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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#18351
Benjamin Waterhouse
1754 - 1846 (92 years)
Benjamin Waterhouse was a physician, co-founder and professor of Harvard Medical School. He is most well known for being the first doctor to test the smallpox vaccine in the United States, which he carried out on his own family.
Go to Profile#18352
Hans Pichler
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Hans Pichler was an Austrian-born German philosopher. A student of Windelband and Meinong, he revived in his work the philosophy of Wolff contra the epistemologism of the Neo-Kantians, particularly in his Über Christian Wolffs Ontologie . Among those influenced by Pichler's turn to realist ontology was Nicolai Hartmann.
Go to Profile#18353
Vincent of Beauvais
1190 - 1264 (74 years)
Vincent of Beauvais was a Dominican friar at the Cistercian monastery of Royaumont Abbey, France. He is known mostly for his Speculum Maius , a major work of compilation that was widely read in the Middle Ages. Often retroactively described as an encyclopedia or as a florilegium, his text exists as a core example of brief compendiums produced in medieval Europe.
Go to Profile#18354
Abdul Bari Nadvi
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Abdul Bari Nadvi was an Indian Muslim scholar born in 1886 in the Barabanki district near Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. His father Hakim Abdul Khaliq was a student of Maulana Mohammad Naeem Farangi Mahli. His younger brother Saad-ud-Din Ansari was among the founding members of the Jamia Millia Delhi and taught there for a long time. Abdul Bari Nadvi died in Lucknow on 30 January 1976. He was survived by four sons and two daughters, all of whom are now deceased.
Go to Profile#18355
Teles of Megara
250 BC - Present (2276 years)
Teles of Megara , was a Cynic philosopher and teacher. He wrote various discourses , seven fragments of which were preserved by Stobaeus. Life Nothing is known about Teles except for the limited information he reveals in his writings. In his discourse On Exile he refers to events in the Chremonidean War in the 260s BC, and he makes a specific reference to Hippomedon's governorship in Thrace under Ptolemy III Euergetes in the years following 241 BC, thus this discourse was written shortly after this date. His native city is uncertain: he makes various indirect references to Megara which show that he was living and teaching there, but it is possible that he originally came from Athens.
Go to Profile#18356
Clemens Timpler
1563 - 1624 (61 years)
Clemens Timpler was a German philosopher, physicist and theologian. Along with Jakob Degen , he is considered an important Protestant metaphysician, establishing the Protestant Reformed Neuscholastik.
Go to Profile#18357
Theophilos Corydalleus
1570 - 1646 (76 years)
Theophilos Corydalleus was a Greek Neo-Aristotelian philosopher who initiated the philosophical movement known as Korydalism or Corydalism. He was also an Eastern Orthodox cleric , physician, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, author, educator and geographer. His philosophical thought kept influencing Greek education for two hundred years after its inception.
Go to Profile#18358
Emil Utitz
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Emil Utitz was a Czech philosopher and psychologist of Jewish descent. He was educated in Prague, where he was a classmate of Franz Kafka. After studies in Munich, Leipzig, and Prague, he became a professor in Rostock, and from 1925 was Chair of Philosophy at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. After his forced retirement in 1933, he became a professor in Prague. In 1942, he was deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto, where he was head of the library. After the liberation of Theresienstadt in 1945, he returned to Prague. Utitz died in Jena in 1956, while travelling through East Germany to give lec...
Go to Profile#18359
Pierre Charron
1541 - 1603 (62 years)
Pierre Charron , French Catholic theologian and major contributor to the new thought of the 17th century. He is remembered for his controversial form of skepticism and his separation of ethics from religion as an independent philosophical discipline.
Go to Profile#18360
Fritz Medicus
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Fritz Medicus was a German-Swiss philosopher. He was awarded his doctorate while studying in Jena, with the publication of his dissertation, Kant's transcendental aesthetics and non-euclidian geometry. He was the Chair of Philosophy at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, and moved to ETH Zurich in 1911. Medicus wrote in the tradition of German idealism.
Go to Profile#18361
Sitting Bull
1831 - 1890 (59 years)
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. He was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him, at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement.
Go to Profile#18362
Johann Christian Reil
1759 - 1813 (54 years)
Johann Christian Reil was a German physician, physiologist, anatomist, and psychiatrist. He coined the term psychiatry – Psychiatrie in German – in 1808. Reil was one of five children, and was the son of a Lutheran pastor in Northwest Germany. He married Johanna Wilhelmine Leveaux in October, 1788. Together they had two sons and four daughters.
Go to Profile#18363
Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus
870 - 940 (70 years)
Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus al-Qunnāʾī was an Arab Christian philosopher who played an important role in the transmission of the works of Aristotle to the Islamic world. He is famous for founding the Baghdad school of Aristotelian philosophers.
Go to Profile#18364
Henry Ercole
Henry Ercole was a minor Maltese mediaeval philosopher who specialised mainly in ethics and logic. He enjoyed great esteem from his contemporaries, both as an administrator and a philosopher. Life It is unclear where Ercole was born in Malta or when. He was a Dominican friar, but it is not known where he completed his initial studies. The first documentary evidence about him is in 1711, when he was Master of Studies at the Studium Generale of the Dominicans at Rabat, Malta. Four years later, in 1715, he held the same office at Trapani, Sicily.
Go to Profile#18365
James H. Hyslop
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
James Hervey Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D, was an American psychical researcher, psychologist, and professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University. He was one of the first American psychologists to connect psychology with psychic phenomena. In 1906 he helped reorganize the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City and served as the secretary-treasurer for the organization until his death.
Go to Profile#18366
Richard Lance Barnett
#18367
John Cantius
1390 - 1473 (83 years)
John Cantius was a Polish priest, scholastic philosopher, physicist and theologian. Biography John Cantius was born in Kęty, a small town near Oświęcim, Poland, to Anna and Stanisław Kanty. He attended the Kraków Academy at which he attained bachelor, and licentiate. In 1418 he became a Doctor of Philosophy. Upon graduation he spent the next three years conducting philosophy classes at the university, while preparing for the priesthood.
Go to Profile#18368
François Gigot de la Peyronie
1678 - 1747 (69 years)
François Gigot de la Peyronie was a French surgeon who was born in Montpellier, France. His name is associated with a condition known as Peyronie's disease. As a teenager, he studied philosophy and surgery in Montpellier, where in 1695 he received his diploma as a barber-surgeon. Peyronie became fascinated with phalluses, which later developed into a lifelong obsession. He continued his education in Paris as a student of Georges Mareschal , who was chief-surgeon at the Hôpital de la Charité. Afterwards he returned to Montpellier as lecturer on anatomy and surgery, and was surgeon-major at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montpellier.
Go to Profile#18369
Marcel Foucault
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Marcel Foucault was a French philosopher and psychologist. Marcel Foucault was professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier. In 1906 he founded a laboratory of experimental psychology at the university.
Go to Profile#18370
Richard Assmann
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Richard Assmann was a German meteorologist and physician who was a native of Magdeburg. He made numerous contributions in high altitude research of the Earth's atmosphere. He was a pioneer of scientific aeronautics and considered a co-founder of aerology.
Go to Profile#18371
William Bartram
1739 - 1823 (84 years)
William Bartram was an American botanist, ornithologist, natural historian and explorer. Bartram was the author of an acclaimed book, now known by the shortened title Bartram's Travels, which chronicled his explorations of the southern British colonies in North America from 1773 to 1777. Bartram has been described as "the first naturalist who penetrated the dense tropical forests of Florida".
Go to Profile#18372
Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales
1741 - 1816 (75 years)
Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales or Jean-Baptiste Isoard de Lisle was a French philosopher noted for his multi-edition, multi-volume opus The Philosophy of Nature: Treatise on Human Moral Nature.
Go to Profile#18373
Hermogenes
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Hermogenes was an ancient Athenian philosopher best remembered as a close friend of Socrates as depicted by Plato and Xenophon. Life Hermogenes was the son of Hipponicus, brother of the wealthy Callias, and resident of the Alopece deme alongside Socrates. Although he belonged to the great family of Callias, he is mentioned by Xenophon as a man of very little property, suggesting that he may have been an illegitimate son of Hipponicus. Plato, on the other hand, suggests that he was unjustly deprived of his property by Callias, his brother.
Go to Profile#18374
Francisco Romero
1891 - 1962 (71 years)
Francisco Romero was a Latin American philosopher who spearheaded a reaction against positivism. Biography Romero was born in Seville, Spain, but spent much of his adult life in Latin America, especially Argentina, where he emigrated in 1904. He entered the Argentine army in 1910 and retired with the rank of major in 1931. He became a friend of the Argentine philosopher Alejandro Korn, and when he left military service he took over Korn's professorships at the universities of La Plata and Buenos Aires. Due to his strong disapproval of the Peronist government, he resigned his university positi...
Go to Profile#18375
Malek Bennabi
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Malek Bennabi was an Algerian writer and philosopher, who wrote about human society, particularly Muslim society with a focus on the reasons behind the fall of Muslim civilization. According to Malek Bennabi, the lack of new ideas in Islamic thought emerged what he coined civilizational bankruptcy. He argued that in order to recover its former magnificence, Islamic society had to become an environment in which individuals felt empowered. In order to satisfy his spiritual and material needs, a Muslim needed to feel that his industry and creativity would find reward.
Go to Profile#18376
Donald Davidson
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Donald Grady Davidson was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
Go to Profile#18377
Anton Mauve
1838 - 1888 (50 years)
Anthonij "Anton" Rudolf Mauve was a Dutch realist painter who was a leading member of the Hague School. He signed his paintings 'A. Mauve' or with a monogrammed 'A.M.'. A master colorist, he was a very significant early influence on his cousin-in-law Vincent van Gogh.
Go to Profile#18378
Herman of Carinthia
1100 - 1160 (60 years)
Herman of Carinthia , also called Hermanus Dalmata or Sclavus Dalmata, Secundus, by his own words born in the "heart of Istria", was a philosopher, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician and translator of Arabic works into Latin.
Go to Profile#18379
Hermann Oppenheim
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Hermann Oppenheim was one of the leading neurologists in Germany. Life and work Oppenheim is the son of Juda Oppenheim , the long-time rabbi of the Warburg synagogue community , and his wife, Cäcilie, née Steeg .
Go to Profile#18380
Johan Christian Dahl
1788 - 1857 (69 years)
Johan Christian Claussen Dahl , often known as or , was a Danish-Norwegian artist who is considered the first great romantic painter in Norway, the founder of the "golden age" of Norwegian painting. He is often described as "the father of Norwegian landscape painting" and is regarded as the first Norwegian painter to reach a level of artistic accomplishment comparable to that attained by the greatest European artists of his day. He was also the first to acquire genuine fame and cultural renown abroad. As one critic has put it, "J.C. Dahl occupies a central position in Norwegian artistic life ...
Go to Profile#18381
Giovanni Rasori
1766 - 1837 (71 years)
Giovanni Rasori was an Italian academic, physician and translator. Career Rasori was born in Parma. He began studying at the university of that city with results so brilliant that he deserved the interest of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma that allowed him to complete his studies at the University of Florence, Pavia, London and Paris, where he remained fascinated by the illuminist and pre-revolutionary climate of the time. In Parma, he was a pupil of the anatomist Flaminio Torrigiani.
Go to Profile#18382
Jeffries Wyman
1814 - 1874 (60 years)
Jeffries Wyman was an American naturalist and anatomist, born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Wyman died in Bethlehem, New Hampshire of a pulmonary hemorrhage. Career He graduated Harvard College in 1833 and Harvard Medical School in 1837. He was made curator at Lowell Institute, Boston, in 1839 and remained affiliated there until 1842. Fees from Lowell Institute lectures enabled him to study in Europe, from 1841 to 1842, where he had the opportunity to study under anatomist Richard Owen in London. Upon his return to the United States, he had hoped to gain a professorship at Harvard College but the position went to Asa Gray.
Go to Profile#18383
Steven I. Hajdu
#18384
Alfred Sisley
1839 - 1899 (60 years)
Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air . He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, he found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.
Go to Profile#18385
Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi
1209 - 1274 (65 years)
Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq ibn Muḥammad ibn Yūnus Qūnawī [alternatively, Qūnavī, Qūnyawī], , was a Persian philosopher, and one of the most influential thinkers in mystical or Sufi philosophy. He played a pivotal role in the study of knowledge—or epistemology, which in his context referred specifically to the theoretical elaboration of mystical/intellectual insight. He combined a highly original mystic-thinker, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn 'Arabī , whose arcane teachings Qūnavī codified and helped incorporate into the burgeoning pre-Ottoman intellectual tradition, on the one hand, with the logical/philosophical innovations of Ibn Sīnā , on the other.
Go to Profile#18386
Conrad Celtes
1459 - 1508 (49 years)
Conrad Celtes was a German Renaissance humanist scholar and poet of the German Renaissance born in Franconia . He led the theatrical performances at the Viennese court and reformed the syllabi. Celtis is considered by many to be the greatest of German humanists and thus dubbed "the Archhumanist" . He is also praised as "the greatest lyric genius and certainly the greatest organizer and popularizer of German Humanism".
Go to Profile#18387
Abu al-Hassan al-Amiri
913 - 992 (79 years)
Abu al-Hassan Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Amiri was a Muslim theologian and philosopher who attempted to reconcile philosophy with religion, and Sufism with conventional Islam. While al-'Amiri believed the revealed truths of Islam were superior to the logical conclusions of philosophy, he argued that the two did not contradict each other. Al-'Amiri consistently sought to find areas of agreement and synthesis between disparate Islamic sects. However, he believed Islam to be morally superior to other religions, specifically Zoroastrianism and Manicheism.
Go to Profile#18388
Heinrich Zangger
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Heinrich Zangger was a Swiss toxicologist and coroner. He was one of the "foremost forensic scientists of his generation". Biography Zangger was the son of a prosperous farmer and studied medicine at the University of Zurich. There he received his medical doctorate on February 19, 1902. His doctoral dissertation is titled Histologisch-färbetechnische Erfahrungen im Allgemeinen und speziell über die Möglichkeit einer morphologischen Darstellung der Zellnarkose [vitale Färbung] . On April 15, 1902 he was appointed professor extraordinarius for anatomy and special physiology of domestic animals...
Go to Profile#18389
Augustin Bonnetty
1798 - 1879 (81 years)
Augustin Bonnetty was a French thinker and writer who founded and edited the Annales de philosophie chrétienne from 1830 until his death. Career In 1815, Bonnetty entered Digne seminary and studied for the priesthood. After completing his philosophical and theological studies, as he was too young to be ordained, he went to Marseilles as a private tutor. He soon felt that his mission was to use science and philosophy in the defense of the Church and to remain a layman.
Go to Profile#18390
George Cheyne
1671 - 1743 (72 years)
George Cheyne, M.D. R.C. E.d. R.S.S. , was a pioneering physician, early proto-psychiatrist, philosopher and mathematician. Life George Cheyne was a Newtonian physician and Behmenist, deeply immersed in mysticism. Born in 1672 in Methlick, near Aberdeen in Scotland, he was baptized in Mains of Kelly, Methlick, Aberdeenshire, on 24 February 1673. He died in Bath on April 12, 1743. The books he published during his life show his wide interest which extended from medicine and natural philosophy to religion, metaphysics, astronomy and mathematics. His books were most of the time very successful and as a result they were translated into other languages, e.g.
Go to Profile#18391
Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
1177 - 1274 (97 years)
Sayyid Usman Marwandi, popularly known as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar , was a Sufi saint and poet who is revered in South Asia. Born in Marwand, Sistan, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar eventually settled in Sindh and is revered by the local Sindhi population.
Go to Profile#18392
Erwin Straus
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus was a German-American phenomenologist and neurologist who helped to pioneer anthropological medicine and psychiatry, a holistic approach to medicine that is critical of mechanistic and reductionistic approaches to understanding and treating human beings.
Go to Profile#18393
Thomas Attributed Name. Hobbes
#18394
Rupert Lodge
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Rupert Clendon Lodge was an Anglo-Canadian philosopher, "the most widely read of all philosophers in Canada". Lodge was born in England, but spent most of his academic career at the University of Manitoba, where he taught from 1920 to 1947. Marshall McLuhan was a student of Lodge in the early 1930s. Lodge's works on Plato remain influential, and were reissued by Routledge in the 2000s and 2010s.
Go to Profile#18395
Hermann Kretzschmar
1848 - 1924 (76 years)
August Ferdinand Hermann Kretzschmar was a German musicologist and writer, and is considered a founder of hermeneutics in musical interpretation and study. Life and career Born in Olbernhau, Saxony, Kretzschmar was son of the organist and cantor Karl Dankegott Kretzschmar and Karoline Wilhelmine, née Leupold. He was from 1862 a student in the Kreuzschule in Dresden, where from 1867–1868 he was twice Prefect of the Dresdner Kreuzchor. In addition, from 1870 he studied Philology at Leipzig University as well as Music at the Leipzig Conservatory and was awarded his doctorate there. From 1871 he ...
Go to Profile#18396
Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold
1793 - 1855 (62 years)
Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold was a German philosopher. He was the son of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and grandchild of Christoph Martin Wieland. He at first lectured on philosophy at the University of Kiel, and afterwards was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Jena. His philosophical system resembles Immanuel Kant's.
Go to Profile#18397
Edward Waldo Emerson
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Edward Waldo Emerson was an American physician, writer and lecturer. Biography Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson, and educated at Harvard, where he graduated in 1866. He graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1874, and practiced medicine in Concord until 1882, when he received an inheritance and retired from his practice. He was an instructor in art anatomy at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1885 to 1906. He was also an accomplished equestrian.
Go to Profile#18398
Jerome Inglott
1776 - 1835 (59 years)
Jerome Inglott was a Maltese philosopher and theologian. His areas of specialisation in philosophy were chiefly metaphysics and ontology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta , and was one of the Philosopher-Rectors at the same university .
Go to Profile#18399
Xiong Shili
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Xiong Shili was a Chinese essayist and philosopher whose major work A New Treatise on Vijñaptimātra is a Confucian critique of the Buddhist Vijñapti-mātra "consciousness-only" theory popularized in China by the Tang-dynasty pilgrim Xuanzang.
Go to Profile