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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,

#18301

Marin Mersenne

1588 - 1648 (60 years)

Marin Mersenne, OM was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those written in the form for some integer . He also developed Mersenne's laws, which describe the harmonics of a vibrating string , and his seminal work on music theory, Harmonie universelle, for which he is referred to as the "father of acoustics". Mersenne, an ordained Catholic priest, had many contacts in the scientific world and has been called "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of ...

#18302

Pausanias

110 - 180 (70 years)

Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.

#18303

Hegesias of Cyrene

400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)

Hegesias of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher. He argued that eudaimonia is impossible to achieve, and that the goal of life should be the avoidance of pain and sorrow. Conventional values such as wealth, poverty, freedom, and slavery are all indifferent and produce no more pleasure than pain. Cicero claims that Hegesias wrote a book called ἀποκαρτερῶν , which persuaded so many people that death is more desirable than life that Hegesias was banned from teaching in Alexandria. It has been thought by some that Hegesias was influenced by Buddhist teachings.

#18304

Édouard Le Roy

1870 - 1954 (84 years)

Édouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Le Roy was a French philosopher and mathematician. Life Le Roy entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1892, and received the agrégation in mathematics in 1895. He became Doctor in Sciences in 1898, taught in several high schools, and became in 1909 professor of mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris.

#18305

Morris Raphael Cohen

Morris Raphael Cohen

1880 - 1947 (67 years)

Morris Raphael Cohen was an American judicial philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar who united pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis. This union coalesced into the "objective relativism" fermenting at Columbia University before and during the early twentieth-century interwar period. He was father to Felix S. Cohen and Leonora Cohen Rosenfield.

#18306

Apuleius

125 - 170 (45 years)

Apuleius was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He was born in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day M'Daourouch, Algeria. He studied Platonism in Athens, travelled to Italy, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the attentions of a wealthy widow. He declaimed and then distributed his own defense before the proconsul and a court of magistrates convened in Sabratha, near Oea . This is known as th...

#18307

Cerinthus

100 - 200 (100 years)

Cerinthus was an early Gnostic, who was prominent as a heresiarch in the view of the early Church Fathers. Contrary to the Church Fathers, he used the Gospel of Cerinthus, and denied that the Supreme God made the physical world. In Cerinthus' interpretation, the Christ descended upon Jesus at baptism and guided him in ministry and the performing of miracles, but left him at the crucifixion. Similarly to the Ebionites, he maintained that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but was a mere man, the biological son of Mary and Joseph.

#18308

Michel Aflaq

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Michel Aflaq was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution .

#18309

Benjamin Tucker

Benjamin Tucker

1854 - 1939 (85 years)

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was an American individualist anarchist. Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty . Tucker was a member of the First International, with his publication Liberty represented as the English language organ for the Socialistic-Revolutionary Congress. Tucker described his form of anarchism as "consistent Manchesterism" and stated that "the Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats."

#18310

Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld

1868 - 1935 (67 years)

Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.

#18311

Afrikan Spir

1837 - 1890 (53 years)

Afrikan Aleksandrovich Spir was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher of German-Greek descent who wrote primarily in German, but also French. His book Denken und Wirklichkeit had a significant influence on several eminent philosophers, scholars and writers such as Hans Vaihinger, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Leo Tolstoy and Rudolf Steiner.

#18312

Vincenzo Gioberti

Vincenzo Gioberti

1801 - 1852 (51 years)

Vincenzo Gioberti was an Italian Catholic priest, philosopher, publicist and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Sardinia from 1848 to 1849. He was a prominent spokesman for liberal Catholicism.

#18313

Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus

1796 - 1862 (66 years)

Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus was a German philosopher best known for his exegetical work on philosophy, such as his characterisation of Hegel's dialectic as a triad of "thesis–antithesis–synthesis."

#18314

August Cieszkowski

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, ...

#18315

Olympiodorus the Younger

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.

#18316

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.

#18317

Christian August Crusius

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.

#18318

Paramahansa Yogananda

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...

#18319

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,...

#18320

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

#18321

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.

#18322

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.

#18323

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.

#18324

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.

#18325

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.

#18326

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.

#18327

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.

#18328

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.

#18329

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.

#18330

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,...

#18331

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...

#18332

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...

#18333

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...

#18334

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.

#18335

Charles Batteux

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.

#18336

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.

#18337

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 .

#18338

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.

#18339

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.

#18340

Errico Malatesta

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.

#18341

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...

#18342

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.

#18343

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 .

#18344

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.

#18345

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.

#18346

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.

#18347

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.

#18348

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.

#18349

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.

#18350

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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