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).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#1951
Alphonse Mucha
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Alfons Maria Mucha , known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.
Go to Profile#1952
Gerhard Vollmer
#16257
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Gerhard Vollmer is a German physicist and philosopher. He is perhaps best known for his development of an evolutionary theory of knowledge. Life Vollmer was born in Speyer. He studied in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Freiburg. After finishing his degree in physics in 1968 he studied philosophy and linguistics in Freiburg. He worked as a trainee in Deutschen Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg. In Freiburg he attained a doctorate in theoretical physics. He stayed here after completing a year's stint as a research assistant in Montreal in 1975. In 1974, Vollmer attained an additional doctorate in...
Go to Profile#1953
Richard Taylor
#21278
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Richard Clyde Taylor was an American philosopher renowned for his contributions to metaphysics. He was also an internationally known beekeeper. Biography Taylor received his PhD at Brown University, where his supervisor was Roderick Chisholm. He taught at Brown University, Columbia and the University of Rochester, and had visiting appointments at about a dozen other institutions. His best-known book was Metaphysics . Other works included Action and Purpose , Good and Evil and Virtue Ethics . Professor Taylor was also the editor of The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. He was an enthusiastic advocate of virtue ethics.
Go to Profile#1954
Sheila Sherlock
#12289
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Dame Sheila Patricia Violet Sherlock DBE, FRCP FRCPE FRS HFRSE FMGA FCRGA was a British physician and medical educator who is considered the major 20th-century contributor to the field of hepatology .
Go to Profile#1955
Stephen David Ross
#15168
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Stephen David Ross is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. He has published over 30 books in interdisciplinary philosophy, especially on art, literature, ethics, and metaphysics, from American pragmatism through poststructuralism, from human beings to animals and things.
Go to Profile#1956
Leo Apostel
#11529
Overall Influence
1925 - 1995 (70 years)
Leo Apostel was a Belgian philosopher and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Apostel was an advocate of interdisciplinary research and the bridging of the gap between exact science and humanities.
Go to Profile#1957
Avishai Margalit
#6433
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Avishai Margalit is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Go to Profile#1958
Itō Jinsai
1627 - 1705 (78 years)
Itō Jinsai, who also went by the pen name Keisai, was a Japanese Confucian philosopher. He is considered to be one of the most influential Confucian scholars of seventeenth century Japan, and the Tokugawa period generally, his teachings flourishing especially in Kyoto and the Kansai area through the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Go to Profile#1959
Władysław Biegański
1857 - 1917 (60 years)
Władysław Biegański was a Polish medical doctor, philosopher and social activist. He dealt with almost all fields, especially infectious diseases, disease diagnostics and logic in medicine. Biography Biegański was born in Grabów nad Prosną. Between 1870 and 1875 he studied at high school in Piotrków Trybunalski; at that time he lived in nearby Janow. Immediately after graduating from junior high school, he started medical studies at the Imperial University of Warsaw, which he graduated from in 1880. In his fifth year of study, he wrote a thesis for the competition organized by the Faculty of ...
Go to Profile#1960
Louis de Jaucourt
1704 - 1779 (75 years)
Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt was a French scholar and the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. He wrote about 18,000 articles on subjects including physiology, chemistry, botany, pathology, and political history, or about 25% of the entire encyclopaedia, all done voluntarily. In the generations after the Encyclopédies, mainly due to his aristocratic background, his legacy was largely overshadowed by the more bohemian Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, but by the mid-20th century more scholarly attention was being paid to him.
Go to Profile#1961
Aśvaghoṣa
80 - 150 (70 years)
, also transliterated Ashvaghosha, , was a Sarvāstivāda or Mahasanghika Buddhist philosopher, dramatist, poet and orator from India. He was born in Saketa, today known as Ayodhya. He is believed to have been the first Sanskrit dramatist, and is considered the greatest Indian poet prior to Kālidāsa. It seems probable that he was the contemporary and spiritual adviser of Kanishka in the first century of our era. He was the most famous in a group of Buddhist court writers, whose epics rivalled the contemporary Ramayana. Whereas much of Buddhist literature prior to the time of Aśvaghoṣa had been ...
Go to Profile#1962
Miyamoto Musashi
1583 - 1645 (62 years)
, also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke or, by his Buddhist name, Niten Dōraku, was a Japanese swordsman, philosopher, strategist, writer and rōnin, who became renowned through stories of his unique double-bladed swordsmanship and undefeated record in his 61 duels . Musashi, as he was often simply known, is considered a Kensei, a sword-saint of Japan. He was the founder of the Niten Ichi-ryū, or Nito Ichi-ryū, style of swordsmanship, and in his final years authored and Dokkōdō .
Go to Profile#1963
Elisabeth Lloyd
#2767
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of science specialising in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine - as well as Adjunct Professor of biology - at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
Go to Profile#1964
Jack Silver
#16053
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Jack Howard Silver was a set theorist and logician at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Montana, he earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Berkeley in 1966 under Robert Vaught before taking a position at the same institution the following year. He held an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship from 1970 to 1972. Silver made several contributions to set theory in the areas of large cardinals and the constructible universe L.
Go to Profile#1965
Julián Marías
#12503
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Julián Marías Aguilera was a Spanish philosopher associated with the Generation of '36 movement. He was a pupil of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and member of the Madrid School. Life and work Marías was born in the city of Valladolid, and moved to Madrid at the age of five. He went on to study philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, graduating in 1936. Within months of his graduation the Spanish Civil War broke out. During the conflict Marías sided with the Republicans, although his actual contributions were limited to propaganda articles and broadcasts.
Go to Profile#1966
Norman P. Barry
#13428
Overall Influence
1944 - 2008 (64 years)
Norman Patrick Barry was an English political philosopher best known as an exponent of classical liberalism. For much of his career he was a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham.
Go to Profile#1967
Hartmut Rosa
#6353
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Hartmut Rosa is a German sociologist and political scientist, most well known for his theory of resonance and temporal sociology of social acceleration. Life Hartmut Rosa was born in Lörrach. He grew up in Grafenhausen in the Black Forest, where he spoke the local Alemannic dialect and played the organ in the Protestant parish. After graduating from high school in 1985 and completing his civilian service, he began studying political science, philosophy and German studies at the University of Freiburg in 1986, which he graduated with honours in 1993. In 1997, he graduated summa cum laude from the Humboldt University of Berlin and received his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#1968
Klaus Heinrich
#11374
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Klaus Heinrich was a German philosopher of religion. Career In 2002, he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. In 1948 he was a founding student member of the Free University of Berlin and from 1971 to 1995 he was a full professor for "Religious Studies on the Philosophy of Religion" at the Institute for Religious Studies. After training in psychoanalysis and studying law, philosophy, Protestant theology, sociology, art history and literary studies, first at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Unter den Linden in Berlin and then at the FU, he received his doctorate from the FU in 1952.
Go to Profile#1969
Lewis White Beck
#21779
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Lewis White Beck was an American philosopher and scholar of German philosophy. Beck was Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Rochester and served as the Philosophy Department chair there from 1949 to 1966. He translated several of Immanuel Kant's works, such as the Critique of Practical Reason, and was the author of Studies in the Philosophy of Kant .
Go to Profile#1970
Terence Parsons
#24797
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Terence Dwight Parsons was an American philosopher, specializing in philosophy of language and metaphysics. He was emeritus professor of philosophy at UCLA. Life and career Parsons was born in Endicott, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester with a BA in physics. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1966. He was a full-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1965 to 1972, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1972 to 1979, at the University of California at Irvine from 1979 to 2000, and at the University of California at Los Angeles from 2000 to 2012.
Go to Profile#1971
Hermann Samuel Reimarus
1694 - 1768 (74 years)
Hermann Samuel Reimarus , was a German philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment who is remembered for his Deism, the doctrine that human reason can arrive at a knowledge of God and ethics from a study of nature and our own internal reality, thus eliminating the need for religions based on revelation. He denied the supernatural origin of Christianity, and was the first influential critic to investigate the historical Jesus. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a mortal Jewish prophet, and the apostles founded Christianity as a religion separate from Jesus’ own ministry.
Go to Profile#1972
Jennifer Saul
#23159
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#1973
Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus
1651 - 1708 (57 years)
Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus was a German mathematician, physicist, physician, and philosopher. He introduced the Tschirnhaus transformation and is considered by some to have been the inventor of European porcelain, an invention long accredited to Johann Friedrich Böttger but others claim porcelain had been made by English manufacturers at an even earlier date.
Go to Profile#1974
Paul Draper
#24065
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Robert Draper is an American philosopher, most known for his work in the philosophy of religion. His work on the evidential argument from evil has been widely influential. He is currently a professor at Purdue University. He is co-editor of topics in the philosophy of religion for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#1975
Irving Weissman
#5640
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Irving Lerner "Irv" Weissman is a Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University where he is the Director of the Stanford Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine along with Michael Longaker.
Go to Profile#1976
Douglas Groothuis
#10362
Overall Influence
1957 - 2018 (61 years)
Douglas R. Groothuis is professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. Groothuis was a campus pastor for twelve years prior to obtaining a position as an associate professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary in 1993. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon. He was married to Rebecca Merrill Groothuis until her death on July 6, 2018.
Go to Profile#1977
Paul Levinson
#4955
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul Levinson is an American author, singer-songwriter, and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. His novels, short fiction, and non-fiction works have been translated into sixteen languages. He is frequently quoted in news articles and appears as a guest commentator on major news outlets.
Go to Profile#1978
Michael Eric Dyson
#2538
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, ordained minister, and radio host. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.
Go to Profile#1979
Jeffrey Bub
#7365
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jeffrey Bub is a physicist and philosopher of physics, and Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy, the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Go to Profile#1980
Ole Thyssen
#11896
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ole Thyssen is a Danish philosopher and sociologist, and Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Biography Thyssen is a MA from the University of Copenhagen from 1971, and he became a Doctor of Philosophy from that same university in 1976.
Go to Profile#1981
Kim Sterelny
#5953
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kim Sterelny is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and was previously editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#1982
Pierre Manent
#8461
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Pierre Manent is a French political scientist and academic. He teaches political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. Every autumn, he is also a visiting teacher in Boston College at the Department of Political Science.
Go to Profile#1983
William Torrey Harris
1835 - 1909 (74 years)
William Torrey Harris was an American educator, philosopher, and lexicographer. He worked for nearly a quarter century in St. Louis, Missouri, where he taught school and served as Superintendent of Schools for twelve years. With Susan Blow, in 1873 he established the first permanent, public kindergarten in the country. He is also known for establishing high school as an integral part of public education.
Go to Profile#1984
Aleksandra Ekster
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster , also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer. As a young woman, her studio in Kiev attracted all the city's creative luminaries, and she became a figure of the Paris salons, mixing with Picasso, Braque and others. She is identified with the Russian/Ukrainian avant-garde, as a Cubo-futurist, Constructivist, and influencer of the Art Deco movement.
Go to Profile#1985
Ramin Jahanbegloo
#8111
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian philosopher and academic based in Toronto, Canada. Biography Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran, Iran. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, where he lived for twenty years. He was a post-doctorate fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is married to Azin Moalej and has a daughter named Afarin Jahanbegloo.
Go to Profile#1986
Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch
1802 - 1896 (94 years)
Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch was a German mathematician, logician, psychologist and philosopher. His brother was the composer Karl Ludwig Drobisch . Life Drobisch studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Leipzig, where he subsequently became a professor. He wrote his habilitation in 1824. From 1826 to 1868 he served as ordinarius in mathematics, and from 1842 on as ordinarius in philosophy. He was rector of the university of Leipzig in 1840–41 and served as dean of the philosophical faculty several times. Drobisch made contributions to philosophical and mathematical logic, set theory, quantitative linguistics and empirical psychology.
Go to Profile#1987
David Kalupahana
#10369
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
David J. Kalupahana was a Buddhist scholar from Sri Lanka. He was a student of the late K.N. Jayatilleke, who was a student of Wittgenstein. He wrote mainly about epistemology, theory of language, and compared later Buddhist philosophical texts against the earliest texts and tried to present interpretations that were both historically contextualised and also compatible with the earliest texts, and in doing so, he encouraged Theravada Buddhists and scholars to reevaluate the legitimacy of later, Mahayana texts and consider them more sympathetically.
Go to Profile#1988
John Mbiti
#7661
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
John Samuel Mbiti was a Kenyan-born Christian philosopher and writer. He was an ordained Anglican priest, and is considered "the father of modern African theology". Early life John Mbiti was born on 30 November 1931 in Mulango, Kitui County, eastern Kenya. His parents were two farmers, Samuel Mutuvi Ngaangi and Valesi Mbandi Kiimba; He was one of six children and was raised in a strong Christian environment. His Christian upbringing encouraged his educational journey through the African Inland Church. He attended Alliance High School in Nairobi and continued his education at University College of Makerere where he graduated in 1953.
Go to Profile#1989
Ian Jarvie
#8359
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Ian Charles Jarvie was a British-born philosopher. Trained in England, he was a long-time resident in Canada. Jarvie was educated at Dover Grammar School for Boys from 1948 to 1955. He studied at the London School of Economics under Karl Popper where he gained his B.Sc. and Ph.D. . Between 1960 and 1962 he was a Philosophy tutor at the London School of Economics, before accepting lectureships in Hong Kong and at the University of York, Ontario. Jarvie was a member of the Royal Society of Canada and managing editor of the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
Go to Profile#1990
Daniel Kolak
#18681
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Daniel Kolak is a Croatian-American philosopher who works primarily in philosophy of mind, personal identity, cognitive science, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. He is professor of philosophy at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and an Affiliate of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science . Kolak is the founder of the philosophical therapy known as cognitive dynamics.
Go to Profile#1991
Yang Changji
1871 - 1920 (49 years)
Yang Changji was a Chinese educator, philosopher, and writer. After advanced studies in Japan and Europe, he taught at Hunan First Normal University, where he exerted considerable influence on Mao Zedong, Cai Hesen, Xiao Zisheng, and others, and then at Peking University. He became considered one of the leading philosophers of his generation before his early death.
Go to Profile#1992
Henrik Syse
#17929
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Henrik Syse is a Norwegian philosopher, author, and lecturer. He is a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo , and a part-time Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bjørknes College in Oslo. He was a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Peace Prize, from 2015 to 2020, and was a member of the Norwegian Press Complaints Commission from 2002 to 2016. Syse also teaches at the Norwegian Defence University College, BI Norwegian Business School, MF Norwegian School of Theology, the University of Oslo, and other institutions of higher learning, and he ...
Go to Profile#1993
Robert Arrington
#28665
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Robert L. Arrington was an American philosopher, specialising in moral philosophy, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of psychology. Arrington was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, and educated at Vanderbilt University and Tulane University .
Go to Profile#1994
Alexander García Düttmann
#16974
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Alexander García Düttmann studied Philosophy in Frankfurt as a student of Alfred Schmidt and in Paris as a student of Jacques Derrida. Career After obtaining his PhD from Frankfurt, he spent two years at Stanford University as a Mellon Fellow. His first academic position in the UK was a lecturership in Philosophy at Essex University. Currently he is professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. He has taught at Monash University, Melbourne; at Middlesex University, where he was professor of Philosophy for seven years; at New York University, where he was a visit...
Go to Profile#1995
Richard Popkin
#17308
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Richard Henry Popkin was an American academic philosopher who specialized in the history of enlightenment philosophy and early modern anti-dogmatism. His 1960 work The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes introduced one previously unrecognized influence on Western thought in the seventeenth century, the Pyrrhonian Scepticism of Sextus Empiricus. Popkin also was an internationally acclaimed scholar on Christian millenarianism and Jewish messianism.
Go to Profile#1996
Mikel Dufrenne
#11034
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Mikel Dufrenne was a French philosopher and aesthetician. He is known as an author of existentialism and is particularly noted for the work The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience . He encountered the work of Karl Jaspers while being a prisoner of war in a camp with Paul Ricœur. Dufrenne and Ricœur later collaborated on a book on Jaspers.
Go to Profile#1997
Norman Daniels
#18503
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Norman Daniels is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical ethicist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and at Tufts University School of Medicine, also in Boston. He also developed the concept of accountability for reasonableness with James Sabin, an ethics framework used to challenge the healthcare resource allocation in the 1990s.
Go to Profile#1998
Alexis Carrel
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.
Go to Profile#1999
Bijan Abdolkarimi
#23065
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Bijan Abdolkarimi is an Iranian philosopher, thinker, translator, and editor. His main interests are ontology, political philosophy and the critique of religious and intellectual traditions. He claims to challenge the dominant ideological discourse in Iran. He has participated in debates at Iranian universities and also in IRIB TV4 in which he has opposed the notion of Islamic humanities. He is also a scholar of Heidegger's thought and philosophy.
Go to Profile#2000
Zisi
483 BC - 402 BC (81 years)
Zisi , born Kong Ji , was a Chinese philosopher and the grandson of Confucius. Intellectual genealogy, teaching, criticism Zisi was the son of Kong Li and the only grandson of Confucius. He is traditionally accredited with transmitting Confucian teaching to Mencius and writing the Doctrine of the Mean, Biaoji 表記, "Ziyi" 緇衣, and "Fangji" 坊記, presently chapters of the Liji.
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