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,
#19101
John Alexander Gunn
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
John Alexander Gunn was a philosopher who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool and worked there as a fellow. He went on to be appointed as a professor at the University of Melbourne in 1923 and retired in 1938. His successor as Director of Extension was Colin R. Badger.
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Sitanath Tattwabhushan
1856 - Present (170 years)
Pandit Sitanath Tattwabhushan was the official theologian and philosopher of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. His hymns still form the basis of Brahmo rites and liturgies. Early life He was born Sitanath Dutta, in a village in Sylhet in 1856. He arrived in Calcutta for higher education in 1871. Although he initially joined Keshub Chunder Sen's Brahmo Niketan where he developed an interest in the philosophy of religion. However following the closure of that institute, he joined Alexander Duff's General Assembly's Institution in 1875. In 1879, he joined Anandamohan Bose's City School as a teacher. La...
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Heinrich Carl Breidenstein
1796 - 1876 (80 years)
Heinrich Carl Breidenstein was a German musicologist. In Bonn he was university professor of musicology, and active in the musical life of the city. Life Breidenstein was born in 1796 in Steinau an der Straße, Hesse, son of Friedrich Ernst Breidenstein, schoolteacher and organist, and his wife Juliane. He was educated at a Gymnasium in Hanau, then studied law in Berlin and later in Heidelberg, where he turned to studying philology. He became a senior teacher at the Gymnasium in Heidelberg, also joining the choral society of Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, a jurist and amateur musician.
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David B. Zilberman
1938 - 1977 (39 years)
David Beniaminovich Zilberman was a Russian-American philosopher and sociologist, scholar of Indian philosophy and culture. He was well-versed in the study of languages and knew Russian, Sanskrit, English, Slavic languages, Ancient Greek, French, and German.
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Johann Klein
1788 - 1856 (68 years)
Johann Klein was professor of obstetrics at the University of Salzburg and at the University of Vienna. Johann Baptist Chiari was his son-in-law. In Vienna, he was succeeded by professor Carl Braun in 1856.
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Abdulkarim Zanjani
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
Sheikh Abdulkarim Zanjani was born in modern-day Iran, in the city of Zanjan, in the village of BarroBarrout. He went to Tehran to study, and became concerned with politics relating to Islamic nations. At 22 years old, he went to Najaf, and became a pupil of renowned religious scholars, such as Seyyed Mohammad Kazem Yazdi and Seyyed Mohammad Firouz Abadi. He demonstrated insight and skills in the sphere of Islamic philosophy. He is recognized primarily for two accomplishments: one concerned with the reconciliation and nearness of sects and Islamic cults, and another with the development of Is...
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Erich Heller
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Erich Heller was a British essayist, known particularly for his critical studies in German-language philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biography Heller was born at Chomutov in Bohemia , to the family of a Jewish physician. He graduated a doctor of law from the German University in Prague on 11 February 1935, at the age of 23. In 1939 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he began his professional career as a Germanist, being active at Cambridge and London and at Swansea . Heller became a British subject in 1947. From 1960 onwards he was based in the...
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Gilbert White
1720 - 1793 (73 years)
Gilbert White was a "parson-naturalist", a pioneering English naturalist, ecologist, and ornithologist. He is best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Life White was born on 18 July 1720 in his grandfather's vicarage at Selborne in Hampshire. His grandfather, also Gilbert White was at that time vicar of Selborne. Gilbert White's parents were John White a trained barrister and Anne Holt . Gilbert was the eldest of eight surviving siblings, Thomas , Benjamin , Rebecca , John , Francis , Anne , and Henry . Gilbert's family lived briefly at Compton, Surrey, before moving ...
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Amerigo Vespucci
1454 - 1512 (58 years)
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence, from whose name the term "America" is derived. Between 1497 and 1504, Vespucci participated in at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery, first on behalf of Spain and then for Portugal . In 1503 and 1505, two booklets were published under his name, containing colourful descriptions of these explorations and other alleged voyages. Both publications were extremely popular and widely read across much of Europe. Although historians still dispute the authorship and veracity of these accounts, at the time they...
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Walter L. Miller
Walter L. Miller is an American endocrinologist and professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco . Miller is expert in the field of human steroid biosynthesis and disorders of steroid metabolism. Over the past 40 years Miller's group at UCSF has described molecular basis of several metabolic disorders including, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, pseudo vitamin D dependent rickets, severe, recessive form of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, 17,20 lyase deficiency caused by CYP17A1 defects, P450scc deficiency caused by CYP11A1 defects, P450 oxidoreductase deficiency .
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Nessos of Chios
Nessos of Chios was a pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosopher from the island of Chios. Biography Little is known about the life and work of Nessos. The only thing that is known that was Democritus philosophy and the compatriot Metrodorus was his student. That is supported in commentaries of interpretations of Homeric and Hesiod works.
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Polemon
400 BC - 270 BC (130 years)
Polemon of Athens was an eminent Greek Platonist philosopher and Plato's third successor as scholarch from 314/313 to 270/269 BC. A pupil of Xenocrates, he believed that philosophy should be practiced rather than just studied, and he placed the highest good in living according to nature.
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Saint Timothy
17 - 97 (80 years)
Timothy or Timothy of Ephesus was an early Christian evangelist and the first Christian bishop of Ephesus, who tradition relates died around the year AD 97. Timothy was from the Lycaonian city of Lystra or of Derbe in Asia Minor, born of a Jewish mother who had become a Christian believer, and a Greek father. The Apostle Paul met him during his second missionary journey and he became Paul's companion and missionary partner along with Silas. The New Testament indicates that Timothy traveled with Paul the Apostle, who was also his mentor. He is addressed as the recipient of the First and Second Epistles to Timothy.
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Geert Groote
1340 - 1384 (44 years)
Gerard Groote , otherwise Gerrit or Gerhard Groet, in Latin Gerardus Magnus, was a Dutch Catholic deacon, who was a popular preacher and the founder of the Brethren of the Common Life. He was a key figure in the Devotio Moderna movement.
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Bohuslav Balbín
1621 - 1688 (67 years)
Bohuslav Balbín was a Czech writer, historian, geographer and Jesuit, called the "Czech Pliny". He became well known also as an advocate of the Czech language in the time of incoming germanization of the Czech lands.
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
1809 - 1865 (56 years)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of anarchism's most influential theorists. Proudhon became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as "the synthesis of community and property". Some consider his mutualism to be part of individualist...
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Dominik Szulc
1797 - 1860 (63 years)
Dominik Szulc was a Polish philosopher, historian, and a significant precursor to Polish positivism. In 1814 he began studies at the University of Vilnius. In 1818 became a teacher of Polish language in high school in Vilnius, and from 1823 a teacher of eloquence and logic in the gymnasium of Bialystok . From 1835 he taught at the gymnasium of Lublin, since 1840 in schools in Warsaw. In 1853 he retired. A member of the Kraków Scientific Society correspondence, and the Russian Geographical Society. In his works he defended the thesis of the Polish character of Copernicus. He believed that the ...
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C. A. Campbell
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Charles Arthur Campbell was a Scottish metaphysical philosopher. Biography C.A. Campbell was born in Glasgow on 3 January 1897. He attended secondary school at the Glasgow Academy and continued to the University of Glasgow where he earned a Bachelor's degree in philosophy. He then entered the Balliol College in Oxford, where would eventually achieve a Doctor of Letters. The First World War began during his time at Oxford, and he set aside his studies to serve as an officer in the British Army, with the 10th Borders Regiment.
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Benno Kerry
1858 - 1889 (31 years)
Benno Kerry was an Austrian philosopher. Life Kerry was born as Benno Kohn in Vienna. He studied under Ernst Laas and Otto Liebmann at the University of Strassburg and from 1877/78 under Franz Brentano at the University of Vienna. In 1881 he obtained his doctorate with the dissertation Untersuchungen über das Causalproblem auf dem Boden einer Kritik der einschlägigen Lehren J. St. Mills . In Vienna, as part of the School of Brentano he befriended Alois Höfler.
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Mabel Besant-Scott
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Mabel Emily Besant-Scott was a Theosophist, Co-Freemason and Rosicrucian. She was the daughter of the Theosophist, Secularist, and Co-Freemason Annie Besant and her husband Rev. Frank Besant. She had an older brother named Arthur Besant. When her father and mother separated, she was to be under the custody of her mother, but in 1878 her father went to the High Court and won the case for custody. It was not until she was 21 that she returned to her mother.
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Stanislaus von Kalckreuth
1820 - 1894 (74 years)
Count Stanislaus Friedrich Ludwig von Kalckreuth was a German painter who specialized in mountain landscapes. Biography He was born into the Kalckreuth family of the Prussian nobility with roots in the early 13th century. After completing his primary education at the gymnasium in Leszno , he was briefly a member of a cadet corps. At the age of twenty, he went to Potsdam and became an officer in the 1st Foot Guards, but served for only a short time, having decided on a career in art. From 1840 to 1844, he studied with Gustav Wegener, then went to Berlin, where he studied with and Karl Eduard ...
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Herman Schell
1850 - 1906 (56 years)
Jakob Herman Schell was a German philosopher and theologian. He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1873, he became Professor of theology in 1888. Biography Schell attended the Gran ducal Lyceum of Freiburg and in 1868 joyned the local seminary. Then he studied theology and philosophy at the University of Freiburg, where he had Constantine von Schäzler as professor of Scholastic dogmatics, meeting Jakob Sengler, one of the later Christian idealists. In 1870, Schell was dismissed by the seminary and moved to University of Würzburg, starting to work with Franz Brentano to his PhD disse...
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Hermann von Keyserling
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Hermann Alexander Graf von Keyserling was a Baltic German philosopher from the Keyserlingk family. His grandfather, Alexander von Keyserling, was a notable geologist of Imperial Russia. Life Keyserling was born to a wealthy aristocratic family in the Könno Manor, Kreis Pernau in Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire, now in Estonia. After his education at the universities of Dorpat , Heidelberg, and Vienna, he took a trip around the world. He married Maria Goedela von Bismarck-Schönhausen, granddaughter of Otto von Bismarck. His son Arnold Keyserling followed his fathers footsteps and becam...
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Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
1540 - 1640 (100 years)
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī was an Indian philosopher in the Advaita Vedānta tradition and devotee of Krishna. He was the disciple of Viśveśvara Sarasvatī and Mādhava Sarasvatī, and is the most celebrated name in the annals of the great debate between Dvaita and Advaita schools of Vedanta. The Nyayamṛta of Vyasatirtha, a text criticising the Advaita view, caused a furore in the Advaita community resulting in a series of scholarly debates over centuries. Madhusūdana composed Advaitasiddhi, a line-by-line refutation of Nyayamṛta. In response to Advaitasiddhi, the Dvaita scholars, Vyasa Ramacharya, an...
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Karl Fortlage
1806 - 1881 (75 years)
Karl Fortlage was a German philosopher. Biography Born in Osnabrück, Fortlage taught in Heidelberg and Berlin before becoming professor of philosophy at Jena in 1846 , a post he held until his death. Originally a follower of Hegel, he turned to Fichte and the psychologist Friedrich Eduard Beneke, agreeing with his assertion that psychology is the basis of all philosophy. The fundamental idea of his psychology is impulse, which combines representation and feeling . Reason is the highest thing in nature, i.e. it is divine in its nature. God is the absolute Ego, and the empirical egos are his i...
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Havelock Ellis
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Henry Havelock Ellis was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He developed the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.
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René Laennec
1781 - 1826 (45 years)
René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was a French physician and musician. His skill at carving his own wooden flutes led him to invent the stethoscope in 1816, while working at the Hôpital Necker. He pioneered its use in diagnosing various chest conditions. He became a lecturer at the Collège de France in 1822 and professor of medicine in 1823. His final appointments were that of head of the medical clinic at the Hôpital de la Charité and professor at the Collège de France. He went into a coma and subsequently died of tuberculosis on August 13, 1826 at age 45.
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Paul-Louis Couchoud
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Paul-Louis Couchoud was a French philosopher, a graduate from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a physician, a man of letters, and a poet. He became well known as an adapter of Japanese haiku into French, an editor of Reviews, a translator, and a writer promoting the German thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus Christ.
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Antoine Galland
1646 - 1715 (69 years)
Antoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, which he called Les mille et une nuits. His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
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Leonidas Polk
1806 - 1864 (58 years)
Lieutenant-General Leonidas Polk was a bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and founder of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America, which separated from the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. He was a planter in Maury County, Tennessee, and a second cousin of President James K. Polk. He resigned his ecclesiastical position to become a major-general in the Confederate States Army, when he was called "Sewanee's Fighting Bishop". His official portrait at the University of the South depicts him as a bishop with his army uniform hanging nearby. He is often erroneously referred to as "Leonidas K.
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Daniel Maichel
1693 - 1752 (59 years)
Daniel Maichel was a German professor of philosophy, theology, logic, physics, rights and politics. He studied protestant theology in Tübingen and earned a master's degree in 1713. Maichel was born in Stuttgart and died in Königsbronn.
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Otto Buek
1873 - 1966 (93 years)
Otto Buek was a German philosopher and translator born in St. Petersburg. He studied philosophy, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Heidelberg, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Marburg. Later he worked as a journalist in Berlin, where he translated works of Tolstoy, Unamuno and Alexander Herzen. Additionally, with Kurt Wildhagen , he edited works by Turgenev, Gogol and two volumes of Ernst Cassirer's edition of Kant's collected writings. During the 1920s, he worked as a correspondent for the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
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Niralamba Swami
1877 - 1930 (53 years)
Jatindra Nath Banerjee was one of two great Indian nationalists and freedom fighters – along with Aurobindo Ghosh – who dramatically rose to prominence between 1871 and 1910. Biography Niralamba Swami was born as Jatindra Nath Banerjee on 19 November 1877 at Channa village in Burdwan district. His father, Kalicharan Banerjee, worked as a government official at Bangaon of Jessore district of Bengal.His early education was completed at the village school. Then he passed FA from Burdwan Raj College, which was then affiliated with the University of Calcutta with high marks. He was admitted to B.A.
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Aeschines of Sphettus
430 BC - 360 BC (70 years)
Aeschines of Sphettus or Aeschines Socraticus , son of Lysanias, of the deme Sphettus of Athens, was a philosopher who in his youth was a follower of Socrates. Historians call him Aeschines Socraticus—"the Socratic Aeschines"—to distinguish him from the more historically influential Athenian orator also named Aeschines. His name is sometimes but now rarely written as Aischines or Æschines.
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W. R. Boyce Gibson
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
William Ralph Boyce Gibson was a British-Australian philosopher. He was an advocate of personal idealism. Biography He was born in Paris, the son of Reverend William Gibson, a Methodist minister and his wife Helen Wilhelmina, daughter of William Binnington Boyce.
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Paul Yorck von Wartenburg
1835 - 1897 (62 years)
Hans Ludwig David Paul, Graf Yorck von Wartenburg was a German lawyer, writer, and philosopher. Life Graf Yorck was descended from the Prussian general Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg. His father Hans David Ludwig and his mother Bertha von Brause were both related to Prussian military families. They lived in Klein Öls Castle, now part of the Oława district in Poland. His nephew was the jurist Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, who opposed Hitler.
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Guillaume Lamy
1644 - 1683 (39 years)
Guillaume Lamy was a French physician best known for his sympathies with Epicurean philosophy, and for his influence on materialists such as La Mettrie. He engaged in a lively dispute with Pierre Cressé over anatomical treatises, notably concerning the seat of the human soul.
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Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani
1644 - 1721 (77 years)
Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani is one of the Iranian Shia philosophers during Safavid period. Life Molla Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani, according to Henry Corbin, lived in the catastrophic period namely when Shah Sultan Hossein ruled out. his time coincided with siege of Isfahan by Afghans.
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Raymond Duncan
1874 - 1966 (92 years)
Raymond Duncan was an American dancer, artist, poet, craftsman, and philosopher, and brother of dancer Isadora Duncan. Biography Born in San Francisco on November 1, 1874, Duncan was the third of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan and of Mary Isadora Gray . Their other children were Elizabeth, Augustin, and Isadora, a noted dancer. In 1891, at the age of 17, Raymond Duncan developed a theory of movement which he called kinematics, "a remarkable synthesis of the movements of labor and of daily life." He believed that the importance of labor lay in the development of the worker, not i...
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Leon of Salamis
401 BC - 400 BC (1 years)
Leon of Salamis was a historical figure, mentioned in Plato's Apology, Xenophon's Hellenica and Andocides' On the Mysteries . This Leon may also be the renowned Athenian general Leon of the Peloponnesian War.
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Wilhelm Esser
1798 - 1854 (56 years)
Wilhelm Esser was a German academic, logician, and philosopher. His works focused on logic, psychology, and moral philosophy. Esser is also identified as a post-Kantian logician. Biography Esser was born on February 21, 1798, in Düren, Germany. He received his primary education in this North Rhine-Westphalian town, studying science under a Jesuit priest at Ratheim before attending a gymnasium at his hometown. In 1814, he moved to Cologne, where he studied philology, philosophy, and theology. He then moved to Münster to continue his studies.
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George Herriman
1880 - 1944 (64 years)
George Joseph Herriman III was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat . More influential than popular, Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among those in the arts. Gilbert Seldes' article "The Krazy Kat Who Walks by Himself" was the earliest example of a critic from the high arts giving serious attention to a comic strip. The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century. Herriman's work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Elzie C. Segar, Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bil...
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Saint David
512 - 589 (77 years)
David was a Welsh bishop of Mynyw during the 6th century. He is the patron saint of Wales. David was a native of Wales, and tradition has preserved a relatively large amount of detail about his life. His birth date, however, is uncertain: suggestions range from 462 to 512. He is traditionally believed to be the son of Non and the grandson of Ceredig ap Cunedda, king of Ceredigion. The Welsh annals placed his death 569 years after the birth of Christ, but Phillimore's dating revised this to 601.
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George Herbert Palmer
1842 - 1933 (91 years)
George Herbert Palmer was an American scholar and author. He was a graduate, and then professor at Harvard University. He is also known for his published works, like the translation of The Odyssey and others about education and ethics, such as The New Education and The Glory of the Imperfect .
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Igor Terentiev
1892 - 1937 (45 years)
Igor Gerasimovich Terentiev was a Russian poet, artist, stage director, representative of Russian avant-garde. Biography and creative work Terentiev was born in Pavlograd into the family of lieutenant Gerasim Lvovich Terentiev and Elizabeth von Derfelden, daughter of a resigned cavalry captain. He had a brother and two sisters: Vladimir , Olga and Tatiana .
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Pietro da Cortona
1596 - 1669 (73 years)
Pietro da Cortona was an Italian Baroque painter and architect. Along with his contemporaries and rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, he was one of the key figures in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture. He was also an important designer of interior decorations.
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Helgi Pjeturss
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Helgi Pjeturss was an Icelandic geologist, philosopher, and spiritualist. In 1905 he became the first Icelander to graduate with a PhD in geology. He conducted extensive research on the geology of Iceland from 1898 to 1910. In 1919, Helgi started publishing Nýall, a collection of essays outlining his theories on what he referred to as astrobiology. Having conducted research on psychic phenomena, Helgi disagreed with spiritualism on several points. Most centrally, he held that the spirits contacted in séances and in dreams were not immaterial beings but material beings living on other planets....
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Paul Diel
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Paul Diel was a French psychologist of Austrian origin who developed the method of introspective analysis and the psychology of motivation. Life Diel was born in Vienna, Austria, on 11 July 1893, to a teacher of German origin and an unknown man. He was orphaned at the age of 13 after spending 8 years in a religious orphanage, but was able to obtain his baccalauréat with the support of a benefactor. Diel did not pursue formal higher education, but instead became an actor, novelist, and poet before teaching himself philosophy. Inspired by the philosophers Plato, Kant and Spinoza, and also b...
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Matthew W. McKeon
1900 - Present (126 years)
Matthew W. McKeon is the chair of the philosophy department at Michigan State University and well known philosopher of logic. McKeon earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at The University of Connecticut in 1994. He teaches courses in Logic and Philosophy of Language.
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Valentin Alberti
1635 - 1697 (62 years)
Valentin Alberti was a Lutheran, orthodox philosopher and theologian from Silesia and was the son of a preacher. He is known for defending Lutheran orthodoxy against the natural law views of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, and being an active polemicist against Roman Catholicism.
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