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,
#18801
Gerhard Krüger
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Gerhard Krüger was a German philosopher who was very much influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the theologian Rudolf Bultmann. He was the son of Joseph May Krüger, an accountant, and Pauline Helene Martha .
Go to Profile#18802
Monimus
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Monimus of Syracuse, Magna Graecia, was a Cynic philosopher. Biography According to Diogenes Laërtius, Monimus was the slave of a Corinthian money-changer who heard tales about Diogenes of Sinope from Xeniades, Diogenes' master. In order that he might become the pupil of Diogenes, Monimus feigned madness by throwing money around until his master discarded him. Monimus also became acquainted with Crates of Thebes. Menander claimed that Monimus held three beggar's wallets instead of one; this may have been intended to imply that Monimus was three times as much of a Cynic as others, of might ha...
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Jean Nicod
1893 - 1924 (31 years)
Jean George Pierre Nicod was a French philosopher and logician, best known for his work on propositional logic and induction. Biography Nicod's main contribution to formal logic was to show that classical propositional calculus could be axiomatized with only one axiom - which is now known as Nicod's axiom - and one rule of inference, both formulated using the Sheffer stroke as only connective. In inductive logic and confirmation theory, he famously proposed Nicod's criterion, according to which a conditional hypothesis is confirmed by all and only its positive instances. This principle plays ...
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Jaime Balmes
1810 - 1848 (38 years)
Jaime Luciano Balmes y Urpiá was a Spanish philosopher, theologian, Catholic apologist, sociologist and political writer. Familiar with the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Balmes was an original philosopher who did not belong to any particular school or stream, and was called by Pius XII the Prince of Modern Apologetics.
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Jerzy Słupecki
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Jerzy Słupecki was a Polish mathematician and logician. Life He attended the seminar of, and wrote a 1938 doctorate under, Jan Łukasiewicz. During WWII he was active in Żegota. In 1963, when at Wroclaw University, where he had been since 1945, he became editor of Studia Logica.
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Charles A. Moore
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Charles Alexander Moore was an American philosopher, historian, sinologist, and writer. He was a professor of comparative philosophy at the University of Hawaii. Biography He was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 11, 1901. Moore was educated at Yale University, where he received an A.B. in 1926 and a Ph.D. in 1932, then taught philosophy for three years. In 1936 he began his 30-year career at the University of Hawaii, where he founded the East-West Philosophers' Conferences, directing the first four in 1939, 1949, 1959, and 1964. In 1951 he also founded a journal, Philosophy East and West, ...
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Arete of Cyrene
400 BC - 340 BC (60 years)
Arete of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher who lived in Cyrene, Libya. She was the daughter of Aristippus of Cyrene. Life and teachings Arete learned philosophy from her father, Aristippus, who had himself learned philosophy from Socrates. Arete, in turn, taught philosophy to her son - Aristippus the Younger - and her son was nicknamed "Mother-taught" .
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Walter Charleton
1619 - 1707 (88 years)
Walter Charleton was a natural philosopher and English writer. According to Jon Parkin, he was "the main conduit for the transmission of Epicurean ideas to England". Life He was the son of the rector of Shepton Mallett in Somerset, where he was born 2 February 1619. He received his early education from his father, and when sixteen entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, under the tuition of John Wilkins. At the early age of 22 he received the degree of M.D. and in the same year was appointed physician to Charles I, who was then at Oxford. In 1650 Charleton settled in London, and was on 8 April admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians.
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Aron Gurwitsch
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Aron Gurwitsch was a Litvak American phenomenologist. Work Gurwitsch wrote on the relations between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, and in the problems of the organization of consciousness. In particular, he distinguished between the theme, the thematic context and the margin. This is the core of his theory of the Field of Consciousness. He also has his own theory of the noema, the horizon and the transcendental ego. Gurwitsch was an important influence for Merleau-Ponty. He taught at Brandeis University in the mid-1950s. He taught at The New School For Social Research's Graduate Facult...
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Jan Baptist van Helmont
1577 - 1644 (67 years)
Jan Baptist van Helmont was a chemist, physiologist, and physician from Brussels. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry". Van Helmont is remembered today largely for his 5-year willow tree experiment, his introduction of the word "gas" into the vocabulary of science, and his ideas on spontaneous generation.
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Paul C. Bucy
#18812
Xenocrates
396 BC - 314 BC (82 years)
Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements. He distinguished three forms of being: the sensible, the intelligible, and a third compounded of the two, to which correspond respectively, sense, intellect and opinion. He considered unity and duality to be gods which rule the universe, and the soul a self-moving number. God pervades all things, and there are daemonical powers, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, which consist in conditions of the soul.
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Ken Gemes
1900 - Present (126 years)
Ken Gemes is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His primary interests are Nietzsche and philosophy of science. Education and career Gemes earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with a dissertation in philosophy of science working with Clark Glymour and Wesley Salmon. He taught at Yale University for ten years before moving to Birkbeck in 2000.
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Cesare Beccaria
1738 - 1794 (56 years)
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist and politician, who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments , which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
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Vladimir Jankélévitch
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher and musicologist. Biography Jankélévitch was the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France. In 1922 he started studying philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris, under Professor Bergson. In 1924 he completed his DES thesis on Le Traité : la dialectique. Ennéade I 3 de Plotin under the direction of Émile Bréhier.
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Aubrey Beardsley
1872 - 1898 (26 years)
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.
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Roger Caillois
1913 - 1978 (65 years)
Roger Caillois was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, ludology and philosophy by focusing on diverse subjects such as games and play as well as the sacred. He was also instrumental in introducing Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Ángel Asturias to the French public. After his death, the French Literary award Prix Roger Caillois was named after him in 1991.
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Dong Zhongshu
179 BC - 104 BC (75 years)
Dong Zhongshu was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer of the Han dynasty. He is traditionally associated with the promotion of Confucianism as the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state. He apparently favored heaven worship over the tradition of cults celebrating the five elements. Ultimately banished to the Chancellery of Weifang by his adversary Gongsun Hong, Gongsun effectively promoted Dong's partial retirement from political life, and his teachings were transmitted from there. However, he apparently enjoyed great influence in the court in the last decades of his life l...
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Bertrando Spaventa
1817 - 1883 (66 years)
Bertrando Spaventa was a leading Italian philosopher of the 19th century whose ideas had an important influence on the changes that took place during the unification of Italy and on philosophical thought in the 20th century.
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Philo the Dialectician
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Philo the Dialectician was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He is sometimes called Philo of Megara although the city of his birth is unknown. He is most famous for the debate he had with his teacher Diodorus Cronus concerning the idea of the possible and the criteria of the truth of conditional statements.
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Cleobulus
630 BC - 560 BC (70 years)
Cleobulus was a Greek poet and a native of Lindos. He is one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Life Cleobulus was the son of Evagoras and a citizen of Lindus in Rhodes. Clement of Alexandria called Cleobulus king of the Lindians, and Plutarch spoke of him as the tyrant. The letter quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, in which Cleobulus invites Solon to Lindus as a democratic place of refuge from the tyrant Peisistratus in Athens, is undoubtedly a later forgery. Cleobulus is also said to have studied philosophy in Egypt. He had a daughter, Cleobulina, who found fame as a poet, composing riddles in hexameter verse.
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Jizang
549 - 623 (74 years)
Jizang was a Persian-Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar who is often regarded as the founder of East Asian Mādhyamaka. He is also known as Jiaxiang or Master Jiaxiang because he acquired fame at the Jiaxiang Temple.
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Utpaladeva
900 - 950 (50 years)
Utpaladeva was an Indian philosopher and theologian from Kashmir. He belonged to the Trika Shaiva tradition and is the most important thinker of the Pratyabhijñā school of monistic idealism. His Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā were the most important and central work of the Pratyabhijñā school. Utpaladeva was a major influence on the great exegete Abhinavagupta, whose works later overshadowed those of Utpaladeva. However, according to the Indologist Raffaele Torella "most of Abhinavagupta’s ideas are just the development of what Utpaladeva had already expounded."
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Johann Jakob Brucker
1696 - 1770 (74 years)
Johann Jakob Brucker was a German historian of philosophy. Life He was born at Augsburg. He was destined for the Lutheran Church, and graduated at the University of Jena in 1718. He returned to Augsburg in 1720, but became parish minister of Kaufbeuren in 1723.
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Cesare Cremonini
1550 - 1631 (81 years)
Cesare Cremonini , sometimes Cesare Cremonino, was an Italian professor of natural philosophy, working rationalism and Aristotelian materialism inside scholasticism. His Latinized name was Cæsar Cremoninus or Cæsar Cremonius.
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Philo of Larissa
145 BC - 79 BC (66 years)
Philo of Larissa was a Greek philosopher. It is very probable that his actual name was Philio - with a second iota. He was a pupil of Clitomachus, whom he succeeded as head of the Academy. During the Mithridatic wars which would see the destruction of the Academy, he travelled to Rome where Cicero heard him lecture. None of his writings survive. He was an Academic sceptic, like Clitomachus and Carneades before him, but he offered a more moderate view of skepticism than that of his teachers, permitting provisional beliefs without certainty.
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John Anderson
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
John Anderson was a Scottish philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism.
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Favorinus
85 - 200 (115 years)
Favorinus was a Roman sophist and skeptic philosopher who flourished during the reign of Hadrian and the Second Sophistic. Early life He was of Gaulish ancestry, born in Arelate . He received a refined education, first in Gallia Narbonensis and then in Rome, and at an early age began his lifelong travels through Greece, Italy and the East.
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Nasir Khusraw
1004 - 1088 (84 years)
Nasir Khusraw was a Isma'ili poet, philosopher, traveler, and missionary for the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate. Despite being one of the most prominent Isma'ili philosophers and theologians of the Fatimids and the writer of many philosophical works intended for only the inner circle of the Isma'ili community, Nasir is best known to the general public as a poet and writer who ardently supported his native Persian tongue as an artistic and scientific language. All of Nasir's philosophical Isma'ili works are in Persian, a rarity in the Isma'ili literature of the Fatimids, which primarily used Arab...
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William Henry Channing
1810 - 1884 (74 years)
William Henry Channing was an American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher. Biography William Henry Channing was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Channing's father, Francis Dana Channing, died when he was an infant, and responsibility for the young man's education was assumed by his uncle, William Ellery Channing, the pre-eminent Unitarian theologian of the early nineteenth century. The younger William graduated from Harvard College in 1829 and from Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was ordained and installed over the Unitarian church in Cincinnati in 1835. He became warmly interested in the schemes of Charles Fourier and others for social reorganization.
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Ivan Kireyevsky
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Ivan Vasilyevich Kireyevsky was a Russian literary critic and philosopher who, together with Aleksey Khomyakov, is credited as a co-founder of the Slavophile movement. Early life and career Ivan Kireyevsky and his brother Pyotr were born into a cultivated noble family of considerable means. Their father was known for hating French atheism so passionately that he would burn heaps of Voltaire's books, acquired specifically for the purpose. He contracted a fatal case of typhus while treating wounded soldiers during the French invasion of Russia. The boy was just six at the time of his death; he ...
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Harvey Cushing
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Harvey Williams Cushing was an American neurosurgeon, pathologist, writer, and draftsman. A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of physician William Osler in three volumes.
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Czesław Znamierowski
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Czesław Znamierowski was a Polish philosopher, jurist and sociologist. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Poznań and chaired its Department of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law. Znamierowski is noted in Polish law for his contributions to social sciences and jurisprudence, particularly the concept of legal system which is similar to H.L.A. Hart's ideas, but was published almost forty years before Hart's The Concept of Law.
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Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer
1768 - 1852 (84 years)
Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer was a German philosopher and physician. Life He was born at Neuenbürg in Württemberg in 1768. After receiving his early education at the Caroline academy of Stuttgart, he entered the University of Tübingen, where he was given the degree of doctor of medicine. He practised for some time as a physician at Sulz, and then at Kirchheim, and in 1811 he was chosen extraordinary professor of philosophy and medicine at Tübingen. In 1818 he became ordinary professor of practical philosophy, but in 1836 he resigned and took up his residence at Kirchheim, where he devoted...
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Ruhollah Khomeini
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was an Iranian Islamic revolutionary, politician and religious leader who served as the first supreme leader of Iran from 1979 until his death. He was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ended the Iranian monarchy.
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Bruno Leoni
1913 - 1967 (54 years)
Bruno Leoni was an Italian classical-liberal political philosopher and lawyer. Whilst the war kept Leoni away from teaching, in 1945 he became Full professor of Philosophy of Law. Leoni was also appointed Dean of the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pavia from 1948 to 1960.
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William Wollaston
1659 - 1724 (65 years)
William Wollaston was a school teacher, Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a major Enlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated. He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
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Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Stilpo
359 BC - 279 BC (80 years)
Stilpo was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He was a contemporary of Theophrastus, Diodorus Cronus, and Crates of Thebes. None of his writings survive, but he is described in the writings of others as being interested in logic and dialectic, and he argued that the universal is fundamentally separated from the individual and concrete. His ethical teachings approached that of the Cynics and Stoics. His most important followers were Pyrrho, the founder of Pyrrhonism, and Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Gaius Musonius Rufus
25 - 95 (70 years)
Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD. He taught philosophy in Rome during the reign of Nero and so was sent into exile in 65 AD, returning to Rome only under Galba. He was allowed to stay in Rome when Vespasian banished all other philosophers from the city in 71 AD although he was eventually banished anyway, returning only after Vespasian's death. A collection of extracts from his lectures still survives. He is also remembered for being the teacher of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom.
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Mir Damad
1561 - 1631 (70 years)
Mir Damad , known also as Mir Mohammad Baqer Esterabadi, or Asterabadi, was a Twelver Shia Iranian philosopher in the Neoplatonizing Islamic Peripatetic traditions of Avicenna. He also was a Suhrawardi, a scholar of the traditional Islamic sciences, and foremost figure of the cultural renaissance of Iran undertaken under the Safavid dynasty. He was also the central founder of the School of Isfahan, noted by his students and admirers as the Third Teacher after Aristotle and al-Farabi.
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Ernest Newman
1868 - 1959 (91 years)
Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective approach of other critics, such as Neville Cardus, was reflected in his books on Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and others. He was music critic of The Sunday Times from 1920 until his death nearly forty years later. His other positions included chief music critic of The Birmingham Post from ...
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Syed Zafarul Hasan
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Syed Zafarul Hasan was a prominent twentieth-century Pakistani Muslim philosopher. Biography He was the eldest son of Khan Sahib Syed Diwan Mohammad. Hasan was educated at Aligarh and obtained doctorates from the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg, Germany, and Oxford University. Dr Zafarul Hasan was the first Muslim Scholar of the Indian sub-continent to secure a PhD from Oxford in Philosophy. His doctoral thesis Realism is a classic on the subject. Prominent philosophers and educationists lauded his work, among them, his teacher Prof. John Alaxander Smith , and Allama Mohammad Iqbal.
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Hermann Ulrici
1806 - 1884 (78 years)
Hermann Ulrici was a German philosopher. He was co-editor of the philosophical journal Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. He also wrote under the pseudonym of Ulrich Reimann. Life Ulrici was born at Pförten, in the Niederlausitz region of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was educated at the in Berlin. He initially studied law, but gave up his profession on the death of his father, and devoted four years to the study of literature, philosophy and science. In 1834 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Halle, where he remained till his death.
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Charles Bell
1774 - 1842 (68 years)
Sir Charles Bell was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist, and philosophical theologian. He is noted for discovering the difference between sensory nerves and motor nerves in the spinal cord. He is also noted for describing Bell's palsy.
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Georg Anton Friedrich Ast
1778 - 1841 (63 years)
Georg Anton Friedrich Ast was a German philosopher and philologist. Biography Ast was born in Gotha. Educated there and at the University of Jena, he became a privatdozent at Jena in 1802. In 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the University of Landshut, where he remained until 1826, when it was transferred to Munich. He lived there until his death in 1841.
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François Hemsterhuis
1721 - 1790 (69 years)
François Hemsterhuis was a Dutch writer on aesthetics and moral philosophy. The son of Tiberius Hemsterhuis, he was born at Franeker in the Netherlands. He was educated at the University of Leiden, where he studied Plato. Failing to obtain a professorship, he entered the service of the state, and for many years acted as secretary to the state council of the United Provinces. He died at the Hague on 7 July 1790. Through his philosophical writings he became acquainted with many distinguished persons—Goethe, Herder, Princess Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin, and especially Jacobi, with whom he had much in common.
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Ai Siqi
1910 - 1966 (56 years)
Ài Sīqí is the pen name of Li Shengxuan , a Yunnan Mongol Chinese philosopher and author. He was born in Tengchong, Yunnan, later traveling to Hong Kong, where he studied English and French at a Protestant school and was exposed to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People and Marxism. He read a great deal of Marxism, including the Communist Manifesto, in Japanese translation. This reading is the root of Ai’s most important works, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism and Philosophy for the Masses . He was a delegate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd National People's Congress.
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Franjo Marković
1845 - 1914 (69 years)
Franjo Marković was a Croatian philosopher and writer. He was an academician, the first professor of philosophy at the renovated University of Zagreb in 1874. The defender of the identity of philosophy as a metaphysical discipline, as opposed to scholasticism on one side, and positivism and materialism on the other side.
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