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,
#201
Al-Ghazali
1058 - 1111 (53 years)
Al-Ghazali , full name , and known in Persian-speaking countries as or in Medieval Europe by the Latinized as Algazelus or Algazel, was a Sunni Muslim polymath. He is known as one of the most prominent and influential jurisconsult, legal theoretician, mufti, philosopher, theologian, logician and mystic in Islamic history.
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Paul Deussen
1845 - 1919 (74 years)
Paul Jakob Deussen was a German Indologist and professor of philosophy at University of Kiel. Strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, Deussen was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and Swami Vivekananda. In 1911, he founded the Schopenhauer Society . Professor Deussen was the first editor, in 1912, of the scholarly journal Schopenhauer Yearbook .
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Anaximenes of Miletus
585 BC - 525 BC (60 years)
Anaximenes of Miletus was an Ancient Greek, Pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Anatolia . He was the last of the three philosophers of the Milesian School, after Thales and Anaximander. These three are regarded by historians as the first philosophers of the Western world. Anaximenes is known for his belief that air is the arche, or the basic element of the universe from which all things are created. Little is known of Anaximenes' life and work, as all of his original texts are lost. Historians and philosophers have reconstructed information about Anaximenes by interpreting texts about him by later writers.
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Robert Merrihew Adams
#1324
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Merrihew Adams is an American analytic philosopher, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of early modern philosophy. Life and career Adams was born on September 8, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to Yale University in the early 1990s as the Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. As chairman, he helped revive the philosophy department after its near-collapse due to personal and scholarly conflicts between analytical and Continental philosophers.
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Mortimer J. Adler
#412
Overall Influence
1902 - 2001 (99 years)
Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica board of editors, and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.
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Roger Bacon
1220 - 1292 (72 years)
Roger Bacon , also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discove...
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Johann Gottfried Herder
1744 - 1803 (59 years)
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people . He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation was popularized.
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Mencius
372 BC - 289 BC (83 years)
Mencius ; born Meng Ke ; or Mengzi was a Chinese Confucian philosopher who has often been described as the "second Sage" , that is, second to Confucius himself. He is part of Confucius' fourth generation of disciples. Mencius inherited Confucius' ideology and developed it further. Living during the Warring States period, he is said to have spent much of his life travelling around the states offering counsel to different rulers. Conversations with these rulers form the basis of the Mencius, which would later be canonised as a Confucian classic.
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Jean-Luc Nancy
#375
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope and L'Impératif catégorique on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix on Martin Heidegger.
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Ernst Cassirer
1874 - 1945 (71 years)
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
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Albert Camus
1913 - 1960 (47 years)
Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
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Alvin Goldman
#1134
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alvin Ira Goldman is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
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George Herbert Mead
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.
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Mozi
470 BC - 391 BC (79 years)
Mozi , original name Mo Di , was a Chinese essayist and philosopher who founded the school of Mohism during the Hundred Schools of Thought period . The ancient text Mozi contains material ascribed to him and his followers.
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Étienne Gilson
1884 - 1978 (94 years)
Étienne Henri Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a neo-Thomist philosopher. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Leszek Kołakowski
#481
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, such as in his three-volume history of Marxist philosophy Main Currents of Marxism . In his later work, Kołakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "we learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are".
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Iamblichus
240 - 320 (80 years)
Iamblichus was a Syrian neoplatonic philosopher of Arab origin. He determined a direction later taken by neoplatonism. Iamblichus was also the biographer of the Greek mystic, philosopher, and mathematician Pythagoras. In addition to his philosophical contributions, his is important for the study of the sophists because it preserved about ten pages of an otherwise unknown sophist known as the Anonymus Iamblichi.
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Jaegwon Kim
#989
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Jaegwon Kim was one of the most influential philosophers during his lifetime. His work has had a profound impact on a wide range of fields, including philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. Kim was also a highly respected thinker within the Korean philosophical tradition.
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Ernst Bloch
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Ernst Simon Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme. He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind.
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Ramanuja
1017 - 1137 (120 years)
Ramanuja , also known as Ramanujacharya, was an Indian Hindu philosopher, guru and a social reformer. He is noted to be one of the most important exponents of the Sri Vaishnavism tradition within Hinduism. His philosophical foundations for devotionalism were influential to the Bhakti movement.
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Anselm of Canterbury
1033 - 1109 (76 years)
Anselm of Canterbury OSB , also called after his birthplace and after his monastery, was an Italian Benedictine monk, abbot, philosopher and theologian of the Catholic Church, who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. After his death, he was canonized as a saint; his feast day is 21 April. He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by a bull of Pope Clement XI in 1720.
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Stanley Cavell
#797
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
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Graham Harman
#1327
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#224
Antonio Negri
#296
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Antonio "Toni" Negri is an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire and his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness".
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Jakob Friedrich Fries
1773 - 1843 (70 years)
Jakob Friedrich Fries was a German post-Kantian philosopher and mathematician. Biography Fries studied theology at the academy of the Moravian Brethren at Niesky and philosophy at the Universities of Leipzig and Jena. After travelling, in 1806 he became professor of philosophy and elementary mathematics at the University of Heidelberg.
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G. A. Cohen
#1153
Overall Influence
1941 - 2009 (68 years)
Gerald Allan Cohen, was a Canadian political philosopher who held the positions of Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford. He was known for his work on Marxism, and later, egalitarianism and distributive justice in normative political philosophy.
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Norman Malcolm
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Norman Malcolm was an American philosopher. Biography Malcolm was born in Selden, Kansas. He studied philosophy with O. K. Bouwsma at the University of Nebraska, then enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University in 1933.
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Robert C. Solomon
#1010
Overall Influence
1942 - 2007 (65 years)
Robert C. Solomon was a philosopher and business ethicist, notable author, and "Distinguished Teaching Professor of Business and Philosophy" at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held a named chair and taught for more than 30 years, authoring The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life and more than 45 other books and editions. Critical of the narrow focus of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which he thought denied human nature and abdicated the important questions of life, he instead wrote analytically in response to the continental discourses of phenomenology and existentia...
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H. L. A. Hart
#181
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was an English legal philosopher. He was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. His most famous work is The Concept of Law, which has been hailed as "the most important work of legal philosophy written in the twentieth century". He is considered one of the world's foremost legal philosophers in the twentieth century.
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Paul Tillich
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at German universities before immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago.
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Philo
15 BC - 45 (60 years)
Philo of Alexandria , also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt. The only event in Philo's life that can be decisively dated is his participation in the embassy to Rome in 40 CE; whereby he represented the Alexandrian Jews in a delegation to the Roman Emperor Caligula following civil strife between the Alexandrian Jewish and Greek communities.
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Xenophon
430 BC - 354 BC (76 years)
Xenophon of Athens was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian, born in Athens. At the age of 30, Xenophon was elected commander of one of the biggest Greek mercenary armies of the Achaemenid Empire, the Ten Thousand, that marched on and came close to capturing Babylon in 401 BC. As the military historian Theodore Ayrault Dodge wrote, "the centuries since have devised nothing to surpass the genius of this warrior". Xenophon established precedents for many logistical operations, and was among the first to describe strategic flanking maneuvers and feints in combat.
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Georg Henrik von Wright
#927
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher. Biography G. H. von Wright was born in Helsinki on 14 June 1916 to Tor von Wright and his wife Ragni Elisabeth Alfthan. On the retirement of Ludwig Wittgenstein as professor at the University of Cambridge in 1948, von Wright succeeded him. He published in English, Finnish, German, and Swedish, belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Von Wright was of both Finnish and 17th-century Scottish ancestry, and the family was raised to nobility in 1772.
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Walter Benjamin
1892 - 1940 (48 years)
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher ...
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Nicolai Hartmann
1882 - 1950 (68 years)
Paul Nicolai Hartmann was a Baltic German philosopher. He is regarded as a key representative of critical realism and as one of the most important twentieth-century metaphysicians. Biography Hartmann was born a Baltic German in Riga, which was then the capital of the Governorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire, and which is now in Latvia. He was the son of the engineer Carl August Hartmann and his wife Helene, born Hackmann. He attended from 1897 the German-language high school in Saint Petersburg. In the years 1902–1903 he studied Medicine at the University of Yuryev , and 1903–1905 classic...
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Sri Aurobindo
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Vande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders, and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution.
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Albertus Magnus
1193 - 1280 (87 years)
Albertus Magnus , also known as Saint Albert the Great, Albert of Swabia or Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar, philosopher, scientist, and bishop. Canonized in 1931 as a Catholic saint, he was known during his lifetime as Doctor universalis and Doctor expertus; late in his life the sobriquet Magnus was appended to his name. Scholars such as James A. Weisheipl and Joachim R. Söder have referred to him as the greatest German philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church distinguishes him as one of the 37 Doctors of the Church.
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Jean Buridan
1295 - 1358 (63 years)
Jean Buridan was an influential 14thcentury French philosopher. Buridan taught in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris for his entire career and focused in particular on logic and on the works of Aristotle. Buridan sowed the seeds of the Copernican Revolution in Europe. He developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia and an important development in the history of medieval science. His name is most familiar through the thought experiment known as Buridan's ass, but the thought experiment does not appear in his extant writings.
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Julia Kristeva
#105
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend...
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Karl Löwith
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Karl Löwith was a German philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he was one of the most prolific German philosophers of the twentieth century. He is known for his two books From Hegel to Nietzsche, which describes the decline of German classical philosophy, and Meaning in History, which challenges the modern, secular progressive narrative of history, which seeks to ground the meaning of history in itself.
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Robert Brandom
#1540
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Boyce Brandom is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use , thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."
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Roderick Chisholm
#1372
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarks that he "is widely regarded as one of the most creative, productive, and influential American philosophers of the 20th Century."
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Frederick Copleston
#1205
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Frederick Charles Copleston was an English Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy . Copleston achieved a degree of popularity in the media for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer.
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Karl-Otto Apel
#763
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Karl-Otto Apel was a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He specialized on the philosophy of language and was thus considered a communication theorist. He developed a distinctive philosophical approach which he called "transcendental pragmatics."
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Georges Canguilhem
#411
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science . Life and work Canguilhem entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924 as part of a class that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan. He aggregated in 1927 and then taught in lycées throughout France, taking up the study of medicine while teaching in Toulouse. He took up a post at the Clermont-Ferrand based University of Strasbourg in 1941, and received his medical doctorate in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Using the pseudonym "Lafont" Canguilhem be...
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Carol Gilligan
#560
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
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F. H. Bradley
1846 - 1924 (78 years)
Francis Herbert Bradley was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality . Life Bradley was born at Clapham, Surrey, England . He was the child of Charles Bradley, an evangelical Anglican preacher, and Emma Linton, Charles's second wife. A. C. Bradley was his brother. Educated at Cheltenham College and Marlborough College, he read, as a teenager, some of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In 1865, he entered University College, Oxford. In 1870, he was elected to a fellowship at Oxford's Merton College where he remained until his death in 1924. Brad...
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J. L. Austin
1911 - 1960 (49 years)
John Langshaw Austin, OBE, FBA was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, best known for developing the theory of speech acts. Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as doing something—making a promise—rather than making an assertion about anything. Hence the title of one of his best-known works, How to Do Things with Words.
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Joseph Raz
#249
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
#250
Aleister Crowley
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, philosopher, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
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