alternative to Mohist and Confucian thought, Yang Zhu's surviving ideas appear primarily in the Chinese texts Huainanzi, Lüshi Chunqiu, Mengzi, and possibly the Liezi and Zhuangzi. He founded the philosophical school of "Yangism".
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Zhou Dunyi
1017 - 1073 (56 years)
Zhou Dunyi was a Chinese cosmologist, philosopher, and writer during the Song dynasty. He conceptualized the Neo-Confucian cosmology of the day, explaining the relationship between human conduct and universal forces. In this way, he emphasizes that humans can master their qi in order to accord with nature. He was a major influence to Zhu Xi, who was the architect of Neo-Confucianism. Zhou Dunyi was mainly concerned with Taiji and Wuji , the yin and yang, and the wu xing .
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Mark Mitin
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Mark Borisovich Mitin was a Soviet Marxist–Leninist philosopher, university lecturer and Professor of Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University . He was interested primarily dialectical and historical materialism, the philosophy of history and criticism of bourgeois philosophy.
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Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée
1838 - 1912 (74 years)
Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée was a French philosopher. Life Fouillée was born at La Pouëze, Maine-et-Loire. He held several minor philosophical lectureships, and from 1864 was professor of philosophy at the lycées of Douai, Montpellier and Bordeaux successively. In 1867 and 1868 he was crowned by the Academy of Moral Science for his work on Plato and Socrates. In 1872 he was elected master of conferences at the Ecole Normale, and was made doctor of philosophy in recognition of his two treatises, Platonis Hippias Minor sine Socratica contra liberum arbitrium argumenta and La Liberté et le déter...
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Richard Whately
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.
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Bronisław Bandrowski
1879 - 1914 (35 years)
Bronisław Bandrowski was a Polish philosopher and psychologist. He was one of the pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. Drawing from his mentor's theories and the tradition of the Lwów–Warsaw school, his works dealt with the problem of induction. Bandrowski was also noted for his death in the Tatra Mountains near Zakopane.
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Radovan Richta
1924 - 1983 (59 years)
Radovan Richta was a Czech philosopher who coined the term technological evolution; a theory about how societies diminish physical labour by increasing mental labour. Richta's first work was Člověk a technika v revoluci našich dnů , published in 1963. This work did much to bring the concept of technology into the forefront of philosophical thought during the 1960s. Richta then went on to publish Civilizace na rozcestí in 1966. "Crossroads" was a compilation work published by 60 authors that "attempt[ed] to analyze the social and human implications of the scientific and technological revolution".
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Alcinous
Alcinous was a Middle Platonist philosopher. He probably lived in the 2nd century AD, although nothing is known about his life. He is the author of The Handbook of Platonism, an epitome of Middle Platonism intended as a manual for teachers. He has, at times, been identified by some scholars with the 2nd century Middle Platonist Albinus.
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Ludwig Büchner
1824 - 1899 (75 years)
Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig Büchner was a German philosopher, physiologist and physician who became one of the exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism. Biography Büchner was born at Darmstadt on 29 March 1824. From 1842 to 1848 he studied physics, chemistry, botany, mineralogy, philosophy and medicine at the University of Giessen, where he graduated in 1848 with a dissertation entitled Beiträge zur Hall'schen Lehre von einem excitomotorischen Nervensystem . Afterwards, he continued his studies at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Würzburg and the University of Vienna.
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Motoori Norinaga
1730 - 1801 (71 years)
Motoori Norinaga was a Japanese scholar of active during the Edo period. He is conventionally ranked as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku studies. Life Norinaga was born in what is now Matsusaka in Ise Province . His ancestors were vassals of the Kitabatake clan in Ise Province for many generations. However, in the early Edo period they abandoned their samurai status, changing their surname to Ozu, and relocated to Matsusaka, where they became cotton wholesalers. The family initially prospered and had a store in Edo as well. . After his elder brother's death, Norinaga succeeded to the Ozu line.
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Oets Kolk Bouwsma
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Oets Kolk Bouwsma was an American analytic philosopher. Education and early career Bouwsma was born of Dutch-American parents in Muskegon, Michigan. He was educated at Calvin College and at the University of Michigan. In his early years he was an advocate of idealism, but later found the work of G. E. Moore's common sense counters to skepticism more appealing to his inclinations. Nonetheless, he was critical of Moore. He developed his own technique of analysis that focused on uncovering hidden analogies driving Moore's ways of speaking about sense data. He worked intensely on Moore, publi...
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Hinrich Lichtenstein
1780 - 1857 (77 years)
Martin H[e]inrich Carl Lichtenstein was a German physician, explorer, botanist and zoologist. He explored parts of southern Africa and collected natural history specimens extensively and many new species were described from his collections by European scientists.
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Robert von Zimmermann
1824 - 1898 (74 years)
Robert von Zimmermann or Robert Zimmermann was a Czech-born Austrian philosopher. The mathematician and philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, entrusted his unfinished work, Grössenlehre , which had not been completed at the time of his death in 1848, to von Zimmermann who was 24 years old. Zimmermann had been a student of Bolzano's. Since Zimmermann's interests were more in the area of philosophy as he had been appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Prague in 1852, he didn't do much with Bolzano's papers. Most of the remaining manuscripts stayed in Zimmermann's possession until 1882 when he gave them to the Austrian Academy of Sciences .
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Franz Xaver von Baader
1765 - 1841 (76 years)
Franz von Baader , born Benedikt Franz Xaver Baader, was a German Catholic philosopher, theologian, physician, and mining engineer. Resisting the empiricism of his day, he denounced most Western philosophy since Descartes as trending into atheism and has been considered a revival of the Scholastic school.
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Titu Maiorescu
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Titu Liviu Maiorescu was a Romanian literary critic and politician, founder of the Junimea Society. As a literary critic, he was instrumental in the development of Romanian culture in the second half of the 19th century.
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Philip Jourdain
1879 - 1919 (40 years)
Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain was a British mathematician, logician and follower of Bertrand Russell. Background He was born in Ashbourne in Derbyshire one of a large family belonging to Emily Clay and his father Francis Jourdain . His sister Eleanor Jourdain was an English academic and author. Another sister, Margaret , was an authority on the history of fine English home-furnishings, and the life-long companion of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett.
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Robert Fludd
1574 - 1637 (63 years)
Robert Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus , was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests. He is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian.
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Étienne Cabet
1788 - 1856 (68 years)
Étienne Cabet was a French philosopher and utopian socialist who founded the Icarian movement. Cabet became the most popular socialist advocate of his day, with a special appeal to artisans who were being undercut by factories. Cabet published Voyage en Icarie in French in 1839 , in which he proposed replacing capitalist production with workers' cooperatives. Recurrent problems with French officials , led him to emigrate to the United States in 1848. Cabet founded utopian communities in Texas and Illinois, but was again undercut, this time by recurring feuds with his followers.
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Pavel Yushkevich
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Pavel Solomonovich Yushkevich was a Russian philosopher. He was a Menshevik activist and participated as one of the Russian Machists in Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism in 1908. This publication prompted criticism in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism. By the 1920s Yushkevich abandoned political activities and worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow from 1922.
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Richard Cumberland
1631 - 1718 (87 years)
Richard Cumberland was an English philosopher, and Bishop of Peterborough from 1691. In 1672, he published his major work, De legibus naturae , propounding utilitarianism and opposing the egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes.
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Robin Attfield
1931 - 1931 (0 years)
Robin Attfield is a British philosopher known for his work on environmental philosophy, ethics, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University.
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Wilhelm Jerusalem
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Wilhelm Jerusalem was an Austrian Jewish philosopher and pedagogue. Biography Jerusalem studied classical philosophy at the University of Prague and prepared a doctorate entitled "The Inscription of Sestos and Polybios". Until 1887 he was a teacher at grammar schools in Prague and Nikolsburg. In 1888 he became a member of the staff of teachers at the grammar school "k.k. Staatsgymnasium im VIII.Bezirk" in Vienna. In 1891 he was an outside lecturer at the University of Vienna. One of his interests was education, and he demanded a change of the educational system in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
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Carlos Alberto Sacheri
1933 - 1974 (41 years)
Carlos Alberto Sacheri was an Argentine thomist philosopher and scholar. He was shot and killed by ERP members on 22 December 1974 in Buenos Aires; he was targeted because of his perceived anticommunism. He was a disciple of the priest Julio Meinvielle . The most widespread of his publications was The Clandestine Church , a denunciation of modernism and liberation theology from traditional positions.
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Carveth Read
1848 - 1931 (83 years)
Carveth Read was a 19th- and 20th-century British philosopher and logician. Life He was born 16 March 1848 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. He was the third son of Edward Read and Elizabeth Truscott. He attended the University of Cambridge . He received a B.A. in 1873 and an M.A. in 1877. He was the Hilbert travelling scholar, studying at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities in 1874-1877. In 1877 he married Evelyn Thompson. From 1878 he lectured at Wren's 'Coaching' establishment . He was Grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the University College London from 1903 to 1911. From 1911 to 1921 he was Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at UCL.
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Shlomo Pines
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Shlomo Pines was an Israeli scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy, best known for his English translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Biography Pines was born in Charenton-le-Pont near Paris, and grew up in Paris, Riga, Archangelsk, London and Berlin. His father, Meir Pines, was a scholar and businessman whose Sorbonne dissertation comprised the first attempt at a history of Yiddish literature.
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Hayashi Razan
1583 - 1657 (74 years)
Hayashi Razan, also known as Hayashi Dōshun, was a Japanese historian, philosopher, political consultant, and writer, serving as a tutor and an advisor to the first four shōguns of the Tokugawa bakufu. He is also attributed with first listing the Three Views of Japan. Razan was the founder of the Hayashi clan of Confucian scholars.
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Hryhorii Skovoroda
1722 - 1794 (72 years)
Hryhorii Skovoroda, also Gregory Skovoroda or Grigory Skovoroda was a philosopher of Ukrainian Cossack origin who lived and worked in the Russian Empire. He was a poet, a teacher and a composer of liturgical music. His significant influence on his contemporaries and succeeding generations and his way of life were universally regarded as Socratic, and he was often called a "Socrates". Skovoroda's work contributed to the cultural heritage both of modern-day Ukraine and of Russia, both countries claiming him as a native son.
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Judah Halevi
1075 - 1141 (66 years)
Judah Halevi was a Spanish Jewish poet, physician and philosopher. He was born in Spain, either in Toledo or Tudela, in 1075. He is thought to have died in 1141, in either Jerusalem, at that point the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, or in Alexandria, Egypt.
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Armando Carlini
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Armando Carlini was an Italian philosopher and author. He was born in Naples, Italy. Carlini was a follower of the Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile. In 1922 he replaced Gentile in the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa. He died in Pisa, Italy.
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Hilmi Ziya Ülken
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Hilmi Ziya Ülken was a Turkish scholar and writer who had an influential role in the development of sociological and philosophical views in Turkey. In addition to his scientific work, he produced literary work, including poems.
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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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