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,
#17801
Bernard Philip Kelly
1907 - 1958 (51 years)
Bernard Philip Kelly was an English Catholic layman who worked in a bank, raised a large family, and regularly penned, over 25 years, philosophical essays and book reviews for the Dominican journal Blackfriars. His friendship with foremost British Thomists and leading distributists of his day, and with the Indian scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy—along with his love for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins—permitted his short life to become the matrix of a rich body of writings.
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Antonio Pigliaru
1922 - 1969 (47 years)
Antonio Pigliaru was a Sardinian jurist and philosopher. He was the most important Sardinian intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century, and one of the most vivid contemporary Italian thinkers. He engaged with manifold themes, but he devoted special attention to the interpretation of the socio-economic problems of interior areas of Sardinia, which he discussed according to his own ethical and political views.
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Joseph Leon Blau
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Joseph Leon Blau was an American scholar of Jewish history and philosophy. Biography Blau was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Columbia University, where he studied under Salo Wittmayer Baron. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1931, his master's in 1933, and his Ph.D. in 1944, all from Columbia. Blau taught at Columbia from 1944 to 1977 and was chair of its Department of Religion from 1968 to 1977.
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Camillo Baldi
1547 - 1637 (90 years)
Camillo Baldi , also known as Camillus Baldus and Camillo Baldo, was an Italian philosopher. Life He was born into a family of minor Bolognese nobility. In 1572 he graduated in Philosophy and Medicine . His father Pietro Maria Baldi was a lecturer at the University of Bologna and Camillo followed in his footsteps teaching there for sixty years. He started teaching in 1576, teaching Aristotelian logic until 1579 when he was promoted to a junior lectureship in philosophy which he held till 1586. From 1586 to 1590 he held the post of 'Protologicus'. This was a position that seems to have been created specifically for Baldi and little is known about what it involved.
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Eugenio Colorni
1909 - 1944 (35 years)
Eugenio Colorni was an Italian philosopher and anti-fascist activist. Life Born in Milan, Colorni taught philosophy at the University of Trieste, and was active in the anti-fascist Giustizia e Libertà movement. He married Ursula Hirschmann, and was an important influence on her brother Albert O. Hirschman, who dedicated his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to Colorni's memory. Colorni was one of the promoters of the Ventotene Manifesto and an early instigator of the European Federalist Movement. In the mid 1930s, he was closely associated with Lelio Basso and others. In October 1938 he and Dino Philipson were arrested for their anti-fascist political activity and their Jewish background.
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Peter Joseph Elvenich
1796 - 1886 (90 years)
Peter Joseph Elvenich was a German Catholic theologian and philosopher born in Embken, a village that today is part of Nideggen, North Rhine-Westphalia. He was a principal supporter and defender of Hermesianism, a theological belief system based on the teachings of Georg Hermes .
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Alexandre Yersin
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin was a Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis. Another bacteriologist, the Japanese physician Kitasato Shibasaburō, is often credited with independently identifying the bacterium a few days earlier. Yersin also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.
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Oscar Paul
1836 - 1898 (62 years)
Oscar Paul was a German musicologist and a music writer, critic, and teacher. Biography Oscar Paul was born in Freiwaldau in Silesia . He went to school in Görlitz, and studied under Louis Plaidy, Ernst Richter and Moritz Hauptmann at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig. He commenced a career as a pianist, but soon found himself unsuited to it.
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Francesco Acri
1834 - 1913 (79 years)
Francesco Acri was an Italian philosopher and historian of philosophy. Biography After graduating with a degree in jurisprudence at Naples in 1857 and studying Aristotle and Kant at Berlin under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, he became a teacher of the history of philosophy, first at the University of Palermo and then, from 1871 at the University of Bologna, where he remained until 1911.
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J. Douglas Miller
#17811
David W. Kennedy
#17812
Yokoyama Taikan
1868 - 1958 (90 years)
Yokoyama Taikan was the art-name of a major figure in pre-World War II Japanese painting. He is notable for helping create the Japanese painting technique of Nihonga. Early life Sakai Hidemaro was born in Mito city, Ibaraki Prefecture, as the eldest son of Sakai Sutehiko, a samurai serving the Mito clan. His earliest name was Hidezō, and later Hidematsu. With his family, he moved to Tokyo in 1878. He studied at the Tōkyō Furitsu Daiichi Chūgakkō , and was interested in the English language and in Western-style oil painting. This led him to study pencil drawing with a painter, Watanabe Fumisaburō.
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Max Wentscher
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Max Wentscher was a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Bonn. Life Max Wentscher was born in Grudziądz in 1866. The son of a merchant, he attended the Academic School of the Johanneum in Hamburg, where he graduated in 1881. From 1881 to 1887 he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Halle-Wittenberg, and Leipzig. In 1893 he received his doctorate in Halle-Wittenberg with the thesis Lotze's concept of God and its metaphysical justification. In 1897 he habilitated in Bonn. Until 1904 he was a private lecturer and titular professor in Bonn.
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Václav Černý
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Václav Černý was a Czechoslovak literary scholar, writer and philosopher. He was an enthusiast of Spanish literature and philosophy and translated into Czech a number of literary and philosophical works by Spanish writers as Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno and Cervantes.
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Jean-Baptiste du Hamel
1624 - 1706 (82 years)
Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel, Duhamel or du Hamel was a French cleric and natural philosopher of the late seventeenth century, and the first secretary of the Academie Royale des Sciences. As its first secretary, he influenced the initial work of the Académie, but his legacy and influence on the Académie and the growth of science in France is mixed.
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J. Russell Lindsay
#17817
Pietro Ubaldi
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Pietro Ubaldi was an Italian author, teacher and philosopher. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Biography Ubaldi was graduated in Law and Music, at Rome. Fluent in English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, in addition to his native Italian, he also knew Latin and Greek language. A student of various philosophical and religious traditions, he distinguished himself as a Christian thinker. He had two children, Agnese and Franco, who died during the second world war. His Christian belief was not only an intellectual question, but a global dimension, something deeply connected with all his being.
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Friedrich Trendelenburg
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
Friedrich Trendelenburg was a German surgeon. He was son of the philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, father of the pharmacologist Paul Trendelenburg and grandfather of the pharmacologist Ullrich Georg Trendelenburg.
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Lazarus Geiger
1829 - 1870 (41 years)
Lazarus Geiger was a German-Jewish philosopher and philologist. Life He was born at Frankfurt-on-Main, was destined to commerce, but soon gave himself up to scholarship and studied at Marburg, Bonn and Heidelberg. From 1861 till his sudden death in 1870 he was professor in the Jewish high school at Frankfurt. His chief aim was to prove that the evolution of human reason is closely bound up with that of language. He further maintained that the origin of the Indo-Germanic language is to be sought not in Asia but in central . He was a convinced opponent of rationalism in religion.
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Joseph Bickersteth Mayor
1828 - 1916 (88 years)
Rev. Joseph Bickersteth Mayor was an English professor, classical scholar, and Anglican clergyman. Early life and education Mayor was born in Cape Colony while his parents returned from Ceylon. He was the fourth son and eighth child of twelve born to Rev. Robert Mayor and Charlotte Bickersteth . His mother came from the prominent Bickersteth family and was the sister of Henry Bickersteth, 1st Baron Langdale and Rev. Edward Bickersteth. John E. B. Mayor was his elder brother.
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Werner Drewes
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Werner Drewes was a painter, printmaker, and art teacher. Considered to be one of the founding fathers of American abstraction, he was one of the first artists to introduce concepts of the Bauhaus school within the United States. His mature style encompassed both nonobjective and figurative work and the emotional content of this work was consistently more expressive than formal. Drewes was as highly regarded for his printmaking as for his painting. In his role as teacher as well as artist he was largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America.
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Sebastian Brant
1458 - 1521 (63 years)
Sebastian Brant was a German humanist and satirist. He is best known for his satire Das Narrenschiff . Early life and education Brant was born in either 1457 or 1458 in Strasbourg to innkeeper Diebold Brant and Barbara Brant . He entered the University of Basel in October 1475 and as an assistant to Jacobus Hugonius he did not pay the matriculation. For five years he lived in the dorm of magister Hieronymus Berlin. Initially studying philosophy and then transferring to the school of law. Latin he was taught by Johann Matthias von Gengenbach who also a lectured philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy.
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Frank Chapman Sharp
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
Frank Chapman Sharp was an American philosopher who specialized in ethics, including business ethics and the ethical conduct of war. Career He received his BA from Amherst College in 1887 and his Ph.D. at the Konigliche-Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin in 1892. His thesis, The Aesthetic Element in Morality and Its Place in a Utilitarian Theory of Morals, was published in book form in both English and German in 1893. His entire teaching career was spent on the philosophy faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where he was promoted to full professor in 1905. He served as President of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Society during the 1907-1908 term.
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Theodorus Gaza
1398 - 1475 (77 years)
Theodorus Gaza , also called Theodore Gazis or by the epithet Thessalonicensis and Thessalonikeus , was a Greek humanist and translator of Aristotle, one of the Greek scholars who were the leaders of the revival of learning in the 15th century .
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Alfred Brunswig
1877 - 1927 (50 years)
Alfred Brunswig was a German philosopher. He taught at Westphalian Wilhelms-University in Münster . Life After graduating from high school in Munich in 1896, Brunswig studied at the Universities of Munich and Berlin until he received his doctorate with Theodor Lipps in 1904. During this period, he adopted Lipps' psychologism. After studying with Edmund Husserl in Göttingen and Carl Stumpf in Berlin, he habilitated in Munich in 1910. He criticized Husserl's conception of evidence and intuition of essences.
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Levi Hedge
1766 - 1844 (78 years)
Levi Hedge was an American educator. Biography Levi Hedge was born in Hardwick, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1792. His independent stand against hazing while still a student was instrumental in ridding Harvard of the injustice associated with its "hat law". He was a Teacher at Westford Academy in Westford, MA from 1792 - 1794
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David Feldman
#17828
Robert Leiber
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Robert Leiber, S.J. was a close advisor to Pope Pius XII, a Jesuit priest from Germany, and Professor for Church History at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1930 to 1960. Leiber was, according to Pius's biographer Susan Zuccotti, "throughout his entire papacy his private secretary and closest advisor".
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Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro
1677 - 1764 (87 years)
Friar Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro was a Spanish monk and scholar who led the Age of Enlightenment in Spain. He was an energetic popularizer noted for encouraging scientific and empirical thought in an effort to debunk myths and superstitions.
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Anton Kržan
1835 - 1888 (53 years)
Anton Kržan was a Croatian philosopher, university professor and a rector. Born in Marija Gorica, he received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1859 in Rome. He was ordained in 1862, and a year later receiving a Ph.D. in theology in Rome. After the return to Zagreb, he worked as a professor at the Archiepiscopal Seminary where he taught metaphysics and special dogmatics. He served as a full professor at the Faculty of Theology since 1874.
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James Oliver Curwood
1878 - 1927 (49 years)
James Oliver Curwood was an American action-adventure writer and conservationist. His books were often based on adventures set in the Hudson Bay area, the Yukon or Alaska and ranked among the top-ten best sellers in the United States in the early and mid 1920s, according to Publishers Weekly. At least one hundred and eighty motion pictures have been based on or directly inspired by his novels and short stories; one was produced in three versions from 1919 to 1953. At the time of his death, Curwood was the highest paid author in the world.
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János Apáczai Csere
1625 - 1659 (34 years)
János Apáczai Csere was a Transylvanian Hungarian polyglot, pedagogist, philosopher and theologian, famous for his work The Hungarian Encyclopedia, the first textbook to be written in Hungarian. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls him "the leading Protestant scholar and writer" of 17th-century Hungary.
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Otto von Gierke
1841 - 1921 (80 years)
Otto Friedrich von Gierke, born Otto Friedrich Gierke was a German legal scholar and historian. He is considered today as one of the most influential and important legal scholars of the 19th and 20th century. In his four-volume magnum opus entitled Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht , he pioneered the study of social groups and the importance of associations in German life, which stood between the divide of private and public law.
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Olga Freidenberg
1890 - 1955 (65 years)
Olga Freidenberg was a Russian and Soviet classical philologist, one of the pioneers of cultural studies in Russia. She is also known as the cousin of the famous writer Boris Pasternak; their correspondence has been published and studied.
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Mashallah ibn Athari
740 - 815 (75 years)
Māshāʾallāh ibn Atharī , known as Mashallah, was an 8th century Persian Jewish astrologer, astronomer, and mathematician. Originally from Khorasan, he lived in Basra during the reigns of the Abbasid caliphs al-Manṣūr and al-Ma’mūn, and was among those who introduced astrology and astronomy to Baghdad. The bibliographer ibn al-Nadim described Mashallah "as virtuous and in his time a leader in the science of jurisprudence, i.e. the science of judgments of the stars". Mashallah served as a court astrologer for the Abbasid caliphate and wrote works on astrology in Arabic. Some Latin translations ...
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Andrew Baxter
1687 - 1750 (63 years)
Andrew Baxter was a Scottish metaphysician. Life Baxter was educated at King's College, University of Aberdeen. He maintained himself by acting as tutor to noblemen's sons. From 1741 to 1747 he lived with Lord Blantyre and Mr Hay of Drummelzier at Utrecht, and made excursions in Flanders, France and Germany. Returning to Scotland, he lived at Whittingehame, near Edinburgh, until his death in 1750. At Spa he had met John Wilkes, then twenty years old, and formed a lasting friendship with him.
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Alexander Gerard
1728 - 1795 (67 years)
Alexander Gerard FRSE was a Scottish minister, academic and philosophical writer. In 1764 he was the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Life He was born on 22 February 1728, the son of Gilbert Gerard , at the manse in Garioch in Aberdeenshire. He attended Foveran Parish School then Aberdeen Grammar School.
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Albína Dratvová
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Albína Dratvová was a Czech philosopher, associate professor of philosophy at Charles University, one of the first few women to be habilitated during the First Czechoslovak Republic. She devoted herself to natural philosophy and methodology, the relationship between natural sciences and positivism. She also contributed significantly with her positions to the emancipation movement of modern women.
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Alfred Sorensen
1890 - 1984 (94 years)
Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen , also known as Sunyata, Shunya, or Sunyabhai, was a Danish mystic, horticulturist and writer who lived in Europe, India and the US. Early life and background Alfred Sorensen was the son of peasant farmer near Aarhus in central Denmark. His formal education ended after the family sold their farm when Sorensen was 14 years old. Sorensen then worked as a gardener on estates in France, Italy and finally England.
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Johann Gottlieb Buhle
1763 - 1821 (58 years)
Johann Gottlieb Buhle , German scholar and philosopher, was born at Brunswick and educated at Göttingen. He became professor of philosophy at Göttingen, Moscow , and Brunswick. Of his numerous publications, the most important are the Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie und einer kritischen Literatur derselben , and Geschichte der neuern Philosophie seit der Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften . The latter, elaborate and well written, is lacking in critical appreciation and proportion; there are French and Italian translations. He edited Aratus and part of Aristotle .
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Georg Erhard Hamberger
1697 - 1755 (58 years)
Georg Erhard Hamberger was a German professor of medicine, surgery, and botany. Biography Hamberger was born in Jena, and received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Jena in 1721. He studied the physiology of respiration, especially with respect to breathing. He authored a textbook on physiology, covering the thorax muscles, intercostal muscles, and pleural sac. He also studied the reaction of camphor and nitric acid. His writings included the study of gravitation and the ascension of gases.
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Aristo of Chios
300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)
Aristo of Chios , also spelled Ariston, was a Greek Stoic philosopher and colleague of Zeno of Citium. He outlined a system of Stoic philosophy that was, in many ways, closer to earlier Cynic philosophy. He rejected the logical and physical sides of philosophy endorsed by Zeno and emphasized ethics. Although agreeing with Zeno that Virtue was the supreme good, he rejected the idea that morally indifferent things such as health and wealth could be ranked according to whether they are naturally preferred. An important philosopher in his day, his views were eventually marginalized by Zeno's succe...
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Rudolph Nissen
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Rudolph Nissen was a German surgeon who chaired surgery departments in Turkey, the United States and Switzerland. The Nissen fundoplication, a surgical procedure for the treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease, is named after him.
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Joaquim Carreras i Artau
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Joaquim Carreras i Artau was a Catalan philosopher. He began his studies of scholastic philosophy at the Girona Seminary, where he stayed for ten years. Later he graduated from the University of Barcelona with BAs in Law and Philosophy. The thesis Ensayo sobre el voluntarismo de J. Duns Scoto gave him a Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Madrid. He taught both at secondary schools and at the University of Barcelona from 1939 to 1964, first as a teaching assistant and, for the last twelve years, as professor.
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Hans Joachim Moser
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Hans Joachim Moser was a German musicologist, composer and singer. Moser was the son of the music-professor Andreas Moser , a pupil and important early biographer of Joseph Joachim. He studied the History of Music , German philology and Philosophy in Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig, and studied violin with his father. With the work Musical Confederations in the German Middle Ages he obtained his doctorate in 1910 at Rostock.
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Terpsion
450 BC - Present (2476 years)
Terpsion of Megara is a speaker in Plato's dialogues. In the frame story which serves as the prologue to Plato's Theaetetus, Terpsion asks his friend Euclid of Megara to recount the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus. Terpsion also appears in the Phaedo as one of the people who was present at the death of Socrates. Debra Nails states that nothing else reliable can be determined about Terpsion, and all later sources that mention him, such as Plutarch and the pseudonymous Socratic letters, are derived from the account in Plato's dialogues.
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Saint Lucy
283 - 304 (21 years)
Lucia of Syracuse , also called Saint Lucia was a Roman Christian martyr who died during the Diocletianic Persecution. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox churches. She is one of eight women explicitly commemorated by Catholics in the Canon of the Mass. Her traditional feast day, known in Europe as Saint Lucy's Day, is observed by Western Christians on 13 December. Lucia of Syracuse was honored in the Middle Ages and remained a well-known saint in early modern England. She is one of the best known virgin martyrs, along with Agatha of Sicily,...
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Giuseppe Furlani
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Giuseppe Furlani was an Italian archaeologist, orientalist, philologist, and historian of religions, and the founder of Italian Assyriology and Hittite studies. Biography Giuseppe Furlani was born on 10 November 1885 in Pula in Croatia, at the time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Francesco and Luigia Damiani. In 1908, he graduated in law, and in 1913 in philosophy at the University of Graz.
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Seo Gyeong-deok
1489 - 1546 (57 years)
Seo Gyeong-deok was a Korean Neo-Confucianist philosopher during the Joseon Dynasty. His philosophy studied materialism and phenomenology based on ancient taoist philosophy theories absorbed by neoconfucianism, like Yin and Yang and Ki.
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Joseph Hillebrand
1788 - 1871 (83 years)
Joseph Hillebrand was a German novelist, philosopher and historian of literature. Biography He was originally a Catholic, studied at Hildesheim and at Göttingen, and in 1815 entered the priesthood and taught at Hildesheim, but resigned his position on accepting Protestant views. Upon Hegel's departure from the University of Heidelberg in 1818, he was appointed a professor of philosophy there, and in 1822 took a like position at the University of Giessen. He was elected to the lower house of the Hessian chamber in 1847, where he took the side of the liberals and became president in 1848. When ...
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