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,
#18101
Max Stirner
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Johann Kaspar Schmidt , known professionally as Max Stirner, was a German post-Hegelian philosopher, dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness. Stirner is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism and individualist anarchism.
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Adi Shankara
788 - 820 (32 years)
Adi Shankara, also called Adi Shankaracharya , was an 8th-century Indian Vedic scholar and teacher . His works present a harmonizing reading of the sastras, with liberating knowledge of the self at its core, synthesizing the Advaita Vedanta teachings of his time.
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Jeremy Bentham
1749 - 1832 (83 years)
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.
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Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1762 - 1814 (52 years)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant before him, Fichte was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness.
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Herbert Spencer
1820 - 1903 (83 years)
Herbert Spencer was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
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Democritus
460 BC - 360 BC (100 years)
Democritus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Abdera, primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe. None of his work has survived. Life Although many anecdotes about Democritus' life survive, their authenticity cannot be verified and modern scholars doubt their accuracy. Democritus was said to be born in the city of Abdera in Thrace, an Ionian colony of Teos. Ancient accounts of his life have claimed that he lived to a very old age, with some writers claiming that he was over a hundred years old at the time of his death.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism . His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turne...
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Averroes
1126 - 1198 (72 years)
Ibn Rushd , often Latinized as Averroes , was an Andalusian polymath and jurist who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the Western world as The Commentator and Father of Rationalism.
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Henri Bergson
1859 - 1941 (82 years)
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher, who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
1775 - 1854 (79 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his one-time university roommate, early friend, and later rival. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is regarded as difficult because of its evolving nature.
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Boethius
480 - 525 (45 years)
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known as Boethius , was a Roman senator, consul, magister officiorum, historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the translation of the Greek classics into Latin, a precursor to the Scholastic movement, and, along with Cassiodorus, one of the two leading Christian scholars of the 6th century. The local cult of Boethius in the Diocese of Pavia was sanctioned by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1883, confirming the diocese's custom of honouring him on the 23 October.
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Duns Scotus
1265 - 1308 (43 years)
John Duns Scotus was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher and theologian. He is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and William of Ockham.
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Auguste Comte
1798 - 1857 (59 years)
Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher, mathematician and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology; indeed, he invented the term and treated that discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.
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Plutarch
40 - 120 (80 years)
Plutarch was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus .
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Hannah Arendt
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Hannah Arendt was a German-born American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theoristss of the 20th century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of ev...
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Mahatma Gandhi
1869 - 1948 (79 years)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā , first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world.
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Hans-Georg Gadamer
1900 - 2002 (102 years)
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method , on hermeneutics. Life Family and early life Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer , a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian. Gadamer resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and became more and more interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Geiese died of diabetes while Hans-Georg was four years ...
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Galen
200 - 300 (100 years)
Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , often anglicized as Galen or Galen of Pergamon, was a Roman Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.
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Sextus Empiricus
200 - 300 (100 years)
Sextus Empiricus was a Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher and Empiric school physician with Roman citizenship. His philosophical works are the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman Pyrrhonism, and because of the arguments they contain against the other Hellenistic philosophies, they are also a major source of information about those philosophies.
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Lucretius
94 BC - 55 BC (39 years)
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which usually is translated into English as On the Nature of Things—and somewhat less often as On the Nature of the Universe. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised in 1836 by C. J. Thomsen.
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Marcus Aurelius
121 - 180 (59 years)
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Ralph Waldo Emerson , who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master".
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Henry Sidgwick
1838 - 1900 (62 years)
Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1883 until his death, and is best known in philosophy for his utilitarian treatise The Methods of Ethics. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research and a member of the Metaphysical Society and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence. In 1875, with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, he co-founded Newnham College, a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge.
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Dante Alighieri
1265 - 1321 (56 years)
Dante Alighieri , most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
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Pyrrho
360 BC - 270 BC (90 years)
Pyrrho of Elis , born in Elis, Greece, was a Greek philosopher of Classical antiquity, credited as being the first Greek skeptic philosopher and founder of Pyrrhonism. Life Pyrrho of Elis is estimated to have lived from around 365/360 until 275/270 BCE. Pyrrho was from Elis, on the Ionian Sea. He was likely a member of the Klytidiai, a clan of seers in Elis who interpreted the oracles of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia where Pyrrho served as a high priest. The Klytidiai were descendants of Klytios, who was the son of Alcmaeon and the grandson of Amphiaraus. In the Python, Pyrrho's student Tim...
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Anaximander
610 BC - 547 BC (63 years)
Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia . He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and, arguably, Pythagoras amongst his pupils.
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John Stuart Mill
1806 - 1873 (67 years)
John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.
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Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 - 1527 (58 years)
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince , written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
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Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662 (39 years)
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on conic sections; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines , establishing him as one of the first two...
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Epictetus
50 - 138 (88 years)
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he spent the rest of his life. His teachings were written down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses and Enchiridion.
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Francis Bacon
1561 - 1626 (65 years)
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban PC , also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon led the advancement of both natural philosophy and the scientific method and his works remained influential even in the late stages of the Scientific Revolution.
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Empedocles
490 BC - 430 BC (60 years)
Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a native citizen of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix and separate the elements, respectively.
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Ayn Rand
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Alice O'Connor , better known by her pen name Ayn Rand , was a Russian-born American writer and public philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own pe...
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Karl Kautsky
1854 - 1938 (84 years)
Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist. A leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Second International, Kautsky advocated orthodox Marxism, which emphasized the scientific, materialist, and determinist character of Karl Marx's work. This interpretation dominated European Marxism for two decades, from the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
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Laozi
604 BC - 600 BC (4 years)
Laozi , also romanized as Lao Tzu and various other ways, was a semi-legendary ancient Chinese philosopher, author of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism along with the Zhuangzi. Laozi is a Chinese honorific, typically translated as "the Old Master". Modern scholarship generally regards his biographical details as invented, and his opus a collaboration. Traditional accounts say he was born as in the state of Chu in the 6th centuryBC during China's Spring and Autumn Period, served as the royal archivist for the Zhou court at Wangcheng , met and impressed Confucius on one occasion...
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Protagoras
486 BC - 420 BC (66 years)
Protagoras was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and rhetorical theorist. He is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato credits him with inventing the role of the professional sophist.
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Porphyry
233 - 301 (68 years)
Porphyry of Tyre was a Neoplatonic philosopher born in Tyre, Roman Phoenicia during Roman rule. He edited and published The Enneads, the only collection of the work of Plotinus, his teacher. He wrote original works in the Greek language on a wide variety of topics, ranging from music theory to Homer to vegetarianism. His Isagoge or Introduction, an introduction to logic and philosophy, was the standard textbook on logic throughout the Middle Ages in its Latin and Arabic translations. Porphyry was, and still is, also well-known for his anti-Christian polemics. Through works such as Philosophy ...
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Christian Wolff
1679 - 1754 (75 years)
Christian Wolff was a German philosopher. Wolff is characterized as one of the most eminent German philosophers between Leibniz and Kant. His life work spanned almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which perhaps represents the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany.
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Rudolf Steiner
1861 - 1925 (64 years)
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism . Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
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Proclus
412 - 485 (73 years)
Proclus Lycius , called Proclus the Successor , was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, one of the last major classical philosophers of late antiquity. He set forth one of the most elaborate and fully developed systems of Neoplatonism and, through later interpreters and translators, exerted an influence on Byzantine philosophy, Early Islamic philosophy, Scholastic philosophy, and German Idealism, especially G.W.F. Hegel, who called Proclus's Platonic Theology "the true turning point or transition from ancient to modern times, from ancient philosophy to Christianity."
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Moritz Schlick
1882 - 1936 (54 years)
Friedrich Albert Moritz Schlick was a German philosopher, physicist, and the founding father of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Early life and works Schlick was born in Berlin to a wealthy Prussian family with deep nationalist and conservative traditions. His father was Ernst Albert Schlick and his mother was Agnes Arndt. At the age of sixteen, he started to read Descartes' Meditations and Schopenhauer's Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik. Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra especially impressed him.
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Karl Jaspers
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. After being trained in and practising psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept the label.
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Leo Strauss
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Leo Strauss was a German-American scholar of political philosophy who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
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George Boole
1815 - 1864 (49 years)
George Boole Jnr was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the Information Age, alongside the work of Claude Shannon.
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William of Ockham
William of Ockham, OFM was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the 14th century. He is commonly known for Occam's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, and also produced significant works on logic, physics and theology. William is remembered in the Church of England with a commemoration on the 10th of April...
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Henry David Thoreau
1817 - 1862 (45 years)
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" , an argument in favor of peaceful disobedience against an unjust state.
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Confucius
552 BC - 479 BC (73 years)
Kong Fuzi , more usually Kongzi , commonly latinized as Confucius, was a Chinese philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. Confucius's teachings and philosophy underpin East Asian culture and society, and remain influential across China and East Asia to this day. His philosophical teachings, called Confucianism, emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity, as well as an emphasis on a ruler's duty to their subjects.
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Al-Farabi
872 - 951 (79 years)
Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi , known in the Latin West as Alpharabius, was an early Islamic philosopher and music theorist. He has been designated as "Father of Islamic Neoplatonism", and the "Founder of Islamic Political Philosophy".
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A. J. Ayer
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic and The Problem of Knowledge . Ayer was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.
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Seneca the Younger
4 BC - 65 (69 years)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger , usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature.
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