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,
#18501
Donato Bramante
1444 - 1514 (70 years)
Donato Bramante , born as Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio and also known as Bramante Lazzari, was an Italian architect and painter. He introduced Renaissance architecture to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his plan for St. Peter's Basilica formed the basis of the design executed by Michelangelo. His Tempietto marked the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome when Pope Julius II appointed him to build a sanctuary over the spot where Peter was martyred.
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Martin D'Arcy
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Martin Cyril D'Arcy was a Roman Catholic priest, philosopher of love, and a correspondent, friend, and adviser of a range of literary and artistic figures including Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers, W. H. Auden, Eric Gill and Sir Edwin Lutyens. He has been described as "perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death".
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Yves Marie André
1675 - 1764 (89 years)
Yves Marie André , also known as le Père André, was a French Jesuit mathematician, philosopher, and essayist. André entered the Society of Jesus in 1693. Although distinguished in his scholastic studies, he adhered to Gallicanism and Jansenism and was thus considered unsuitable for responsible office by Church authorities. He therefore pursued scientific studies and became royal professor of mathematics at Caen.
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William Ames
1576 - 1633 (57 years)
William Ames was an English Puritan minister, philosopher, and controversialist. He spent much time in the Netherlands, and is noted for his involvement in the controversy between the Calvinists and the Arminians.
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Maximus of Tyre
200 - 200 (0 years)
Maximus of Tyre , also known as Cassius Maximus Tyrius, was a Greek rhetorician and philosopher who lived in the time of the Antonines and Commodus, and who belongs to the trend of the Second Sophistic. His writings contain many allusions to the history of Greece, while there is little reference to Rome; hence it is inferred that he lived longer in Greece, perhaps as a professor at Athens. Although nominally a Platonist, he is really a sophist rather than a philosopher, although he is still considered one of the precursors of Neoplatonism.
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Ronald Ross
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Sir Ronald Ross was a British medical doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria, becoming the first British Nobel laureate, and the first born outside Europe. His discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of a mosquito in 1897 proved that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, and laid the foundation for the method of combating the disease.
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Ludwig Strümpell
1812 - 1899 (87 years)
Ludwig Strümpell, after his ennoblement in 1870 von Strümpell , was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Biography Strümpell was born in Schöppenstedt in Lower Saxony, the son of a dyer. He studied philosophy at the University of Königsberg, where he was influenced by Johann Friedrich Herbart, and continued his studies at the University of Leipzig. In 1845, he became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dorpat , and after 1871 served as a professor at the University of Leipzig. He died in Leipzig in 1899 but was buried in his home town Schöppenstedt, which made him an honor...
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Sisir Kumar Maitra
1887 - 1963 (76 years)
Sisir Kumar Maitra was Head of the Department of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University. His writings compared Eastern and Western philosophy, and the teachings of Sri Aurobindo in comparison with Western philosophers.
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Aldo Capitini
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Aldo Capitini was an Italian philosopher, poet, political activist, anti-fascist, and educator. He was one of the first Italians to take up and develop Mahatma Gandhi's theories of nonviolence and was known as "the Italian Gandhi".
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Gershom Carmichael
1672 - 1729 (57 years)
Gershom Carmichael was a Scottish philosopher. Gershom Carmichael was a Scottish subject born in London, the son of Alexander Charmichael, a Church of Scotland minister who had been banished by the Scottish privy council for his religious opinions. As a child, he suffered from crooked limbs and was treated by "body menders" who made him wear limb braces. Through his friendship with the Duke of Hamilton, Carmichael visited Bath to take the waters and he was eventually able to dispense with the braces.
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Antenor Orrego
1892 - 1960 (68 years)
Antenor Orrego Espinoza was a Peruvian writer and political philosopher of Basque ancestry. He was a member of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance . The Universidad Privada Antenor Orregoo , founded in Trujillo, Peru in 1988, is named after him.
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Athir al-Din al-Abhari
1200 - 1264 (64 years)
Athīr al‐Dīn al‐Mufaḍḍal ibn ʿUmar ibn al‐Mufaḍḍal al‐Samarqandī al‐Abharī, also known as Athīr al‐Dīn al‐Munajjim was an Iranian muslim polymath, philosopher, astronomer, astrologer and mathematician. Other than his influential writings, he had many famous disciples.
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Gustav Kafka
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Gustav Kafka was an Austrian philosopher, psychologist. One of Kafka's most outstanding contributions to the realms of psychology have been his critique of fundamentals and methods, such as his criticism of behaviorism, and other articles in which he revealed new points of view based on concrete investigation.
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Charles Seeger
1886 - 1979 (93 years)
Charles Louis Seeger Jr. was an American musicologist, composer, teacher, and folklorist. He was the father of the American folk singers Pete Seeger , Peggy Seeger , and Mike Seeger ; and brother of the World War I poet Alan Seeger and children's author and educator Elizabeth Seeger .
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Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster
1869 - 1966 (97 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster was a German academic, educationist, pacifist and philosopher, known for his public opposition to Nazism. His works primarily dealt with the development of ethics through education, sexology, politics and international law.
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Miloš N. Đurić
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Miloš N. Đurić , was a Serbian classical philologist, hellenist, classical translator, philosopher, university professor and a full member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Đurić's textbooks and translations of classic literary works such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and Poetics are still in use. According to Dr. Ksenija Maricki Gađanski, Đurić's numerous contributions to Serbian culture puts him on a scale of earlier Serbian enlighteners such as Saint Sava and Dositej Obradović.
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Jacob Lorhard
1561 - 1609 (48 years)
Jacob Lorhard was a German philosopher and pedagogue based in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Biography Lorhard was born in Münsingen, in the Duchy of Württemberg. He studied at the University of Tübingen. In 1603 he became Rector of the Gymnasium in St. Gallen. In 1606 he published Ogdoas scholastica, which contains the word "ontologia" – probably appearing for the first time ever in a book. He uses "Ontologia" synonymously with "Metaphysica". The following year he received the offer of becoming Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg from Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel. Rudolph Göckel was also professor in Marburg in logic, ethics, and mathematics at this time.
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Charles Augustus Strong
1862 - 1940 (78 years)
Charles Augustus Strong was an American philosopher and psychologist. He spent the earlier part of his career teaching in the United States, but after his wife died, in 1906 he settled with their daughter in Italy, near Florence. Between 1918 and 1936 he wrote most of his works there.
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Sandie Lindsay, 1st Baron Lindsay of Birker
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
Alexander Dunlop Lindsay, 1st Baron Lindsay of Birker, , known as Sandie Lindsay, was a Scottish academic and peer. Lindsay worked at a number of universities, beginning his career as a fellow in moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and as an assistant lecturer at Victoria University of Manchester. He the moved to Balliol College, Oxford where he had been elected a fellow in 1906. He served in the British Army during the First World War. He was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1922 to 1924, before returning to the University of Oxford as master of Balliol College 1924.
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Karl Vorländer
1860 - 1928 (68 years)
Karl Vorländer was a German neo-Kantian philosopher who taught in Solingen. He published various studies and editions of the works of Immanuel Kant, including studies of the relation between Kantian thought and socialist thought, and of the influence of Kant on the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His 1924 biography of Kant became a classic of Kant scholarship for much of the twentieth century.
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Richard P. Mayeux
#18522
Cassius Longinus
213 - 273 (60 years)
Cassius Longinus was a Greek rhetorician and philosophical critic. Born in either Emesa or Athens, he studied at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas and Origen the Pagan, and taught for thirty years in Athens, one of his pupils being Porphyry. Longinus did not embrace the Neoplatonism then being developed by Plotinus, but continued as a Platonist of the old type and his reputation as a literary critic was immense. During a visit to the east, he became a teacher, and subsequently chief counsellor to Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. It was by his advice that she endeavoured to regain her independence from Rome.
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Luigi Guido Grandi
1671 - 1742 (71 years)
Dom Guido Grandi, O.S.B. Cam. was an Italian monk, priest, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and engineer. Life Grandi was born on 1 October 1671 in Cremona, Italy and christened Luigi Francesco Lodovico. When he was of age, he was educated at the Jesuit college there. After he completed his studies there in 1687, he entered the novitiate of the Camaldolese monks at Ferrara and took the name of Guido. In 1693 he was sent to the Monastery of St. Gregory the Great, the Camaldolese house in Rome, to complete his studies in philosophy and theology in preparation for Holy Orders. A year later, Grandi was assigned as professor of both fields at the Camaldolese Monastery of St.
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Gustave Belot
1859 - 1929 (70 years)
Gustave Belot was a French philosopher and educational administrator. Gustave Belot was born 7 August 1859 at Strasbourg, the son of a professor in the faculty of letters at Lyons. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1878, taking the philosophy agrégation in 1881, and becoming a provincial philosophy instructor at Brest and elsewhere. In 1899 he succeeded Lucien Lévy-Bruhl as professor of philosophy at the lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1911 he was appointed Inspector of the Paris Academy, and in 1913 he became Inspector-General of Secondary Instruction. He died in Paris on 21 December 1929....
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Paul Foulquié
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Paul Foulquié was a French thinker and philosopher known for his books on metaphysics, epistemology, existentialism and psychology. His works have been translated into different languages. Bibliography L'existentialisme Precis de philosophie La volonté La dialectique La psychologie contemporaine Psychologie Dictionnaire de la langue philosophique by Foulquié Paul Diccionario de Pedogogia Dictionnaire de la langue pédagogique by Paul Foulquié and Quadrige Précis de philosophie Tome III Métaphysique l'action. Cours de philosophie Alain Précis de philosophie à l'usage des candidats au baccalau...
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Ferrante de Gemmis
1732 - 1803 (71 years)
Ferrante de Gemmis was an Italian philosopher and literary man. Biography Ferrante de Gemmis was born in Terlizzi, near Bari. His parents were the Baron Tommaso de Gemmis and Francesca Bruni. He was educated in Naples where he graduated in law. He inherited the properties of his uncle Minister Ferrante Maddalena. De Gemmis was a friend of the philosopher and political economist Antonio Genovesi. He founded an Academy in Terlizzi becoming the primary exponent of Illuminism in the region of Apulia. He refused to become a judge so he could continue writing about philosophy even though he wrote i...
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Alfred Delp
1907 - 1945 (38 years)
Alfred Delp was a German Jesuit priest and philosopher of the German Resistance. A member of the inner Kreisau Circle resistance group, he is considered a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism. Falsely implicated in the failed 1944 July Plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler, Delp was arrested and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1945.
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Bernhard Alexander
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Bernhard Alexander was a Hungarian writer of Jewish background, and a professor of philosophy and aesthetics. Life and career Bernhard Alexander was born Alexander Márkus in Pest on 13 April 1850, and educated in his native city, later attending German universities, where he pursued studies in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics and pedagogy. On his return to Hungary he was appointed to a teaching post in a Realschule in Budapest, and in 1878 was admitted as a docent into the faculty of philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest, where he became a full professor in 1895.
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Louis de Bonald
1754 - 1840 (86 years)
Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald was a French counter-revolutionary philosopher and politician. He is mainly remembered for developing a theoretical framework from which French sociology would emerge.
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John Arbuthnot
1667 - 1735 (68 years)
John Arbuthnot FRS , often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, was a Scottish physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club , and for inventing the figure of John Bull.
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George Dalgarno
1616 - 1687 (71 years)
George Dalgarno was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems. Originally from Aberdeen, he later worked as a schoolteacher in Oxford in collaboration with John Wilkins, although the two parted company intellectually in 1659.
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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.
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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.
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Richard Lance Barnett
#18535
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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