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,
#2001
John Lane Bell
#11538
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Lane Bell is an Anglo-Canadian philosopher, mathematician and logician. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His research includes such topics as set theory, model theory, lattice theory, modal logic, quantum logic, constructive mathematics, type theory, topos theory, infinitesimal analysis, spacetime theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of more than 70 articles and of 13 books. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile#2002
Ronald Giere
#24677
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Ronald Giere was an American philosopher of science who was an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. He was a Fellow of The AAAS, a long-time member of the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, and a past president of the Philosophy of Science Association. His research focused on agent-based accounts of models and scientific representation, and on connections between naturalism and secularism.
Go to Profile#2003
Hans Ruin
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Hans Waldemar Ruin was a Finnish philosopher and writer of Swedish-Finnish extraction. Biography Ruin was the son of Professor Waldemar Ruin and Flora Lindholm. He married Karin "Kaisi" Sievers in 1917, daughter of physician Klas Richard Sievers and Freifrau Karin von Bonsdorff. He had two children, Martina and Olof, and maternal grandfather to David and Marika Lagercrantz. His grandchild was also named Hans Ruin and became a philosopher.
Go to Profile#2004
Bonifaty Kedrov
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Bonifaty Mikhailovich Kedrov was a Soviet researcher, philosopher, logician, chemist and psychologist who was a specialist in the philosophy of dialectical materialism and the philosophy of science.
Go to Profile#2005
JoAnn E. Manson
#25143
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
JoAnn Elisabeth Manson is an American physician and professor known for her pioneering research, public leadership, and advocacy in the fields of epidemiology and women's health. Manson's research has contributed to the understanding of the causes of chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and breast cancer. She is one of the most highly cited researchers in the world according to Google Scholar, with an h-index of over 300. She is the Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women's Health at Harvard Medical School, a professor of epidemiology in the Harvard School of Public He...
Go to Profile#2006
Richard Arneson
#19879
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Richard J. Arneson is an American philosopher specializing in political philosophy who has taught at the University of California, San Diego since 1973. He chaired the department during 1992–1996 and served as graduate adviser. In 1996, he also served as visiting professor in the ethics, politics, and economics program at Yale University. Arneson earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975. His work has largely focused on utilitarianism and on luck egalitarianism. He is also a proponent of prioritarianism.
Go to Profile#2007
Victoria Camps
#24238
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Victoria Camps is a Spanish philosopher and professor of ethics. Career She obtained a degree in philosophy at the University of Barcelona, completing her thesis, entitled “La dimensión pragmática del lenguaje”, in 1975.
Go to Profile#2008
J. Howard Moore
1862 - 1916 (54 years)
John Howard Moore was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator, humanitarian and socialist. He is considered to be an early, yet neglected, proponent of animal rights and ethical vegetarianism, and was a leading figure in the American humanitarian movement. Moore was a prolific writer, authoring numerous articles, books, essays, pamphlets on topics including animal rights, education, ethics, evolutionary biology, humanitarianism, socialism, temperance, utilitarianism and vegetarianism. He also lectured on many of these subjects and was widely regarded as a talented orator, earning the nam...
Go to Profile#2009
Colotes
320 BC - Present (2344 years)
Colotes of Lampsacus was a pupil of Epicurus. He wrote a work to prove "That it is impossible even to live according to the doctrines of the other philosophers" and dedicated it to Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Although this work is lost, its arguments are preserved in two works written by Plutarch in refutation of it: "That it is impossible even to live pleasantly according to Epicurus", and Against Colotes. According to Plutarch, Colotes attacked Socrates and other great philosophers in this work. Some fragments of two other works of Colotes have been discovered at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum: Against Plato's Lysis, and Against Plato's Euthydemus.
Go to Profile#2010
Helmut Sies
#31581
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Helmut Sies is a German physician, biochemist and university professor. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of hydrogen peroxide as a normal attribute of aerobic life in 1970, and he introduced the concept of Oxidative stress in 1985. He also worked on the biological strategies of antioxidant defense and the biochemistry of nutritional antioxidants .
Go to Profile#2011
John of Jandun
1285 - 1328 (43 years)
John of Jandun or John of Jaudun was a French philosopher, theologian, and political writer. Jandun is best known for his outspoken defense of Aristotelianism and his influence in the early Latin Averroist movement.
Go to Profile#2012
James McCosh
1811 - 1894 (83 years)
James McCosh was a philosopher of the Scottish School of Common Sense. He was president of Princeton University 1868–88. Biography McCosh was born into a Covenanting family in Ayrshire, and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, obtaining his M.A. at the latter, at the suggestion of Sir William Hamilton, for an essay on stoicism. He became a minister of the Church of Scotland in 1834, serving as minister first at Abbey Church in Arbroath and then at Brechin. He sided with the Free Church of Scotland in the Disruption of 1843, becoming minister at Brechin's new East Free Church.
Go to Profile#2013
Vasily Seseman
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Vasily Seseman was a Russian and Lithuanian philosopher, a representative of Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He is mostly remembered for his role in fostering philosophy in newly independent Lithuania and developing Lithuanian philosophical vocabulary . A close associate of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev Karsavin, as a prisoner of Gulag he was also an informal philosophy tutor and supporter of Buddhist writer Bidia Dandaron.
Go to Profile#2014
Joan Massagué
#13156
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Joan Massagué , is a Spanish biologist and the current director of the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the study of both cancer metastasis and growth factors that regulate cell behavior, as well as a professor at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Go to Profile#2015
Edward Caird
1835 - 1908 (73 years)
Edward Caird was a Scottish philosopher. He was a holder of LLD, DCL, and DLitt. Life The younger brother of the theologian John Caird, he was the son of engineer John Caird, the proprietor of Caird & Company, born at Greenock in Renfrewshire, and educated at Greenock Academy and the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford . He was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College from 1864 to 1866.
Go to Profile#2016
Tadeusz Czeżowski
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Tadeusz Czeżowski was a Polish philosopher and logician. He is considered one of the most prominent members of the Lviv-Warsaw School. Biography Czeżowski was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on July 26, 1889. He was the son of a high-ranking state official a previous Prefect who later became the Counsellor of the Governorate of Galicia. In 1907, he studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the University of Lviv. His mother, Helena Kusche, was considered part of the petite bourgeoisie of the city. He became a student of Kazimierz Twardowski, who conferred to Czeżowski his doctorate in philosophy in 1914 after completing his dissertation entitled, Teoria klas .
Go to Profile#2017
Michael Marder
#13453
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He works in the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy, environmental thought, and political philosophy.
Go to Profile#2018
Christos Yannaras
#8324
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Christos Yannaras is a Greek philosopher, Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of more than 50 books which have been translated into many languages. He is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.
Go to Profile#2019
Vilém Flusser
#14421
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Vilém Flusser was a Brazilian Czech-born philosopher, writer and journalist. He lived for a long period in São Paulo and later in France, and his works are written in many different languages. His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy in history: the period of image worship, and period of ...
Go to Profile#2020
Louis Bertrand Castel
1688 - 1757 (69 years)
Louis Bertrand Castel was a French mathematician born in Montpellier, who entered the order of the Jesuits in 1703. Having studied literature, he afterwards devoted himself entirely to mathematics and natural philosophy. After moving from Toulouse to Paris in 1720, at the behest of Bernard de Fontenelle, Castel acted as the science editor of the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux.
Go to Profile#2021
Maria Lugones
#10403
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
María Cristina Lugones was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and at Binghamton University in New York State. She identified as a U.S-based woman of color and theorized this category as a political identity forged through feminist coalitional work.
Go to Profile#2022
Giulio Giorello
#22265
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Giulio Giorello was an Italian philosopher, mathematician, and epistemologist. Biography Giorello graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1968 and in mathematics in 1971 at the University of Milan. While there, he studied under the philosopher Ludovico Geymonat. He then taught physics and natural sciences at the University of Pavia, University of Catania, University of Insubria and the University of Milan. Giorello was a professor of philosophy of science at the University of Milan; he was also President of SILFS . He directed the "Scienza e idee" series by Raffaello Cortina Editore and col...
Go to Profile#2023
José Ingenieros
1877 - 1925 (48 years)
José Ingenieros was an Argentine physician, pharmacist, positivist philosopher and essayist. He was born in Palermo , and graduated from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in 1900. Ingenieros was philosophically influenced by Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, and wrote a very important philosophical and social work, "El hombre mediocre" , in 1913. Ingenieros founded the Buenos Aires Institute of Criminology in 1907 and the Argentine Psychological Society in 1908; he was elected President of the Argentine Medical Association in 1909.
Go to Profile#2024
Adi Ophir
#18299
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Adi Ophir is an Israeli philosopher. Early life Adi Ophir was born on September 22, 1951. He received his BA and MA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his PhD from Boston University. Ophir is married to Ariella Azoulay.
Go to Profile#2025
G. E. L. Owen
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen was a British classicist and philosopher who is best known as a scholar of ancient philosophy. He was a specialist on the work of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Born to a Welsh father and an English mother in Portsmouth, Owen studied Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but was called up to serve as an intelligence officer in World War II. After returning to England, he taught philosophy at the University of Oxford and moved to a chair at Harvard University in 1966. His final appointment was the Laurence Professorship of Ancient Philosophy at the University of...
Go to Profile#2026
François Fénelon
1651 - 1715 (64 years)
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon , more commonly known as François Fénelon , was a French Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. Today, he is remembered mostly as the author of The Adventures of Telemachus, first published in 1699.
Go to Profile#2027
Rocky Gerung
#11813
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rocky Gerung is an Indonesian political commentator, philosopher, academic and public intellectual. Early life Rocky began studying at the University of Indonesia in 1979. He first entered the department of political science, which at that time joined the Faculty of Social Sciences, before deciding to move to the department of philosophy and graduated in 1986. During college, Rocky was close to the socialist-leaning activists such as Marsillam Simanjuntak, Hariman Siregar, and others.
Go to Profile#2028
Maurice De Wulf
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Maurice Marie Charles Joseph De Wulf , was a Belgian Thomist philosopher, professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, was one of the pioneers of the historiography of medieval philosophy. His book History of Medieval Philosophy appeared first in 1900 and was followed by many other editions and translations, one them being available today online.
Go to Profile#2029
Haim Gaifman
#14678
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Haim Gaifman is a logician, probability theorist, and philosopher of language who is professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Education and career In 1958 he received his M.Sc. at Hebrew University. Then in 1962, he received his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley under Alfred Tarski on the topic of infinite Boolean algebras. Since, he has held various permanent and visiting positions in mathematics, philosophy and computer science departments. While he was professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University, he taught courses in philosophy and directed the program in History an...
Go to Profile#2030
Mladen Dolar
#11756
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mladen Dolar is a Slovene philosopher, psychoanalyst, cultural theorist and film critic. Dolar was born in Maribor as the son of the literary critic Jaro Dolar. In 1978 he graduated in Philosophy and French language at the University of Ljubljana, under the supervision of the renowned philosopher Božidar Debenjak. He later studied at the University of Paris VII and the University of Westminster.
Go to Profile#2031
Charles Larmore
#20308
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charles Larmore is an American philosopher. He is the W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, noted for his writings on political liberalism as well as on various topics in moral philosophy and the history of philosophy.
Go to Profile#2032
Tamar Gendler
#23260
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tamar Szabó Gendler is an American philosopher. She is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale as well as the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Yale University. Her academic research focuses on issues in philosophical psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and areas related to philosophical methodology.
Go to Profile#2033
Robert Musil
1880 - 1942 (62 years)
Robert Musil was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities , is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels. Family Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, the son of engineer Alfred Edler Musil and his wife Hermine Bergauer . The orientalist Alois Musil was his second cousin.
Go to Profile#2034
Barry Loewer
#27383
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Barry Loewer is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. Education and career He obtained his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Stanford University in 1975 . He taught first at the University of South Carolina before joining Rutgers University in 1989.
Go to Profile#2035
Tracey Emin
#1305
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
Go to Profile#2036
Claude Sumner
#19085
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Claude Sumner, SJ was a Canadian professor of philosophy who worked at Addis Ababa University from 1953. He was best known for his work on Zera Yacob. Sumner died on June 24, 2012, in Montreal, Canada, at the age of 92.
Go to Profile#2037
James P. Sterba
#22438
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
James P. Sterba is an American philosopher who specializes in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion. Biography Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the North American Society for Social Philosophy. He has authored 35 books.
Go to Profile#2038
Henricus Regius
1598 - 1679 (81 years)
Henricus Regius was a Dutch philosopher, physician, and professor of medicine at the University of Utrecht from 1638. Biography Regius was born in Utrecht, and was also known by his birth name, Hendrik de Roy, or by its French rendering, Henri Le Roy. He studied liberal arts at the University of Franeker and medicine at Groningen University, Leiden University, and subsequently at the Universities of Montpellier and Padua.
Go to Profile#2039
N. Katherine Hayles
#4827
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.
Go to Profile#2040
Natalie Duddington
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Natalie Duddington was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie . Biography Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, to the author Alexander Ertel. She was Ertel's oldest daughter and considered intelligent as a child. When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904, she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England.
Go to Profile#2041
Jonas Salk
#374
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Jonas Edward Salk was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2042
David Sosa
#30724
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David Sosa is an American philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Analytic Philosophy.
Go to Profile#2043
Kurt Flasch
#15546
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Kurt Flasch is a German philosopher, who works mainly as a historian of medieval thought and of late antiquity. Flasch was professor at the Ruhr University Bochum. He was / is a member of several German and international Academies. In 2000, he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
Go to Profile#2044
Émilie du Châtelet
1706 - 1749 (43 years)
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was a French natural philosopher and mathematician from the early 1730s until her death due to complications during childbirth in 1749.
Go to Profile#2045
Pietro Verri
1728 - 1797 (69 years)
Count Pietro Verri was an Italian economist, historian, philosopher and writer. Among the most important personalities of the 18th-century Italian culture, he is considered among the fathers of the Lombard reformist Enlightenment and the most important pre-Smithian authority on cheapness and plenty.
Go to Profile#2046
Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus
#15767
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus is a German mathematician and logician. He received his PhD in 1967 at the University of Münster under Hans Hermes and Dieter Rödding. Ebbinghaus has written various books on logic, set theory and model theory, including a seminal work on Ernst Zermelo. His book Einführung in die mathematische Logik, joint work with Jörg Flum and Wolfgang Thomas, first appeared in 1978 and became a standard textbook of mathematical logic in the German-speaking area. It is currently in its sixth edition . An English edition of Mathematical Logic was published in the Springer-Verlag Und...
Go to Profile#2047
Eric Scerri
#5561
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#2048
Steve Fuller
#8636
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Steve William Fuller is an American social philosopher in the field of science and technology studies. He has published in the areas of social epistemology, academic freedom, and the subjects of intelligent design and transhumanism.
Go to Profile#2049
Antipater of Tarsus
300 BC - 129 BC (171 years)
Antipater of Tarsus was a Stoic philosopher. He was the pupil and successor of Diogenes of Babylon as leader of the Stoic school, and was the teacher of Panaetius. He wrote works on the gods and on divination, and in ethics he took a higher moral ground than that of his teacher Diogenes.
Go to Profile#2050
Andal
800 - 900 (100 years)
Andal , also known as Kothai, Nachiyar, and Godadevi, was the only female Alvar among the twelve Hindu poet-saints of South India. She was posthumously considered an avatar of the goddess Bhudevi. As with the Alvar saints, she was affiliated with the Sri Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. Active in the 8th-century, with some suggesting 7th-century, Andal is credited with two great Tamil works, Tiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumoḻi, which are still recited by devotees during the winter festival season of Margaḻi. Andal is a prominent figure for women in South India and has inspired several women's gro...
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