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,
#17851
Gunnar Aspelin
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Gunnar Aspelin , was a Swedish professor of philosophy at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. Prof. Aspelin was the son of the artist Karl Aspelin and his wife Ellen Bergh. Prof. Aspelin married in 1923 with Dagmar Scherstén, daughter of the physician Frithiof Scherstén and Ida Schröder. Prof. Aspelin was the father of Herbert Aspelin, the researcher in comparative literature Kurt Aspelin, the lawspeaker Erland Aspelin, the teacher Marianne Aspelin and the artist Gert Aspelin.
Go to Profile#17852
Isaak Benrubi
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Isaak Benrubi was a philosopher from the Ottoman city of Thessaloniki, he opposed the conventional character of the act of knowing in "subject" and "object" to the reality that is interested in both subject and object: "I can't exist without the universe, neither can the universe exist without me". He decided to attend the CIC's meeting in Geneva only after learning that both Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson would also be attending.
Go to Profile#17853
Alberto Santos-Dumont
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
Alberto Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian aeronaut, sportsman, inventor, and one of the few people to have contributed significantly to the early development of both lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air aircraft. The heir of a wealthy family of coffee producers, he dedicated himself to aeronautical study and experimentation in Paris, where he spent most of his adult life. He designed, built, and flew the first powered airships and won the in 1901, when he flew around the Eiffel Tower in his airship No. 6, becoming one of the most famous people in the world in the early 20th century.
Go to Profile#17854
Gorampa
1429 - 1489 (60 years)
Gorampa Sonam Senge was an important philosopher in the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. He was the author of a vast collection of commentaries on sutra and tantra whose work was influential throughout Tibetan Buddhism. Gorampa is particularly known for his writings on madhyamaka philosophy, especially his critique of the madhyamaka views of Tsongkhapa and Dolpopa. Gorampa defended the mainly anti-realist interpretation of madhyamaka held by the Sakya school .
Go to Profile#17855
Adriaen Brouwer
1605 - 1638 (33 years)
Adriaen Brouwer was a Flemish painter active in Flanders and the Dutch Republic in the first half of the 17th century. Brouwer was an important innovator of genre painting through his vivid depictions of peasants, soldiers and other "lower class" individuals engaged in drinking, smoking, card or dice playing, fighting, music making etc. in taverns or rural settings. Brouwer contributed to the development of the genre of tronies, i.e. head or facial studies, which investigate varieties of expression. In his final year he produced a few landscapes of a tragic intensity. Brouwer's work had an important influence on the next generation of Flemish and Dutch genre painters.
Go to Profile#17856
Ákos Pauler
1876 - 1933 (57 years)
Ákos Pauler was a Hungarian philosopher. He defended metaphysics against logical positivism. As part of this defense, he accounted for a method of determining truths alongside the deductive and inductive methods, one which he called reductive. According to Pauler, the reductive method, unlike induction and deduction, does not determine what entities there are but rather can determine the conditions of possibility of valid thought itself. He also associates the reductive method with Plato's dialectic, even suggesting that reduction can ultimately lead to knowledge of the Form of the Good.
Go to Profile#17857
Norman Lockyer
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer was an English scientist and astronomer. Along with the French scientist Pierre Janssen, he is credited with discovering the gas helium. Lockyer also is remembered for being the founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature.
Go to Profile#17858
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.
Go to Profile#17859
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.
Go to Profile#17860
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.
Go to Profile#17861
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.
Go to Profile#17862
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.
Go to Profile#17863
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 .
Go to Profile#17864
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.
Go to Profile#17865
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.
Go to Profile#17866
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.
Go to Profile#17867
J. Douglas Miller
#17868
David W. Kennedy
#17869
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.
Go to Profile#17870
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.
Go to Profile#17871
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.
Go to Profile#17872
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.
Go to Profile#17873
J. Russell Lindsay
#17874
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.
Go to Profile#17875
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.
Go to Profile#17876
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.
Go to Profile#17877
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.
Go to Profile#17878
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.
Go to Profile#17879
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.
Go to Profile#17880
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.
Go to Profile#17881
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 .
Go to Profile#17882
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.
Go to Profile#17883
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
Go to Profile#17884
David Feldman
#17885
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".
Go to Profile#17886
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.
Go to Profile#17887
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.
Go to Profile#17888
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.
Go to Profile#17889
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.
Go to Profile#17890
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.
Go to Profile#17891
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.
Go to Profile#17892
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 ...
Go to Profile#17893
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.
Go to Profile#17894
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.
Go to Profile#17895
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.
Go to Profile#17896
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.
Go to Profile#17897
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 .
Go to Profile#17898
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.
Go to Profile#17899
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...
Go to Profile#17900
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.
Go to Profile