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,
#18151
Rafael Calvo Serer
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Rafael Calvo Serer was a Professor of History of Spanish Philosophy, a writer, essayist. He was president of the Council of Administration of the newspaper Madrid, in which he published numerous articles on national and international politics. In 1949 he obtained the National Award for Literature for his work España sin problema.
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Gampopa
1079 - 1153 (74 years)
Gampopa Sönam Rinchen was the main student of Milarepa, and a Tibetan Buddhist master who codified his own master's ascetic teachings, which form the foundation of the Kagyu educational tradition. Gampopa was also a doctor and tantric master. He authored the first Lamrim text, Jewel Ornament of Liberation, and founded the Dagpo Kagyu school. He is also known as Dvagpopa, and by the titles Dakpo Lharjé "the physician from Dakpo" and Daö Zhönnu, "Candraprabhakumara" .
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Luigi Ferri
1826 - 1895 (69 years)
Luigi Ferri was an Italian philosopher born in Bologna. His education was obtained mainly at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his father, a painter and architect, was engaged in the construction of the Théâtre Italien. From his twenty-fifth year he began to lecture in the colleges of Évreux, Dieppe, Blois and Toulouse. Later, he was lecturer at Annecy and Casal-Montferrat, and became head of the education department under Mamiani in 1860.
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Mohsen Fayz Kashani
1598 - 1680 (82 years)
Mul·lā "al-Muḥsin" "al-Fayḍ" al-Kāshānī was an Iranian Twelver Shi'i Muslim, mystic, poet, philosopher, and muhaddith . Life Mohsen Fayz Kashani was born in Kashan to a scholarly family renowned for its learning, Fayz started his education with his father, Shah Morteza. His father owned a rich library which benefited Fayz. When he reached the age of twenty, he travelled to Isfahan for further study. However, after a year in Isfahan, he moved to Shiraz to study Hadith and Fiq under Majid Bahrani, one of the leading Shi'ite scholars of his time. Bahrani died a few months later, and Fayz r...
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Charles de Villers
1765 - 1815 (50 years)
Charles François Dominique de Villers was a French philosopher. He was mainly responsible for translating the philosophy of Immanuel Kant into the French language. Life Villers was born in Boulay-Moselle, France. He studied at the Benedictine College in Metz, and then became a student of the School of Applied Artillery of Metz. He attained the rank of captain. Like other officers of that era, such as the artillery colonel Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet of Puysegur, he became interested in animal magnetism.
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Anton Raphael Mengs
1728 - 1779 (51 years)
Anton Raphael Mengs was a German painter, active in Dresden, Rome, and Madrid, who while painting in the Rococo period of the mid-18th century became one of the precursors to Neoclassical painting, which replaced Rococo as the dominant painting style in Europe.
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Gopinath Kaviraj
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Gopinath Kaviraj was an Indian Sanskrit scholar, Indologist and philosopher. First appointed in 1914 a librarian, he was the Principal of Government Sanskrit College, Varanasi from 1923 to 1937. He was also the editor of the Sarasvati Bhavana Granthamala during that period.
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Eugene Lindsay Opie
1873 - 1971 (98 years)
Eugene Lindsay Opie was an American physician and pathologist who conducted research on the causes, transmission, and diagnosis of tuberculosis and on immunization against the disease. He served as professor of pathology at several U.S. medical schools and as Dean of the Washington University School of Medicine .
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Luis Buñuel
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the great and more influential filmmakers of all time. Buñuel’s works were known for their avant-garde surrealism which were also infused with political commentary.
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John Watson
1847 - 1939 (92 years)
John Watson was a Canadian philosopher and academic. Life He was born in Gorbals parish, Glasgow, Scotland, on 25 February 1847, the son of John Watson, a printer from Lanarkshire, and his wife Elizabeth Robertson from Northumberland. He attended the Free Church School in Kilmarnock. He then worked as a clerk to 1866.
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Dietrich Mahnke
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Dietrich Mahnke was a German philosopher and historian of mathematics. From 1902–1906, Mahnke studied at Göttingen under Edmund Husserl and David Hilbert. After serving in the First World War , he graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1925 with a thesis on Leibniz. The thesis was later published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung as Leibnizens Synthese von Universalmathematik und Individualmetaphysik. In 1926 he habilitated at Greifswald with a thesis entitled Neue Einblicke in die Entdeckungsgeschichte der höheren Analysis. In 1927 he became a professor of...
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Manuel Chrysoloras
1355 - 1415 (60 years)
Manuel Chrysoloras was a Byzantine Greek classical scholar, humanist, philosopher, professor, and translator of ancient Greek texts during the Renaissance. Serving as the ambassador for the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in medieval Italy, he became a renowned teacher of Greek literature and history in the republics of Florence and Venice, and today he's widely regarded as a pioneer in the introduction of ancient Greek literature to Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages.
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M. M. Sharif
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Mian Mohammad Sharif TI was a Pakistani philosopher, Islamic scholar, and college professor. He is noted for his work in analytical philosophy and pioneered the idea of Muslim philosophy. His work was published in international philosophical journals.
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August Batsch
1761 - 1802 (41 years)
August Johann Georg Karl Batsch was a German naturalist. He was a recognised authority on mushrooms, and also described new species of ferns, bryophytes, and seed plants. Life and career Batsch was born in Jena, Saxe-Weimar to George Lorenz Bratsch and Ernestine Bratsch. He studied at the Jena City School, and then had private tuition. He showed an aptitude for natural sciences and drawing, and so subsequently studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Jena , entering in 1772 and obtaining his doctorate in philosophy in 1781 and in medicine in 1786, his supervisor being Justus Christian Loder.
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Domingo de Soto
1494 - 1560 (66 years)
Domingo de Soto, O.P. was a Spanish Dominican priest and Scholastic theologian born in Segovia , and died in Salamanca , at the age of 66. He is best known as one of the founders of international law and of the Spanish Thomistic philosophical and theological movement known as the School of Salamanca.
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Niccolò Lorini
1544 - Present (482 years)
Niccolò Lorini was born in Florence in 1544. He served as a Preacher General Dominican Order and a lecturer in ecclesiastical history at the University of Florence. He is most famous for his involvement in the Galileo trails, the Galileo affair. He was a member of the Pigeon League named for one of Galileo's rivals, Lodovico delle Colombe. Lorini instigated the events of 1616 by sending the Roman Inquisition a copy of Galileo's letter to Benedetto Castelli.
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Neophytos Doukas
1760 - 1845 (85 years)
Neophytos Doukas or Dukas was a Greek priest and scholar, author of many books and translations from ancient Greek works, and one of the most important personalities of the modern Greek Enlightenment during the Ottoman occupation of Greece. His contributions to Greek education have been neglected because of the traditional ideas he advocated concerning the Greek language question .
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William Thompson
1775 - 1833 (58 years)
William Thompson was an Irish political and philosophical writer and social reformer, developing from utilitarianism into an early critic of capitalist exploitation whose ideas influenced the cooperative, trade union and Chartist movements as well as Karl Marx.
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Karel van Mander
1548 - 1606 (58 years)
Karel van Mander or Carel van Mander I was a Flemish painter, poet, art historian and art theoretician, who established himself in the Dutch Republic in the latter part of his life. He is mainly remembered as a biographer of Early Netherlandish painters and Northern Renaissance artists in his Schilder-boeck. As an artist and art theoretician he played a significant role in the spread and development of Northern Mannerism in the Dutch Republic.
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Johannes Bouwmeester
1634 - 1680 (46 years)
Johannes Bouwmeester was a Dutch physician, philosopher and a founding member of the literary society Nil volentibus arduum. He enrolled at Leiden University in 1651 and in 1658 graduated there in medicine. He was a close friend of Lodewijk Meyer, co-founder of Nil volentibus arduum, and acquainted with the philosophers Benedictus de Spinoza and Adriaen Koerbagh. His father, Claes Bouwmeester, was tailor by trade and several family members were builders of musical instruments. He was born in Amsterdam.
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Isaac Orobio de Castro
1617 - 1687 (70 years)
Balthazar Orobio de Castro , was a Portuguese Jewish philosopher, physician and religious apologist. Life While still a child, he was taken to Seville by his parents, who were Marranos. He studied philosophy at Alcalá de Henares and became teacher of metaphysics at the University of Salamanca. Later he devoted himself to the study of medicine, and became a popular practitioner in Seville, and physician in ordinary to the duke of Medina-Celi and to a family nearly related to the king.
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Paul Nizan
1905 - 1940 (35 years)
Paul-Yves Nizan was a French philosopher and writer. He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and much of his writing reflects his political beliefs, although he resigned from the party soon after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He died in the Battle of Dunkirk, fighting against the German army in World War II.
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Julius Schaller
1810 - 1868 (58 years)
Julius Schaller was a German philosopher born in Magdeburg. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Halle, where in 1834 he received his habilitation. In 1838 he became an associate professor at Halle, where in 1861 he was appointed a full professor.
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Aedesius
280 - 355 (75 years)
Aedesius was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic. He was born into a wealthy Cappadocian family, but he moved to Syria, where he was apprenticed to Iamblichos. None of his writings have survived, but there is an extant biography by Eunapius, a Greek sophist and historian of the 4th century who wrote a collection of biographies titled Lives of the Sophists. Aedesius's philosophical doctrine was a mixture between Platonism and eclecticism and, according to Eunapius, he differed from Iamblichus on certain points connected with theurgy and magic.
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Yin Haiguang
1919 - 1969 (50 years)
Yin Haiguang was a Chinese author, educator and philosopher from Taiwan. Biography Yin was born to missionary parents in Huanggang, Hubei in December 1919 and was raised in Wuchang. His uncle, Yin Ziheng , was a revolutionist who took part in Xinhai Revolution.
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Adolph Stöhr
1855 - 1921 (66 years)
Adolph Stöhr was professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. His lectures and publications covered subjects such as logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, experimental psychology, psychology of perception, and psychology of association.
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Rudolf Wagner
1805 - 1864 (59 years)
Rudolf Friedrich Johann Heinrich Wagner was a German anatomist and physiologist and the co-discoverer of the germinal vesicle. He made important investigations on ganglia, nerve-endings, and the sympathetic nervess.
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Samuel Bailey
1791 - 1870 (79 years)
Samuel Bailey was a British philosopher, economist and writer. He was called the "Bentham of Hallamshire". Life Bailey was born at Sheffield on 5 July 1791, the son of Joseph Bailey and Mary Eadon. His father was among the first of those Sheffield merchants who went to the United States to establish trade connections. After a few years in his father's business, he retired from all business concerns with an ample fortune, although he remained connected with the Sheffield Banking Company, of which he was a founder in 1831 and served as chairman for many years. Although an ardent liberal, he took little part in political affairs.
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Grigory Vyrubov
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Grigory Nikolayevich Vyrubov, or Grégoire Wyrouboff was a Russian Empire Positivist philosopher and historian of science. History Born in Moscow, Vyrubov was brought up in Italy and France before studying medicine and natural philosophy at the University of Moscow. Heavily influenced by Edmond Nikolayevich Pommier, Vyrubov founded the Positivist journal Philosophie positive with Emile Littré in 1867: he edited the journal until 1881. He befriended Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen, and edited anonymously the first edition of Herzen's works .
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René Leriche
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Henri Marie René Leriche was a French vascular surgeon and physiologist. He was a specialist in pain, vascular surgery and the sympathetic trunk. He sensitized many who were mutilated in the first World war, he was the first to be interested in pain and to practice gentle surgery with as little trauma as possible.
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John N. Deck
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
John Norbert Deck was a Canadian philosopher. Adhering to neither sartorial nor intellectual fashions, Deck inspired generations of students with his highly idiosyncratic form of idealism, deriving from Plotinus but equally rooted in Thomas Aquinas and Hegel.
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Robert Campin
1375 - 1444 (69 years)
Robert Campin , now usually identified with the Master of Flémalle , was a master painter who, along with Jan van Eyck, initiated the development of Early Netherlandish painting, a key development in the early Northern Renaissance.
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Herbert Schneider
1892 - 1984 (92 years)
Herbert Wallace Schneider was a German American professor of philosophy and a religious studies scholar long associated with Columbia University. Born in Berea, Ohio, Schneider completed his undergraduate and graduate education at Columbia, going on to teach at that school for many years. An early student of John Dewey, he studied pragmatism, ontology, social philosophy, and fascism, and is best remembered for his works The Puritan Mind and A History of American Philosophy . The Herbert Schneider Award, an annual presentation of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, is name...
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James Syme
1799 - 1870 (71 years)
James Syme was a Scottish pioneering surgeon. Early life James Syme was born on 7 November 1799 at 56 Princes Street in Edinburgh. His father was John Syme WS of Cartmore and Lochore, estates in Fife and Kinross. His father lost most of his fortune in attempting to develop the mineral resources of his property. His father had a legal practice at 23 North Hanover Street, not far from Princes Street in Edinburgh.
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Lucretia Mott
1793 - 1880 (87 years)
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which the Declaration of Sentiments was written.
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Elena Cornaro Piscopia
1646 - 1684 (38 years)
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia or Elena Lucrezia Corner , also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
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Edmund Pfleiderer
1842 - 1902 (60 years)
Edmund Pfleiderer was a German philosopher and theologian. He entered the ministry and during the Franco-Prussian War served as army chaplain, an experience described in his eines feldgeistlichen im kriege 1870/71 . He was afterwards appointed professor ordinarius of philosophy at Kiel , and in 1878 he was elected to the philosophical chair at Tübingen. He published works on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, empiricism and scepticism in David Hume's philosophy, modern pessimism, Kantian criticism, English philosophy, Heraclitus of Ephesus and many other subjects.
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Norman Bethune
1890 - 1939 (49 years)
Henry Norman Bethune was a Canadian thoracic surgeon, early advocate of socialized medicine, and member of the Communist Party of Canada. Bethune came to international prominence first for his service as a frontline trauma surgeon supporting the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, and later supporting the Chinese Communist Party's Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Bethune helped bring modern medicine to rural China, treating both sick villagers and wounded soldiers.
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Magnus Hundt
1449 - 1519 (70 years)
Magnus Hundt or Magnus Canis , also known as Parthenopolitanus, was a German philosopher, physician and theologian. Hundt coined the term anthropology, and he and Otto Casmann have been mentioned as founders of anthropology since they used the term in the 16th century.
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Juan Azor
1535 - 1603 (68 years)
Juan Azor was a Spanish philosopher and Jesuit priest. Life Azor was born at Lorca in the province of Murcia, southern Spain. He entered the Society of Jesus on 18 March 1559, and went on to become professor of philosophy and later of theology, both dogmatic and moral, at Piacenza, Alcalá, and Rome. He was a member of the first committee appointed by Father General Acquaviva to draw up the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum.
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Karl. T. Weber
#18192
Al-Shahrazuri
Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Mahmud Shahrazuri was a 13th-century Muslim physician, historian and philosopher. He was of Kurdish origin. It appears that he was alive in AD 1288. However, it is also said that he died in the same year.
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Valentino Annibale Pastore
1868 - 1956 (88 years)
Valentino Annibale Pastore was an Italian philosopher and logician. Pastore was born in Orbassano. He studied literature at the University of Turin under Arturo Graf. His thesis La vita delle forme letterarie was published in 1892 in Turin. Pastore then turned to philosophy, influenced by the works of Pasquale d'Ercole, Friedrich Kiesow, Antonio Garbasso, and Giuseppe Peano, publishing his own thesis Sopra le teorie della scienza: logica, matematica, fisica in 1903.
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Boethus of Sidon
75 BC - 10 BC (65 years)
Boethus of Sidon was a Peripatetic philosopher from Sidon, who lived towards the end of the 1st century BC. None of his work has been preserved and the complete collection of quotings and paraphrases appeared first in 2020.
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Janus Cornarius
1500 - 1558 (58 years)
Janus Cornarius was a Saxon humanist and friend of Erasmus. A gifted philologist, Cornarius specialized in editing and translating Greek and Latin medical writers with "prodigious industry," taking a particular interest in botanical pharmacology and the effects of environment on illness and the body. Early in his career, Cornarius also worked with Greek poetry, and later in his life Greek philosophy; he was, in the words of Friedrich August Wolf, "a great lover of the Greeks." Patristic texts of the 4th century were another of his interests. Some of his own writing is extant, including a book...
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Maxime Hans Kuczyński
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Max "Maxime" Hans Kuczyński was a German physician of Jewish origin. He was the father of the former President of Peru, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Biography Maxime Kuczyński was born in Berlin, as the son of Emma and Louis Kuczyński, both of Jewish Polish origin. He studied medicine and natural science at the University of Rostock. In 1913 he received his degree in philosophy, and in 1919 a degree in medicine.
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William Mackintire Salter
1853 - 1931 (78 years)
William Mackintire Salter was the author of several books on philosophy and a critical and enduring major classic on Nietzsche. He was also a special lecturer for the Department of Philosophy in the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the Ethical movement.
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Dawes Hicks
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
George Dawes Hicks FBA was a British philosopher who was the first professor of moral philosophy at University College, London from 1904 until 1928 and professor emeritus thereafter until his death.
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Lawrence Alma-Tadema
1836 - 1912 (76 years)
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, , RWS was a Dutch painter who later settled in the United Kingdom, becoming the last officially recognised denizen in 1873. Born in Dronryp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in London, England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there.
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Edmundo Cetina Velázquez
1896 - 1959 (63 years)
Edmundo Cetina Velázquez was a Mexican philosopher and writer from Tenosique, Tabasco. He was born in 1896 and died in 1959. He was the son of Joaquin Cetina Moreno and Maria de Jesus Velázquez. He studied at the Instituto Juárez and later became a self-taught physician and a passionate student of philosophy and exact sciences. He wrote several essays on topics such as metaphysics, ethics, logic, mathematics, physics, and biology. Some of his writings are: Algunos balbuceos sobre una filosofía de la vida , Algunos aspectos de la Relatividad , La vida y la muerte , El problema del conocimiento , and El problema del ser .
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