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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#18051

John Michell

1724 - 1793 (69 years)
John Michell was an English natural philosopher and clergyman who provided pioneering insights into a wide range of scientific fields including astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation. Considered "one of the greatest unsung scientists of all time", he is the first person known to have proposed the existence of black holes, and the first to have suggested that earthquakes travelled in wavess. Recognizing that double stars were a product of mutual gravitation, he was the first to apply statistics to the study of the cosmos. He invented an apparatus to measure the mass of the Earth, and explained how to manufacture an artificial magnet.
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#18052

Margaret MacDonald

1907 - 1956 (49 years)
Margaret MacDonald was a British analytic philosopher. She worked in the areas of philosophy of language, political philosophy and aesthetics. Life and education Margaret MacDonald was born in London and abandoned as a child.
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#18053

P. C. Chang

1892 - 1957 (65 years)
Peng Chun Chang, commonly known as P. C. Chang , was a Chinese academic, philosopher, playwright, human rights activist, and diplomat. He was born in Tianjin, China, and died at his home in Nutley, New Jersey.
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#18054

Henry Longueville Mansel

Henry Longueville Mansel
1820 - 1871 (51 years)
Henry Longueville Mansel was an English philosopher and ecclesiastic. Life He was born at Cosgrove, Northamptonshire . He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London and St John's College, Oxford. He took a double first in 1843, and became tutor of his college. He was appointed reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855, and Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1859. He was a great opponent of university reform and of the Hegelianism which was then beginning to take root in Oxford. In 1867 he succeeded Arthur Penrhyn Stanley as regius professor of ecclesiastical history, and in 1868 he was appointed dean of St Paul's.
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#18055

Polemarchus

500 BC - 403 BC (97 years)
Polemarchus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from Piraeus. Life The son of Cephalus of Syracuse, Polemarchus had two brothers, the famous orator Lysias and Euthydemus, and a sister who married Brachyllus. Polemarchus and Lysias traveled to Thurii when the latter was 15 years old.
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#18056

Edmund Husserl

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#18057

Belu Zilber

1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Belu Zilber was a Romanian communist activist. Born into a Jewish family in Târgu Frumos, Iași County, he adhered to the Bolshevik movement while still an adolescent. Because he participated in the typographers' demonstration of December 13, 1918, he was expelled from every educational institution in his native country by the authorities of the Kingdom of Romania. He continued his high school education in Paris and began but did not complete studies at the polytechnic division of the University of Grenoble. He returned to Romania in 1922 and was hired as an expert at the War Ministry. He was ...
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#18058

Xenophilus

Xenophilus
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Xenophilus , of Chalcidice, was a Pythagorean philosopher and musician who lived in the first half of the 4th century BC. Aulus Gellius relates that Xenophilus was the intimate friend and teacher of Aristoxenus and implies that Xenophilus taught him Pythagorean doctrine. He was said to have belonged to the last generation of Pythagoreans, and he is the only Pythagorean known to have lived in Athens in the 4th century BC.
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#18059

Pedro Zulen

Pedro Zulen
1889 - 1925 (36 years)
Pedro Salvino Zulen Aymar was a Peruvian philosopher and librarian of Chinese descent, who dedicated the most part of his short life to the fight for decentralised politics and the defense of indigenous rights.
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#18060

Władysław Ślewiński

Władysław Ślewiński
1856 - 1918 (62 years)
Władysław Ślewiński was a Polish painter. He was one of Gauguin's students and a leading artist of the Young Poland movement. Biography He was born to a landowning family and his mother died in childbirth. His cousin, the painter Józef Chełmoński, noticed his artistic talent and advised his father to enroll him at the drawing school operated by Wojciech Gerson. His father resisted at first, but finally agreed.
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#18061

Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński

Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński
1776 - 1853 (77 years)
Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński was a Polish messianist philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, lawyer, occultist and economist. He was born as Hoëné to a municipal architect in 1776 but changed his name in 1815 to Józef Wroński. Later in life he changed his name to Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński, without using his family's original French spelling Hoëné. At no point in his life, neither in Polish or French, was he known as Hoëné-Wroński; nor was the common French transliteration, Josef Hoëné-Wronski, ever his official name in his native Poland .
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#18062

Tomáš Masaryk

Tomáš Masaryk
1850 - 1937 (87 years)
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czechoslovak statesman, political activist and philosopher who served as the first president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. He is regarded as the founding father of Czechoslovakia.
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#18063

Peter Wust

Peter Wust
1884 - 1940 (56 years)
Peter Wust was a German existentialist philosopher who is unknown in the English realm, for his works has never been translated into English to this day. Biography Wust was born the oldest of eleven children in Rissenthal in Saarland. He attended the local public school, then the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, in Trier. Though his parents had hoped he would become a Catholic priest, he decided on studying Geisteswissenschaft. After 1907, Wust pursued German studies, English studies, and philosophy in Berlin and Strasbourg. He taught in Berlin, Neuss, Trier, and Cologne, and earned his doctorate...
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#18064

Addison Webster Moore

1866 - 1930 (64 years)
Addison Webster Moore was a U.S. pragmatist philosopher. He was president of the Western Philosophical Association in 1911 and president of the American Philosophical Association in 1917. He was born in Plainfield, Indiana, United States. He studied at DePauw University, earning an A.B. in 1890 and an A.M. in 1893. He then studied at Cornell and took his Ph.D. in 1898 at the University of Chicago, attracted by John Dewey's arrival there. When Dewey went to Columbia University in 1904, Moore took over the Metaphysics and Logic courses at Chicago, and became professor of philosophy in 1909.
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#18065

Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah

Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah was an educator, litterateur, Islamic theologist and social reformer of pre-partition India. He was instrumental in the formation of the University of Dhaka and is the namesake of Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology.
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#18066

Brice Parain

1897 - 1971 (74 years)
Brice Parain was a French philosopher and essayist. He appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film Vivre sa vie. In Éric Rohmer's film My Night at Maud's , conversations about Pascal's Wager are directly inspired by a similar debate between Parain and Dominique Dubarle in an episode of the television series En profil dans le texte called l'Entretien sur Pascal in 1965, also produced by Rohmer.
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#18067

Camillo Golgi

Camillo Golgi
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Camillo Golgi was an Italian biologist and pathologist known for his works on the central nervous system. He studied medicine at the University of Pavia between 1860 and 1868 under the tutelage of Cesare Lombroso. Inspired by pathologist Giulio Bizzozero, he pursued research in the nervous system. His discovery of a staining technique called black reaction in 1873 was a major breakthrough in neuroscience. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named for him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex.
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#18068

Hierocles

Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher. Very little is known about his life. Aulus Gellius mentions him as one of his contemporaries, and describes him as a "grave and holy man." Work Hierocles is famous for a book called Elements of Ethics , part of which was discovered as a papyrus fragment at Hermopolis in 1901. This 300 line fragment discusses self-perception, and argues that all birds, reptiles, and mammals from the moment of birth perceive themselves continuously and that self-perception is both the primary and the most basic faculty of animals. The argument draws heavily on a Stoic concep...
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#18069

Jiva Goswami

Jiva Goswami
1511 - 1596 (85 years)
Jiva Goswami was an Indian philosopher and saint from the Gaudiya Vaishnava school of Vedanta tradition, producing a great number of philosophical works on the theology and practice of Bhakti yoga, Vaishnava Vedanta and associated disciplines. He is known as one of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan and was the nephew of the two leading figures, Rupa Goswami and Sanatana Goswami.
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#18070

George Syncellus

800 - 810 (10 years)
George Syncellus was a Byzantine chronicler and ecclesiastical official. He had lived many years in Palestine as a monk, before coming to Constantinople, where he was appointed synkellos to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople. He later retired to a monastery to write what was intended to be his great work, a chronicle of world history, Ekloge chronographias , or Extract of Chronography. According to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, George "struggled valiantly against heresy [i.e. Iconoclasm] and received many punishments from the rulers who raged against the rites of the Church", although the ...
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#18071

Adolphe Franck

Adolphe Franck
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Adolphe Franck was a French-Jewish philosopher who specialised in Jewish mysticism. Early life Franck was born in Liocourt in 1809. He originally studied to become a rabbi, but decided to become a philosopher instead as a protégé of Victor Cousin.
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#18072

Rigas Feraios

Rigas Feraios
1757 - 1798 (41 years)
Rigas Feraios or Velestinlis ; 1757 – 24 June 1798 Early life Rigas Feraios was born in 1757 as Antonios Rigas Velestinlis into a wealthy family in the village of Velestino in the Sanjak of Tirhala, Ottoman Empire . He later was at some point nicknamed Pheraeos or Feraios, by scholars, after the nearby ancient Greek city of Pherae, but he does not seem ever to have used this name himself; he is also sometimes known as Konstantinos or Constantine Rhigas . He is often described as being of Aromanian ancestry, with his native village of Velestino being Aromanian. Rigas' family had its roots in Perivoli, another Aromanian-inhabited village, but it usually overwintered in Velestino.
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#18073

Julius Frank

1808 - 1841 (33 years)
Johann Julius Gottfried Ludwig Frank or Julius Frank was a professor of history, geography and philosophy from Gotha, Germany. He taught at the Largo de São Francisco's Law School in São Paulo ., Brazil. He was an advocator of a liberal philosophy and founded the Students League in Brazil .
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#18074

Rodolfo Mondolfo

1877 - 1976 (99 years)
Rodolfo Mondolfo was an Italian philosopher who lived in Italy and Argentina. Born in Senigallia into a prominent family of Jewish origin, he studied at University of Florence and the University of Siena. In 1910 he started teaching at University of Turin where he worked until 1914, when he left for University of Bologna and later at the University of Padova.
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#18075

Anthony Collins

Anthony Collins
1676 - 1729 (53 years)
Anthony Collins was an English philosopher and essayist, notable for being one of the early proponents of Deism in Great Britain. Life and writings Collins was born in Heston, near Hounslow in Middlesex, England, the son of lawyer Henry Collins and Mary . He had two sisters: Anne Collins , who married Henry Lovibond , and Mary Collins , who married Edward Lovibond , a merchant and Director of the East India Company. Mary and Edward's son was the poet Edward Lovibond.
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#18076

Robert Broom

Robert Broom
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Robert Broom FRS FRSE was a British- South African medical doctor and palaeontologist. He qualified as a medical practitioner in 1895 and received his DSc in 1905 from the University of Glasgow. From 1903 to 1910, he was professor of zoology and geology at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, South Africa, and subsequently he became keeper of vertebrate palaeontology at the South African Museum, Cape Town.
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#18077

Christopher Jacob Boström

Christopher Jacob Boström
1797 - 1866 (69 years)
Christopher Jacob Boström was a Swedish philosopher. His ideas dominated Swedish philosophy until the beginning of the twentieth century. He also had a great influence on Swedish cultural life. Biography As a student he briefly studied theology, and religion remained his primary interest throughout his life. During his theological studies, he was a classmate of Lutheran revivalist preacher Pehr Brandell.
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#18078

Martin Deutinger

1815 - 1864 (49 years)
Martin Deutinger was a German philosopher and religious writer, born in Langenpreising, Bavaria, and died at Pfäfers, Switzerland. Life Deutinger first studied theology and philosophy at the Lyceum in Dillingen in 1832 before he heard the lectures of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in Munich in 1833 and became enthusiastic about the philosophy of art. He was ordained as a priest in 1837, and after filling several clerical positions, taught philosophy at Freising , Munich , and Dillingen .
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#18079

Victor Delbos

1862 - 1916 (54 years)
Étienne Marie Justin Victor Delbos was a Catholic philosopher and historian of philosophy. Delbos was appointed a lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1902. In 1911 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He died in July 1916 as a result of an infectious myocarditis brought on by pleurisy. Maurice Blondel, a close friend, wrote an obituary account of Delbos and saw various posthumous publications through the press.
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#18080

Arignote

530 BC - 450 BC (80 years)
Arignote or Arignota was a Pythagorean philosopher from Croton, Magna Graecia, or from Samos. She was known as a student of Pythagoras and Theano and, according to some traditions, their daughter as well.
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#18081

Nammalvar

Nammalvar
800 - 800 (0 years)
Nammalvar was one of the twelve Alvar saints of Tamil Nadu, India, who are known for their affiliation to the Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. The verses of the Alvars are compiled as the Naalayira Divya Prabandham, where praises are sung of 108 temples that are classified as divine realms, called the Divya Desams. Nammalvar is considered to be the fifth in the line of the twelve Alvars. He is highly regarded as a great mystic of the Vaishnava tradition. He is also considered to be the foremost among the twelve Alvars, and his contributions amount to 1352 among the 4000 stanzas in the Naalayi...
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#18082

Antonio Caso Andrade

Antonio Caso Andrade
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
Antonio Caso Andrade was a Mexican philosopher and rector of the former Universidad Nacional de México, nowadays known as the National Autonomous University of Mexico from December 1921 to August 1923. Along with José Vasconcelos, he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud, a humanist group against philosophical positivism. The Athenian generation opposed Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’s philosophical views, giving credence to and expanding on the ideas of Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and José Enrique Rodó. Caso opposed rationalism. His group the ateneistas believed in a moral, willing, and spiritual individual being.
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#18083

Zengzi

Zengzi
504 BC - 435 BC (69 years)
Zeng Shen , better known as Zengzi , courtesy name Ziyu , was a Chinese philosopher and disciple of Confucius. He later taught Zisi , the grandson of Confucius, who was in turn the teacher of Mencius, thus beginning a line of transmitters of orthodox Confucian traditions. He is revered as one of the Four Sages of Confucianism.
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#18084

Antanas Maceina

1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Antanas Maceina was a Lithuanian philosopher, existentialist, educator, theologian, and poet. Developed philosophy of culture of Stasys Šalkauskis, adjusted Christian philosophy and existentialism, accented an importance of native language to education.
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#18085

Mikhail Ovsyannikov

1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Mikhail Fedotovich Ovsyannikov was a Soviet philosopher and academic who concentrated on in-depth study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Ovsyannikov was head of the Philosophy Department at Moscow State University from 1968 to 1974.
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#18086

J. N. Findlay

J. N. Findlay
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
John Niemeyer Findlay , usually cited as J. N. Findlay, was a South African philosopher. Education and career Findlay read classics and philosophy as a boy and then at the Transvaal University College, .
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#18087

Delfim Santos

Delfim Santos
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
Delfim Pinto dos Santos , was a Portuguese academic, philosopher, educationist, essayist and book and movie reviewer. Life Delfim Santos was born in Oporto, Portugal in 1907, to Arnaldo Pinto and Amelia dos Santos Oliveira. His father was a goldsmith and trained him for his craft, which Delfim successfully practiced as apprentice until Arnaldo's untimely death, occurred when the son was aged 15. Still under the impact of his recent orphan condition, the young Delfim kept the family business running for a while, only to become aware that his vocation and motivation lay elsewhere and thereby decided to pursue a lifelong engagement with study and intellectual quest.
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#18088

Apollodorus of Seleucia

150 BC - Present (2176 years)
Apollodorus of Seleucia , or Apollodorus Ephillus, was a Stoic philosopher, and a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon. Apollodorus is famous for describing Cynicismism as "the short path to virtue", and he may have been the first Stoic after the time of Zeno and Aristo to systematically attempt to reconcile Stoicism with Cynicism. The lengthy account of Cynicism given by Diogenes Laërtius, which is presented from a Stoic point of view, may be derived from Apollodorus, and it is possible that he was the first Stoic to promote the idea of a line of Cynic succession from Socrates to Zeno .
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#18089

Pope Alexander VI

Pope Alexander VI
1431 - 1503 (72 years)
Pope Alexander VI was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 11 August 1492 until his death in 1503. Born into the prominent Borgia family in Xàtiva under the Crown of Aragon , Rodrigo studied law at the University of Bologna. He was ordained deacon and made a cardinal in 1456 after the election of his uncle as Pope Callixtus III, and a year later he became vice-chancellor of the Catholic Church. He proceeded to serve in the Curia under the next four popes, acquiring significant influence and wealth in the process. In 1492, Rodrigo was elected pope, taking the name Ale...
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#18090

Edward Kelley

Edward Kelley
1555 - 1590 (35 years)
Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot , was an English Renaissance occultist and scryer. He is known for working with John Dee in his magical investigations. Besides the professed ability to see spirits or angels in a "shew-stone" or mirror, which John Dee so valued, Kelley also said that he possessed the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, the goal of alchemy, as well as the philosopher's stone itself.
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#18091

John Grierson

John Grierson
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
John Grierson was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert J. Flaherty's Moana.
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#18092

Thomas Spencer Baynes

Thomas Spencer Baynes
1823 - 1887 (64 years)
Thomas Spencer Baynes was an English philosopher. Life Baynes was born in Wellington, Somerset to a Baptist minister. He intended to study for Baptist ministry, and was at a theological seminary at Bath with that view but, being strongly attracted to philosophical studies, left it and went to Edinburgh, where he became the favourite pupil of Sir William Hamilton, of whose philosophical system he continued an adherent.
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#18093

Maitreya-nātha

Maitreya-nātha
270 - 350 (80 years)
Maitreya-nātha is a name whose use was pioneered by Buddhist scholars Erich Frauwallner, Giuseppe Tucci, and Hakuju Ui to distinguish one of the three founders of the Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, along with Asanga and Vasubandhu. Some scholars believe this Maitreya to be a historical person in India. The traditions themselves have held that it is referring to Maitreya, the future buddha.
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#18094

Petrus de Ibernia

1101 - 1201 (100 years)
Petrus de Ibernia, also known as Peter of Ireland, was a 13th-century writer and lecturer who is believed to have taught logic and natural philosophy to Thomas Aquinas. Peter of Ireland is mentioned by the Aquinas' biographers Wilhelm of Tocco and Peter Calo.
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#18095

David Gozal

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#18096

Zef Jubani

Zef Jubani
1818 - 1880 (62 years)
Zef Jubani or Giuseppe Jubany in Italian was an Albanian folklorist and activist of the Albanian National Awakening. He is known for the publication of a Collection of Albanian Folk Songs and Rhapsodies in the Gheg Albanian dialect. Jubani advocated the creation of a unique alphabet of the Albanian language. For his political activities, which often were anti-clericalist, Jubani was denounced to the Holy See by the Jesuit missionaries of Shkodër.
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#18097

Eduardo Nicol

1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Eduardo Nicol was a Mexican-Catalan philosopher. He arrived in Mexico in 1939, obtained his major in philosophy from National Autonomous University of Mexico , the biggest university in Mexico, where he taught from 1940. While at UNAM, he became the chairs of adolescent psychology and the history of psychology following .
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#18099

Richard von Schubert-Soldern

1852 - 1924 (72 years)
Richard Ritter von Schubert-Soldern was a philosopher in Austria-Hungary and later Austria. Schubert-Soldern earned a doctorate at the University of Prague in 1879 and habilitated at Leipzig University in 1882 with a thesis titled Ueber Trancendenz des Objects und Subjects .
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#18100

Christian Krohg

Christian Krohg
1852 - 1925 (73 years)
Christian Krohg was a Norwegian naturalist painter, illustrator, author and journalist. Krohg was inspired by the realism art movement and often chose motifs from everyday life. He was the director and served as the first professor at the Norwegian Academy of Arts from 1909 to 1925.
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