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,
#18001
Karl Groos
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Karl Groos was a German philosopher and psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play. His 1898 book on The Play of Animals suggested that play is a preparation for later life.
Go to Profile#18002
Leo the Mathematician
790 - 900 (110 years)
Leo the Mathematician, the Grammarian or the Philosopher was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century". He was archbishop of Thessalonica and later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic.
Go to Profile#18003
Owen Barfield
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Arthur Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings. Life Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth and Arthur Edward Barfield . He had three elder siblings: Diana , Barbara , and Harry . He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America.
Go to Profile#18004
John Everett Millais
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street . Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophel...
Go to Profile#18005
Vinoba Bhave
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Vinayak Narahari Bhave, also known as Vinoba Bhave , was an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights. Often called Acharya , he is best known for the Bhoodan Movement. He is considered as National Teacher of India and the spiritual successor of Mahatma Gandhi. He was an eminent philosopher. The Gita has been translated into the Marathi language by him with the title Geetai .
Go to Profile#18006
Heinrich Gomperz
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Heinrich Gomperz was an Austrian philosopher. He was a son of Theodor Gomperz. He was a patient of Sigmund Freud and was married to Ada Stepnitz. Works , 1898., 1907.Die indische Theosophie, 1925., 2 Vols., 1905–1908., 1915.Über Sinn und Sinngebilde, Erklären und Verstehen, 1929., 1953.
Go to Profile#18007
James Frederick Ferrier
1808 - 1864 (56 years)
James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer and philosopher. He introduced the word epistemology in philosophical English, as well as coining agnoiology for the study of ignorance. Education and early writings Ferrier was born at 15 Heriot Row in Edinburgh, the son of John Ferrier, writer to the signet. He was educated at the Royal High School, the University of Edinburgh and Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently, his metaphysical tastes having been fostered by his intimate friend, Sir William Hamilton, spent some time at Heidelberg studying German philosophy.
Go to Profile#18008
Euclid of Megara
436 BC - 365 BC (71 years)
Euclid of Megara was a Greek Socratic philosopher who founded the Megarian school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates in the late 5th century BC, and was present at his death. He held the supreme good to be one, eternal and unchangeable, and denied the existence of anything contrary to the good. Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter's Elements.
Go to Profile#18009
Dagobert D. Runes
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Dagobert David Runes was an immigrant publisher in the US, a philosopher and author. Biography Runes was born in Zastavna, Bukovina, Austro-Hungary . He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1924, under the direction of Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle of positivist philosophers.
Go to Profile#18010
Edgar Cayce
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Edgar Cayce was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to speak from his higher self while in a trance-like state. His words were recorded by his friend, Al Layne; his wife, Gertrude Evans, and later by his secretary, Gladys Davis Turner. During the sessions, Cayce would answer questions on a variety of subjects such as healing, reincarnation, dreams, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition, Atlantis, and future events. Cayce, a devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher, said that his readings came from his subconscious mind exploring the dream realm, where he said all minds were timelessly connected.
Go to Profile#18011
John Lewis
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
John Lewis was a British Unitarian minister and Marxist philosopher and author of many works on philosophy, anthropology, and religion. Lewis's father, a successful builder and architect, came from a Welsh farming family, and was a very devout Methodist. Young Lewis's social and political views clashed with those of his father. Their quarrels eventually led to his father disinheriting him.
Go to Profile#18012
Francis Ellingwood Abbot
1836 - 1903 (67 years)
Francis Ellingwood Abbot was an American philosopher and theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method. His lifelong romance with his wife Katharine Fearing Loring forms the subject of If Ever Two Were One, a collection of his correspondence and diary entries.
Go to Profile#18013
Dietrich von Hildebrand
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer. Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII. He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Pope John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicist...
Go to Profile#18014
Stéphane Lupasco
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Stéphane Lupasco was a Romanian philosopher who developed non-Aristotelian logic. Early years Stéphane Lupasco was born in Bucharest on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavian aristocracy. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck, who established the family in Paris in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon, he studied philosophy, biology and physics at the Sorbonne and, briefly, law. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20s and 30s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in...
Go to Profile#18015
D. Elton Trueblood
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
David Elton Trueblood , who was usually known as "Elton Trueblood" or "D. Elton Trueblood", was a noted 20th-century American Quaker author and theologian, former chaplain both to Harvard and Stanford universities.
Go to Profile#18016
Bernardino Telesio
1509 - 1588 (79 years)
Bernardino Telesio was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist. While his natural theories were later disproven, his emphasis on observation made him the "first of the moderns" who eventually developed the scientific method.
Go to Profile#18017
Émile Meyerson
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Émile Meyerson was a Polish-born French epistemologist, chemist, and philosopher of science. Meyerson was born in Lublin, Poland. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 74. Biography Meyerson was educated at the University of Heidelberg and studied chemistry under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1882 Meyerson settled in Paris. He served as foreign editor of the Havas news agency, and later as the director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. He became a naturalized French citizen after World War I.
Go to Profile#18018
Carlos Vaz Ferreira
1872 - 1958 (86 years)
Carlos Vaz Ferreira was a Uruguayan philosopher, lawyer, writer, and academic. Influenced by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, he is notable for introducing liberal, pluralistic political values and pragmatic philosophical concepts to South American society.
Go to Profile#18019
Théodore Simon Jouffroy
1796 - 1842 (46 years)
Théodore Simon Jouffroy , aka Simon Joseph Théodore Jouffroy, was a French philosopher. Biography He was born at Les Pontets, Franche-Comté, département of Doubs. In his tenth year, his father, a tax-gatherer, sent him to an uncle at Pontarlier, under whom he began his classical studies. At Dijon his compositions attracted the attention of an inspector, who had him placed in the normal school, Paris. There he came under the influence of Victor Cousin, and in 1817 he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the normal and Bourbon schools.
Go to Profile#18020
Aryadeva
200 - 250 (50 years)
Āryadeva , was a Mahayana Buddhist monk, a disciple of Nagarjuna and a Madhyamaka philosopher. Most sources agree that he was from "Siṃhala", which some scholars identify with Sri Lanka. After Nagarjuna, he is considered to be the next most important figure of the Indian Madhyamaka school.
Go to Profile#18021
Jacob Moleschott
1822 - 1893 (71 years)
Jacob Moleschott was a Dutch physiologist and writer on dietetics. He is known for his philosophical views in regard to scientific materialism. He was a member of German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .
Go to Profile#18022
John Playfair
1748 - 1819 (71 years)
John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth , which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
Go to Profile#18023
F. C. S. Schiller
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, FBA , usually cited as F. C. S. Schiller, was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein , Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California. In his lifetime he was well known as a philosopher; after his death, his work was largely forgotten.
Go to Profile#18024
Louis Lavelle
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Louis Lavelle was a French philosopher, considered one of the greatest French metaphysicians of the twentieth century. His magnum opus, La Dialectique de l'éternel présent , is a systematic metaphysical work. Lavelle's other principal works include De l'Être , De l'Acte , Du Temps et de l'Eternité , and De l'Âme Humaine .
Go to Profile#18025
Nicholas Murray Butler
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Nicholas Murray Butler was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. Butler was president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the deceased James S. Sherman's replacement as William Howard Taft’s running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election. He became so well known and respected that The New York Times printed his Christmas greeting to the nation many years during the 1920s and 1930s.
Go to Profile#18026
Christoph von Sigwart
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Christoph von Sigwart was a German philosopher and logician. He was the son of philosopher Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart . Life After a course of philosophy and theology, Sigwart became professor at Blaubeuren , and eventually at Tübingen, in 1865.
Go to Profile#18027
Cooper Harold Langford
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
Cooper Harold Langford was an American analytic philosopher and mathematical logician who co-authored the book Symbolic Logic with C. I. Lewis. He is also known for introducing the Langford–Moore paradox.
Go to Profile#18028
Dominique Dubarle
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Dominique Dubarle was a French Dominican friar and religious philosopher, a professor at the Saulchoir. He was dean of the faculty of philosophy of the Catholic Institute of Paris from 1967 to 1973 and was an expert at the Second Vatican Council .
Go to Profile#18029
Władysław Witwicki
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Władysław Witwicki was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator , historian and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland. Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of , theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów–Warsaw school.
Go to Profile#18030
Idomeneus of Lampsacus
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Idomeneus of Lampsacus was a friend and disciple of Epicurus. Life Little is known about his life, except that he married Batis of Lampsacus, the sister of Metrodorus, and he was a court dignitary at Lampsacus around 306–301 BC. Idomeneus wrote a considerable number of philosophical and historical works, and though the latter were not regarded as of very great authority, still they must have been of considerable value, as they seem to have been chiefly devoted to an account of the lives of the leading figures of Greece.
Go to Profile#18031
George Gurdjieff
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer. Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. The practice of his teaching has become known as "The Work" and is additional to the ways of the fakir, monk and yogi, so that his student P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as the "Fourth Way".
Go to Profile#18032
Cheng Hao
1032 - 1085 (53 years)
Chéng Hào , Courtesy name Bóchún , was a Chinese philosopher and politician from Luoyang, China. In his youth, he and his younger brother Cheng Yi were students of Zhou Dunyi, one of the architects of Neo-Confucian cosmology. His philosophy was dualistic and pantheistic ; among his quotes are "outside dao there are no things and outside things there is no dao", "we call it god to emphasize the wonderful mystery of principle in ten thousand things, just as we call it lord to characterize its being the ruler of events" and "in terms of the reality, it is change; in terms of principle, it is da...
Go to Profile#18033
Hermarchus
325 BC - 250 BC (75 years)
Hermarchus or Hermarch , sometimes incorrectly written Hermachus , was an Epicurean philosopher. He was the disciple and successor of Epicurus as head of the school. None of his writings survives. He wrote works directed against Plato, Aristotle, and Empedocles. A fragment from his Against Empedocles, preserved by Porphyry, discusses the need for law in society. His views on the nature of the gods are quoted by Philodemus.
Go to Profile#18034
Swami Prabhavananda
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Swami Prabhavananda was an Indian philosopher, monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and religious teacher. He moved to America in 1923 to take up the role of assistant minister in the San Francisco Vedanta Society. In 1928 he was the minister of a small group in Portland, OR, but in 1930 he founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The Swami spent the rest of his life there, writing and collaborating with some of the most distinguished authors and intellectuals of the time, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard.
Go to Profile#18035
Anton Denikin
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
Anton Ivanovich Denikin was a Russian military leader who served as the acting supreme ruler of the Russian State and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of South Russia during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923. Previously, he was a general in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I.
Go to Profile#18036
Atticus
150 - 200 (50 years)
Atticus was an ancient Platonic philosopher who lived in the second century of the Christian era, under the emperor Marcus Aurelius. His lifetime fell into the epoch of Middle Platonism, of which he was one of the most notable representatives.
Go to Profile#18037
Carlo Michelstaedter
1887 - 1910 (23 years)
Carlo Raimondo Michelstaedter or Michelstädter was an Italian philosopher, artist, and man of letters. Life Carlo Michelstaedter was born in Gorizia, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian County of Gorizia and Gradisca, the youngest of four children of Albert and Emma Michelstaedter . His older siblings were Gino , Elda and Paula . His full name was Carlo Raimondo . His father was the director of the local branch of the Trieste-based Assicurazioni Generali insurance company. The Michelstaedters were an Italian-speaking upper middle class Jewish family of Ashkenazi origin.
Go to Profile#18038
Emmanuel Mounier
1905 - 1950 (45 years)
Emmanuel Mounier was a French philosopher, theologian, teacher and essayist. Biography Mounier was the guiding spirit in the French personalist movement, and founder and director of Esprit, the magazine which was the organ of the movement. Mounier, who was the child of peasants, was a brilliant scholar at the Sorbonne. In 1929, when he was only twenty-four, he came under the influence of the French writer Charles Péguy, to whom he ascribed the inspiration of the personalist movement. Mounier's personalism became a main influence of the non-conformists of the 1930s.
Go to Profile#18039
Mazzino Montinari
1928 - 1986 (58 years)
Mazzino Montinari was an Italian scholar of Germanistics. A native of Lucca, he became regarded as one of the most distinguished researchers on Friedrich Nietzsche, and harshly criticized the edition of The Will to Power, which he regarded as a forgery, in his book The will to power does not exist.
Go to Profile#18040
Georg Friedrich Daumer
1800 - 1875 (75 years)
Georg Friedrich Daumer was a German poet and philosopher. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native city, at that time directed by the famous philosopher Hegel. In 1817 he entered the University of Erlangen as a student of theology, but abandoned that study for philosophy. For a number of years Daumer was professor at the gymnasium of Nuremberg; owing to ill-health he was pensioned in 1832 and henceforth devoted himself entirely to literary work. While at Erlangen he came strongly under the influence of Pietism. Soon, however, he became sceptical and exhibited decided leanings towards pantheism.
Go to Profile#18041
Aleksei Aleksandrovich Kozlov
1831 - 1901 (70 years)
Aleksei Aleksandrovich Kozlov was a Russian philosopher known for his contributions to Russian idealism. He is recognized as the founder of the "neo-Leibnizian" movement in Russia, which involved updating the ideas of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, as well as the works of R.H. Lotze and Gustav Teichmüller. Kozlov's philosophy is also considered a precursor to Russian personalist metaphysics.
Go to Profile#18042
Samuel Ramos
1897 - 1959 (62 years)
Samuel Ramos Magaña, PhD , was a Mexican philosopher and writer. Ramos was born in Zitácuaro, Michoacán, and in 1909 entered the Colegio de San Nicolás Hidalgo . He published his first works in the school's student publication Flor de Loto. In 1915 he began to study philosophy under the tutelage of his mentor, José Torres Orozco.
Go to Profile#18043
Ernest Addison Moody
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Ernest Addison Moody was a noted philosopher, medievalist, and logician as well as a musician and scientist. He served as professor of philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles , where he also served as department chair, and Columbia University. He has an annual memorial conference in his name on the subject of medieval philosophy. He was president of the American Philosophical Association from 1963 to 1964.
Go to Profile#18044
Andrés Bello
1781 - 1865 (84 years)
Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López was a Venezuelan humanist, diplomat, poet, legislator, philosopher, educator and philologist, whose political and literary works constitute an important part of Spanish American culture. Bello is featured on the old 2,000 Venezuelan bolívar and the 20,000 Chilean peso notes.
Go to Profile#18045
John of Salisbury
1110 - 1180 (70 years)
John of Salisbury , who described himself as Johannes Parvus , was an English author, philosopher, educationalist, diplomat and bishop of Chartres. Early life and education Born at Salisbury, England, he was of Anglo-Saxon rather than of Norman extraction, and therefore apparently a clerk from a modest background, whose career depended upon his education. Beyond that, and that he applied to himself the cognomen of Parvus, meaning "short" or "small", few details are known regarding his early life. From his own statements it is gathered that he crossed to France about 1136, and began regular stu...
Go to Profile#18046
Stephan Witasek
1870 - 1915 (45 years)
Stephan Witasek was an Austrian philosopher noted for his contribution to the development of the Graz School. He is cited as the most talented psychologist of the school and was groomed as Alexius Meinong's successor. Witasek is noted for developing a theory of aesthetics within the Graz School's abstract object theory.
Go to Profile#18047
Alphonse Mucha
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Alfons Maria Mucha , known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.
Go to Profile#18048
Itō Jinsai
1627 - 1705 (78 years)
Itō Jinsai, who also went by the pen name Keisai, was a Japanese Confucian philosopher. He is considered to be one of the most influential Confucian scholars of seventeenth century Japan, and the Tokugawa period generally, his teachings flourishing especially in Kyoto and the Kansai area through the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Go to Profile#18049
Władysław Biegański
1857 - 1917 (60 years)
Władysław Biegański was a Polish medical doctor, philosopher and social activist. He dealt with almost all fields, especially infectious diseases, disease diagnostics and logic in medicine. Biography Biegański was born in Grabów nad Prosną. Between 1870 and 1875 he studied at high school in Piotrków Trybunalski; at that time he lived in nearby Janow. Immediately after graduating from junior high school, he started medical studies at the Imperial University of Warsaw, which he graduated from in 1880. In his fifth year of study, he wrote a thesis for the competition organized by the Faculty of ...
Go to Profile#18050
Louis de Jaucourt
1704 - 1779 (75 years)
Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt was a French scholar and the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. He wrote about 18,000 articles on subjects including physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, and political history, or about 25% of the entire encyclopaedia, all done voluntarily. In the generations after the Encyclopédies, mainly due to his aristocratic background, his legacy was largely overshadowed by the more bohemian Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, but by the mid-20th century more scholarly attention was being paid to him.
Go to Profile