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,
#18251
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was a French scholar trained in philosophy who furthered anthropology with his contributions to the budding fields of sociology and ethnology. His primary field interest was ways of thinking.
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Baltasar Gracián
1601 - 1658 (57 years)
Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J. , better known as Baltasar Gracián, was a Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud . His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
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Lev Lopatin
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Lev Mikhailovich Lopatin was a Russian philosopher and former head of the Moscow Psychological Society until the formal liquidation of the society by the Soviet after the Revolution of 1917. Lopatin fell victim to the policies of Soviet reform, which caused widespread famine, and in 1920 he died due to malnourishment and exhaustion.
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Johann Georg Heinrich Feder
1740 - 1821 (81 years)
Johann Georg Heinrich Feder was a German philosopher. Life Feder was born on 15 May 1740 in the village of Schornweisach in the Principality of Bayreuth, the son of Martin Heinrich Feder , the village pastor. Feder studied theology and pedagogy at Erlangen. From 1768 to 1782 he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. At the time of his death, in Hanover, he was Director of the Pageninstitut.
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Aristoxenus
360 BC - 300 BC (60 years)
Aristoxenus of Tarentum was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher, and a pupil of Aristotle. Most of his writings, which dealt with philosophy, ethics and music, have been lost, but one musical treatise, Elements of Harmony , survives incomplete, as well as some fragments concerning rhythm and meter. The Elements is the chief source of our knowledge of ancient Greek music.
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Marquis de Sade
1740 - 1814 (74 years)
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade , was a French writer, libertine, political activist and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. Some of these were published under his own name during his lifetime, but most appeared anonymously or posthumously.
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Hippias
443 BC - 399 BC (44 years)
Hippias of Elis was a Greek sophist, and a contemporary of Socrates. With an assurance characteristic of the later sophists, he claimed to be regarded as an authority on all subjects, and lectured on poetry, grammar, history, politics, mathematics, and much else. Most of our knowledge of him is derived from Plato, who characterizes him as vain and arrogant.
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Panaetius
185 BC - 110 BC (75 years)
Panaetius of Rhodes was an ancient Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in Athens, before moving to Rome where he did much to introduce Stoic doctrines to the city, thanks to the patronage of Scipio Aemilianus. After the death of Scipio in 129 BC, he returned to the Stoic school in Athens, and was its last undisputed scholarch. With Panaetius, Stoicism became much more eclectic. His most famous work was his On Duties, the principal source used by Cicero in his own work of the same name.
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Benjamin Rush
1745 - 1813 (68 years)
Benjamin Rush was an American revolutionary, a Founding Father of the United States and signatory to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and a civic leader in Philadelphia, where he was a physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, and the founder of Dickinson College. Rush was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress. He later described his efforts in support of the American Revolution, saying: "He aimed right." He served as surgeon general of the Continental Army and became a professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice at the University of...
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Diogenes
412 BC - 323 BC (89 years)
Diogenes , also known as Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism. He was born in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC.
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Debendranath Tagore
1817 - 1905 (88 years)
Debendranath Tagore was an Indian philosopher and religious reformer, active in the Brahmo Samaj . He joined Brahmo samaj in 1842. He was the founder in 1848 of the Brahmo religion, which today is synonymous with Brahmoism. Born in Shilaidaha, his father was the industrialist Dwarakanath Tagore; he himself had 14 children, many of whom, including Nobel-prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, made significant artistic or literary contributions to society.
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Émile Littré
1801 - 1881 (80 years)
Émile Maximilien Paul Littré was a French lexicographer, freemason and philosopher, best known for his , commonly called . Biography Littré was born in Paris. His father, Michel-François Littré, had been a gunner and, later, a sergeant-major of marine artillery in the French navy who was deeply imbued with revolutionary ideas of the day. Settling down as a tax collector, he married Sophie Johannot, a free-thinker like himself, and devoted himself to the education of his son Émile. The boy was sent to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Louis Hachette and Eugène Burnouf became his friends. After h...
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Marquis de Condorcet
1743 - 1794 (51 years)
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet , known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal public instruction, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale — and the Jacobin faction in particular — voted to have Condorcet arrested.
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August Cieszkowski
1814 - 1894 (80 years)
Count August Dołęga Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist and social and political activist. His Hegelian philosophy influenced the young Karl Marx and action theorists. Biography Cieszkowski was born in Nowa Sucha, in the Duchy of Warsaw. He studied at the Jagiellonian University and in then, from 1832, at the University of Berlin where he became interested in Hegelianism through the lectures of Karl Ludwig Michelet, who became a lifelong friend. He gained his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1838. After his studies he travelled around Europe, visiting France, ...
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Olympiodorus the Younger
495 - 570 (75 years)
Olympiodorus the Younger was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astrologer and teacher who lived in the early years of the Byzantine Empire, after Justinian's Decree of 529 AD which closed Plato's Academy in Athens and other pagan schools. Olympiodorus was the last pagan to maintain the Platonist tradition in Alexandria ; after his death the School passed into the hands of Christian Aristotelians, and was eventually moved to Constantinople. He is not to be confused with Olympiodorus the Deacon, a contemporary Alexandrian writer of Bible commentaries.
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Cheng Yi
1033 - 1107 (74 years)
Cheng Yi , also known by various other names and romanizations, was a Chinese classicist, essayist, philosopher, and politician of the Song Dynasty. He worked with his older brother Cheng Hao. Like his brother, he was a student of Zhou Dunyi, a friend of Shao Yong, and a nephew of Zhang Zai. The five of them along with Sima Guang are called the Six Great Masters by his follower Zhu Xi. He became a prominent figure in neo-Confucianism, and the philosophy of Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao and Zhu Xi is referred to as the Cheng–Zhu school or the Rationalistic School.
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Christian August Crusius
1715 - 1775 (60 years)
Christian August Crusius was a German philosopher and Protestant theologian. Biography Crusius was born in Leuna in the Electorate of Saxony. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, and became professor of theology there in 1750, and principal in 1773.
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Paramahansa Yogananda
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Paramahansa Yogananda was an Indian Hindu monk, yogi and guru who introduced millions to meditation and Kriya Yoga through his organization, Self-Realization Fellowship / Yogoda Satsanga Society of India – the only one he created to disseminate his teachings. A chief disciple of the yoga guru Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, he was sent by his lineage to spread the teachings of yoga to the West. He immigrated to America at the age of 27 to prove the unity between Eastern and Western religions and to preach a balance between Western material growth and Indian spirituality. His long-standing influen...
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J. Marion Sims
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
James Marion Sims was an American physician in the field of surgery. His most famous work was the development of a surgical technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistula, a severe complication of obstructed childbirth. He is also remembered for inventing the Sims speculum, Sims sigmoid catheter, and the Sims position. Against significant opposition, he established, in New York, the first hospital specifically for women. He was forced out of the hospital he founded because he insisted on treating cancer patients; he played a small role in the creation of the nation's first cancer hospital,...
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Ernst Meumann
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Meumann was a German educator, pedagogist and psychologist, the founder of experimental pedagogy. Works Die Sprache des Kindes Über Ökonomie und Technik des Lernens Der Verzug des Schuldners nach dem Recht des BGB für das Deutsche Reich Intelligenz und Wille. Ökonomie und Technik des Gedächtnisses Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die experimentelle Pädagogik System der Ästhetik Abriss der experimentellen Pädagogik The psychology of learning: an experimental investigation of the economy and technique of memory. 2012, Nabu press. ISBN 9781279520284
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Calcidius
350 - 350 (0 years)
Calcidius was a 4th-century philosopher who translated the first part of Plato's Timaeus from Greek into Latin around the year 321 and provided with it an extensive commentary. This was likely done for Bishop Hosius of Córdoba. Very little is otherwise known of him.
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Fritz Mauthner
1849 - 1923 (74 years)
Fritz Mauthner was an Austrian philosopher and author of novels, satires, reviews and journalistic works. He was an exponent of philosophical scepticism derived from a critique of human knowledge and of philosophy of language.
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Cebes
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Cebes of Thebes was an Ancient Greek philosopher from Thebes remembered as a disciple of Socrates. One work, known as the Pinax or Tabula, attributed to Cebes still survives, but it is believed to be a composition by a pseudonymous author of the 1st or 2nd century CE.
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Archelaus
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Archelaus was an Ancient Greek philosopher, a pupil of Anaxagoras, and may have been a teacher of Socrates. He asserted that the principle of motion was the separation of hot from cold, from which he endeavoured to explain the formation of the Earth and the creation of animals and humans.
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Christian Hermann Weisse
1801 - 1866 (65 years)
Christian Hermann Weisse was a German Protestant religious philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. He was the son of theologian . Biography Weisse was born in Leipzig, and studied at the university there, at first adhering to the Hegelian school of philosophy. In the course of time, his ideas changed, and became close to those of Schelling in his later years. He developed a new speculative theism, and became an opponent of Hegel's idealism. In his addresses on the future of the Protestant Church , he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus' conceptions of the heavenly Father, the Son of Man and the kingdom of Heaven.
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Paramartha
499 - 569 (70 years)
Paramārtha was an Indian monk from Ujjain, who is best known for his prolific Chinese translations of Buddhist texts during the Six Dynasties era. He is known as one of the four great translators in Chinese Buddhist history . He is also known for the various oral commentaries he gave on his translations which were written down by his disciples . Some of Paramārtha's influential translations include Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa, Asaṅga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha, and Dignāga's Ālambanaparīkṣā & Hastavālaprakaraṇa.
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Wonhyo
617 - 686 (69 years)
Wŏnhyo was one of the most important philosophers and commentators in East Asian Buddhism and the most prolific scholar in Korean Buddhism. As one of the most eminent scholar-monks in East Asian history, his extensive literary output runs to over 80 works in 240 fascicles. His most influential commentaries are those on buddha-nature texts like the *Vajrasamādhisūtra, the Awakening of Faith, and the Mahāparinivāṇasūtra. These works became classics widely respected throughout Korea, China and Japan.
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Arnold Gehlen
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Arnold Gehlen was an influential conservative German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist. Biography Gehlen's major influences while studying philosophy were Hans Driesch, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Max Scheler. Furthermore, he was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and US-American pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and especially George Herbert Mead.
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Eli Siegel
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Eli Siegel was a poet, critic, and educator. He founded Aesthetic Realism, a philosophical movement based in New York City. An idea central to Aesthetic Realism—that every person, place or thing in reality has something in common with all other things—was expressed in the title poem of his first volume, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. His second volume was Hail, American Development.
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Thomas Browne
1605 - 1682 (77 years)
Sir Thomas Browne was an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. His writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry and are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffused with melancholia, Browne's writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre,...
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Báb
1819 - 1850 (31 years)
The Báb was the founder of Bábism, and one of the central figures of the Baháʼí Faith. He was a merchant from Shiraz in Qajar Iran who, in 1844 at the age of 25, claimed to be a messenger of God. He was acclaimed by his followers as the Báb , a reference to the deputy of the Hidden Imam, while instigating a millenarian movement — which proposed the abrogation of Islamic laws and traditions — and the establishment of a new religion. Though he was popular among the lower classes, he faced opposition from the orthodox clergy and government, which eventually executed him and thousands of his foll...
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Hans Cornelius
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
Johannes Wilhelm Cornelius was a German neo-Kantian philosopher and psychologist. Biography Born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria on 27 September 1863. He originally studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, graduating with a Ph.D. in 1886, before turning to philosophy. In 1894, he habilitated in philosophy and subsequently held a post in philosophy at the University of Munich . In 1910, Cornelius moved as a full professor to the Akademie für Sozialwissenschaften, which four years later would become a department of the newly founded University of Frankfurt. Among his students in Frankfurt wer...
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H. Richard Niebuhr
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Helmut Richard Niebuhr is considered one of the most important Christian theological ethicists in 20th-century America, best known for his 1951 book Christ and Culture and his posthumously published book The Responsible Self. The younger brother of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Niebuhr taught for several decades at the Yale Divinity School. Both brothers were, in their day, important figures in the neo-orthodox theological school within American Protestantism. His theology has been one of the main sources of postliberal theology, sometimes called the "Yale school". He influenced suc...
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Euhemerus
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Euhemerus was a Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messina in Sicily as the most probable location, while others suggest Chios or Tegea.
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Charles Batteux
1713 - 1780 (67 years)
Charles Batteux was a French philosopher and writer on aesthetics. Biography Batteux was born in Alland'Huy-et-Sausseuil, Ardennes, and studied theology at Reims. In 1739 he came to Paris, and after teaching in the colleges of Lisieux and Navarre, was appointed to the chair of Greek and Roman philosophy in the Collège de France. His 1746 treatise Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe was an attempt to find a unity among existing theories of beauty and taste on "a single principle", and its views were widely accepted, not only in France but throughout Europe.
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Athenagoras of Athens
133 - 190 (57 years)
Athenagoras was a Father of the Church, an Ante-Nicene Christian apologist who lived during the second half of the 2nd century of whom little is known for certain, besides that he was Athenian , a philosopher, and a convert to Christianity.
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Buddhapālita
470 - 550 (80 years)
Buddhapālita was an Indian Mahayana Buddhist commentator on the works of Nagarjuna and Aryadeva. His Mūlamadhyamaka-vṛtti is an influential commentary to the Mūlamadhyamakakarikā. Buddhapālita's commentarial approach works was criticised by his contemporary Bhāviveka, and then defended by the later Candrakīrti .
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Alfonso Reyes
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Alfonso Reyes Ochoa was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times and has been acclaimed as one of the greatest authors in Spanish language. He served as ambassador of Mexico to Argentina and Brazil.
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Diodorus Cronus
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Diodorus Cronus was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected to the Megarian school. He was most notable for logic innovations, including his master argument formulated in response to Aristotle's discussion of future contingents.
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Errico Malatesta
1853 - 1932 (79 years)
Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarchist propagandist and revolutionary socialist. He edited several radical newspapers and spent much of his life exiled and imprisoned, having been jailed and expelled from Italy, Britain, France, and Switzerland. Originally a supporter of insurrectionary propaganda by deed, Malatesta later advocated for syndicalism. His exiles included five years in Europe and 12 years in Argentina. Malatesta participated in actions including an 1895 Spanish revolt and a Belgian general strike. He toured the United States, giving lectures and founding the influential anarchist journal La Questione Sociale.
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Erasistratus
305 BC - 249 BC (56 years)
Erasistratus was a Greek anatomist and royal physician under Seleucus I Nicator of Syria. Along with fellow physician Herophilus, he founded a school of anatomy in Alexandria, where they carried out anatomical research. As well, he is credited with helping to found the methodic school of teachings of medicine in Alexandria whilst opposing traditional humoral theories of Hippocratic ideologies. Together with Herophilus, he is credited by historians as the potential founder of neuroscience due to his acknowledgements of nerves and their roles in motor control through the brain and skeletal musc...
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Jin Yuelin
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Jin Yuelin or Chin Yueh-Lin was a Chinese philosopher best known for three works, one each on logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. He was also a commentator on Bertrand Russell. Biography Jin was born in Changsha, Hunan and attended Tsinghua University from 1911 until 1914. He obtained a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 1920. In 1926, Jin founded the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University. Jin was an active participant in the May 4th movement as a young, intellectual revolutionary. He helped to incorporate the scientific method into philosophy. Hao Wang was one of his students.
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Theobald Ziegler
1846 - 1918 (72 years)
Theobald Ziegler was a German philosopher and educator born in Göppingen, Württemberg. Career Ziegler studied theology and philosophy at the University of Tübingen, and later was a secondary school teacher in Heilbronn, Winterthur and Baden-Baden. During this time period he also taught classes at Tübinger Stift. In 1882 he became konrektor of a Protestant secondary school in Strasbourg, followed by an appointment as professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg .
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Moritz Geiger
1880 - 1937 (57 years)
Moritz Geiger was a German philosopher and a disciple of Edmund Husserl. He was a member of the Munich phenomenological school. Beside phenomenology, he dedicated himself to psychology, epistemology and aesthetics.
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Victor Brochard
1848 - 1907 (59 years)
Victor Charles Louis Brochard was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. Life Victor Brochard was born in Quesnoy-sur-Deûle. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1868, and in 1872 was appointed professor of philosophy at the lycée de Pau. After a succession of other lycée appointments, he was appointed lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in 1886. A few years later he was appointed professor of the history of ancient philosophy at the Sorbonne.
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Ramon Llull
1232 - 1316 (84 years)
Ramon Llull was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, Christian apologist and former knight from the Kingdom of Majorca. He invented a philosophical system known as the Art, conceived as a type of universal logic to prove the truth of Christian doctrine to interlocutors of all faiths and nationalities. The Art consists of a set of general principles and combinatorial operations. It is illustrated with diagrams.
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Julius Frauenstädt
1813 - 1879 (66 years)
Christian Martin Julius Frauenstädt was a German philosopher and editor. He was educated at the house of his uncle at Neisse, and converted from Judaism to protestant Christianity in 1833. He studied theology and, later, philosophy at Berlin, where he came under the sway of the philosophies of Hegel and Schelling. He worked as a private tutor for the Sayn-Wittgenstein family during this period.
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Robert Koch
1843 - 1910 (67 years)
Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. As the discoverer of the specific causative agents of deadly infectious diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax, he is regarded as one of the main founders of modern bacteriology. As such he is popularly nicknamed the father of microbiology , and as the father of medical bacteriology. His discovery of the anthrax bacterium in 1876 is considered as the birth of modern bacteriology. Koch used his discoveries to establish that germs "could cause a specific disease" and directly provided proofs for that germ theory of diseases, therefore creating the scientific basis of public health, saving millions of lives.
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David Prall
1886 - 1940 (54 years)
David Wight Prall was a philosopher of art and an academic. His interests include aesthetics, value theory, abstract ideas, truth and the history of philosophy. He is noted for his notion of aesthetic surfaces.
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Ilya Repin
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Ilya Yefimovich Repin was a Ukrainian-born Russian painter. He became one of the most renowned artists in Russia in the 19th century. His major works include Barge Haulers on the Volga , Religious Procession in Kursk Province , Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan ; and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks . He is also known for the revealing portraits he made of the leading Russian literary and artistic figures of his time, including Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Pavel Tretyakov, and especially Leo Tolstoy, with whom he had a long friendship.
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