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,
#2101
Jean Nicod
1893 - 1924 (31 years)
Jean George Pierre Nicod was a French philosopher and logician, best known for his work on propositional logic and induction. Biography Nicod's main contribution to formal logic was to show that classical propositional calculus could be axiomatized with only one axiom - which is now known as Nicod's axiom - and one rule of inference, both formulated using the Sheffer stroke as only connective. In inductive logic and confirmation theory, he famously proposed Nicod's criterion, according to which a conditional hypothesis is confirmed by all and only its positive instances. This principle plays ...
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Sandra Laugier
#24491
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sandra Laugier is a French philosopher, who works on moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, gender studies, and popular culture. She is a full professor of philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She currently serves as the deputy director of the Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne . In 2014, she received the title of the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In 2022, she was awarded the Grand Prix Moron by the Académie française.
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Ernan McMullin
#12254
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Ernan McMullin was an Irish philosopher who last served as the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He was an internationally respected philosopher of science who has written and lectured extensively on subjects ranging from the relationship between cosmology and theology, to the role of values in understanding science, to the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. He is the only person to ever hold the presidency of four of the major US philosophical associations. He was an expert on the life of Galileo.
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Jack Copeland
#8146
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Brian John Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and author of books on the computing pioneer Alan Turing. Education Copeland was educated at the University of Oxford, obtaining a Bachelor of Philosophy degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1978, where he undertook research on modal logic and non-classical logic supervised by Dana Scott.
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Bron Taylor
#15835
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Bron Raymond Taylor is an American scholar and conservationist. He is professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida and has also been an affiliated scholar with the Center for Environment and Development at the University of Oslo. Taylor works principally in the areas of religion and ecology, environmental ethics and environmental philosophy. He is also a prominent historian and ethnographer of environmentalism and especially radical environmentalist movements, surfing culture and nature-based spiritualities. Taylor is also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion and N...
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Hermann Lübbe
#10281
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Hermann Lübbe is a German philosopher. He is considered a member of the Ritter School. Biography Lübbe was born in Aurich. From 1947 to 1951, he studied philosophy, theology and sociology in Göttingen, Münster and Freiburg. Among his academic teachers were Joachim Ritter and Heinrich Scholz. From 1963 to 1969, Lübbe was professor in Bochum. Since 1966, he was also secretary of state in the education ministry of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1969, Lübbe became professor in Bielefeld and secretary of state with the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia. From 1971 to 1991, h...
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Lewis C. Cantley
#10908
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lewis C. Cantley is an American cell biologist and biochemist who has made significant advances to the understanding of cancer metabolism. Among his most notable contributions are the discovery and study of the enzyme PI-3-kinase, now known to be important to understanding cancer and diabetes mellitus. He is currently Meyer Director and Professor of Cancer Biology at the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He was formerly a professor in the Departments of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Director of Cancer Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Donald A. Martin
#11483
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Donald Anthony Martin , also known as Tony Martin, is an American set theorist and philosopher of mathematics at UCLA, where he is an emeritus professor of mathematics and philosophy. Education and career Martin received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1965–67. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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Jaime Balmes
1810 - 1848 (38 years)
Jaime Luciano Balmes y Urpiá was a Spanish philosopher, theologian, Catholic apologist, sociologist and political writer. Familiar with the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Balmes was an original philosopher who did not belong to any particular school or stream, and was called by Pius XII the Prince of Modern Apologetics.
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Bernhard Pörksen
#11952
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Bernhard Pörksen is a German media scholar. Life Bernhard Pörksen studied German language and literature, journalism and biology in Hamburg. At the invitation of Ivan Illich he spent several research periods at Pennsylvania State University. Between 1996 and 1997, he worked both as a freelance journalist and as a voluntary editorial staff member of a newspaper. He has published essays, commentaries and critical contributions to debates in numerous German daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and online media.
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Jerzy Słupecki
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Jerzy Słupecki was a Polish mathematician and logician. Life He attended the seminar of, and wrote a 1938 doctorate under, Jan Łukasiewicz. During WWII he was active in Żegota. In 1963, when at Wroclaw University, where he had been since 1945, he became editor of Studia Logica.
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Charles A. Moore
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Charles Alexander Moore was an American philosopher, historian, sinologist, and writer. He was a professor of comparative philosophy at the University of Hawaii. Biography He was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 11, 1901. Moore was educated at Yale University, where he received an A.B. in 1926 and a Ph.D. in 1932, then taught philosophy for three years. In 1936 he began his 30-year career at the University of Hawaii, where he founded the East-West Philosophers' Conferences, directing the first four in 1939, 1949, 1959, and 1964. In 1951 he also founded a journal, Philosophy East and West, ...
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Arete of Cyrene
400 BC - 340 BC (60 years)
Arete of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher who lived in Cyrene, Libya. She was the daughter of Aristippus of Cyrene. Life and teachings Arete learned philosophy from her father, Aristippus, who had himself learned philosophy from Socrates. Arete, in turn, taught philosophy to her son - Aristippus the Younger - and her son was nicknamed "Mother-taught" .
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Francis Peyton Rous
1879 - 1970 (91 years)
Francis Peyton Rous was an American pathologist at the Rockefeller University known for his works in oncoviruses, blood transfusion and physiology of digestion. A medical graduate from the Johns Hopkins University, he was discouraged to become a practicing physician due to severe tuberculosis. After three years of working as an instructor of pathology at the University of Michigan, he became dedicated researcher at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research for the rest of his career.
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David L. Norton
#24486
Overall Influence
1930 - 1995 (65 years)
David Lloyd Norton was an American philosopher. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, March 27, 1930, to Cecil V. Norton and Ruth Essick Norton. He was the brother of Douglas C. Norton of Norton's Fine Art in St. Louis.
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Khalifa Haftar
#561
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Omar Haftar is a Libyan politician, military officer, and the commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army . On 2 March 2015, he was appointed commander of the armed forces loyal to the elected legislative body, the Libyan House of Representatives.
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Walter Charleton
1619 - 1707 (88 years)
Walter Charleton was a natural philosopher and English writer. According to Jon Parkin, he was "the main conduit for the transmission of Epicurean ideas to England". Life He was the son of the rector of Shepton Mallett in Somerset, where he was born 2 February 1619. He received his early education from his father, and when sixteen entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, under the tuition of John Wilkins. At the early age of 22 he received the degree of M.D. and in the same year was appointed physician to Charles I, who was then at Oxford. In 1650 Charleton settled in London, and was on 8 April admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians.
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Aron Gurwitsch
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Aron Gurwitsch was a Litvak American phenomenologist. Work Gurwitsch wrote on the relations between phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, and in the problems of the organization of consciousness. In particular, he distinguished between the theme, the thematic context and the margin. This is the core of his theory of the Field of Consciousness. He also has his own theory of the noema, the horizon and the transcendental ego. Gurwitsch was an important influence for Merleau-Ponty. He taught at Brandeis University in the mid-1950s. He taught at The New School For Social Research's Graduate Facult...
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Georgy Shchedrovitsky
#6915
Overall Influence
1929 - 1994 (65 years)
Georgy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky was a Russian philosopher and methodologist, public and cultural figure. The creator of the system-thinking methodology, the founder and leader of the Moscow methodological circle, the ideological inspirer of the "methodological movement."
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Jan Baptist van Helmont
1577 - 1644 (67 years)
Jan Baptist van Helmont was a chemist, physiologist, and physician from Brussels. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry". Van Helmont is remembered today largely for his 5-year willow tree experiment, his introduction of the word "gas" into the vocabulary of science, and his ideas on spontaneous generation.
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Paul C. Bucy
#2122
Pierre-André Taguieff
#5991
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pierre-André Taguieff is a French philosopher who has specialised in the study of racism and antisemitism. He is the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in an Institut d'études politiques de Paris laboratory, the Centre for Political Research . He is also a member of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.
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Karel Appel
#4672
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
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Israel Lyon Chaikoff
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Israel Lyon Chaikoff was a Canadian-American physiologist and biochemist, known for the Wolff–Chaikoff effect. He and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of radioactive iodine to investigate thyroid function.
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David Sidorsky
#26566
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
David Sidorsky was an American professor emeritus of philosophy, who joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1959. Background David Sidorsky was born on July 7, 1925, in Calgary, Alberta, after his Zionist parents emigrated from Lithuania. He received a BA in 1948 and MA in 1954 from New York University. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1962. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Nature of Disagreement in Social Philosophy: Four Criticisms of Liberalism."
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Barbara Herman
#20415
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Philosophy. A well-known interpreter of Kant's ethics, Herman works on moral philosophy, the history of ethics, and social and political philosophy. Among her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences .
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Steven H. Miles
#21140
Overall Influence
Steven H. Miles is an American doctor, author, and professor of medicine who has published on ethically topics relating to medicine and the use of torture. Miles is a practicing physician and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and is a member of its Center for Bioethics. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanistics. Miles is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
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Xenocrates
396 BC - 314 BC (82 years)
Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, and leader of the Platonic Academy from 339/8 to 314/3 BC. His teachings followed those of Plato, which he attempted to define more closely, often with mathematical elements. He distinguished three forms of being: the sensible, the intelligible, and a third compounded of the two, to which correspond respectively, sense, intellect and opinion. He considered unity and duality to be gods which rule the universe, and the soul a self-moving number. God pervades all things, and there are daemonical powers, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, which consist in conditions of the soul.
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John Macmurray
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher. His thought both moved beyond and was critical of the modern tradition, whether rationalist or empiricist. His thought may be classified as personalist, as his writings focused primarily on the nature of human beings. He viewed persons in terms of their relationality and agency, rather than the modern tendency to characterize them in terms of individualism and cognition.
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George Edward Hughes
#22595
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
George Edward Hughes was an Irish-born New Zealand philosopher and logician whose principal scholarly works were concerned with modal logic and medieval philosophy. Biography Hughes was born on 8 June 1918 in Waterford city, Ireland. His English parents George James Hughes and Gertrude Sparks moved to Scotland in the early 1920s, as a result of the Irish War of Independence. George graduated MA with First Class Honours in Philosophy and English, and then in pure Philosophy, from the University of Glasgow. He then studied for a year at the University of Cambridge, before being called back to Glasgow as an assistant lecturer.
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Andrew Benjamin
#14629
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Andrew Benjamin is an Australian philosopher. He holds a post as distinguished professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. Benjamin first came to critical attention with his writings in continental philosophy, writing articles and editing books on the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva and Jean-François Lyotard. Benjamin has become involved in the field of architecture, to the extent that he has also taught in various schools of architecture in UK, US and Australia.
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Clément Rosset
#19119
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Clément Rosset was a French philosopher and writer. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, and the author of books on 20th-century philosophy and postmodern philosophy.
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Paul Edwards
#14091
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Paul Edwards was an Austrian-American moral philosopher. He was the editor-in-chief of MacMillan's eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy from 1967, and lectured at New York University, Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research from the 1960s to the 1990s.
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George Yancy
#14783
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#2135
Jacques Bidet
#26779
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Jacques Bidet is a French philosopher and social theorist who is currently professor emeritus in the Philosophy Department at the Université de Paris X - Nanterre. His works are mainly devoted to the construction of a theory of modern society under the name of Meta/structural theory . Modern nation-states, as elements of world system, are structured on both market and organisation, supposedly rational mediations, as co-implied class factors. The philosophical, sociological, historical, legal-political and cultural aspects of this paradigm are developed in the sense of an Altermarxism, by cont...
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Suzanne Bachelard
#15862
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Suzanne Bachelard was a French philosopher and academic. In 1958, she published La Conscience de la rationalité. She was the daughter of philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose posthumous book Fragments d'une Poétique du Feu she edited. She taught at the Sorbonne, where she also had Jacques Derrida as her assistant. She was the first translator to French of Edmund Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic.
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Rudolf Stammler
1856 - 1938 (82 years)
Karl Eduard Julius Theodor Rudolf Stammler was an influential German philosopher of law. He distinguished a purely formal concept of law from the ideal, the realization of justice. He thought that, rather than reacting and adjusting the law to economic pressures, the law should be deliberately steered towards the current ideal.
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Günter Figal
#34071
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Günter Figal is a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at University of Freiburg. He is a specialist in the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger. His research focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, German classical philosophy and the history of metaphysics. Figal was the president of the Martin-Heidegger-Society between 2003 and 2015.
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Ken Gemes
1900 - Present (124 years)
Ken Gemes is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His primary interests are Nietzsche and philosophy of science. Education and career Gemes earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with a dissertation in philosophy of science working with Clark Glymour and Wesley Salmon. He taught at Yale University for ten years before moving to Birkbeck in 2000.
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Clark Glymour
#16467
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Clark N. Glymour is the Alumni University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
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Othmar Spann
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Othmar Spann was a conservative Austrian philosopher, sociologist and economist. His radical anti-liberal and anti-socialist views, based on early 19th century Romantic ideas expressed by Adam Müller et al. and popularized in his books and lecture courses, helped antagonise political factions in Austria during the interwar years.
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Cesare Beccaria
1738 - 1794 (56 years)
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist and politician, who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments , which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
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Vladimir Jankélévitch
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Vladimir Jankélévitch was a French philosopher and musicologist. Biography Jankélévitch was the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France. In 1922 he started studying philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris, under Professor Bergson. In 1924 he completed his DES thesis on Le Traité : la dialectique. Ennéade I 3 de Plotin under the direction of Émile Bréhier.
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Charles Guignon
#25333
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Charles Burke Guignon was an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is known for his expertise on Martin Heidegger's philosophy and existentialism. He became a member of the Florida Philosophical Association in the early 2000s.
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Terrell Ward Bynum
#14271
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Terrell Ward Bynum is an American philosopher, writer and editor. Bynum is currently director of the Research Center on Computing and Society at Southern Connecticut State University, where he is also a professor of philosophy, and visiting professor in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in De Montfort University, Leicester, England. He is best known as a pioneer and historian in the field of computer and information ethics; for his achievements in that field, he was awarded the Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association, the Weizenbaum Award of the International ...
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Aubrey Beardsley
1872 - 1898 (26 years)
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.
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Ronald Jensen
#17296
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ronald Björn Jensen is an American mathematician who lives in Germany, primarily known for his work in mathematical logic and set theory. Career Jensen completed a BA in economics at American University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Bonn in 1964. His supervisor was Gisbert Hasenjaeger. Jensen taught at Rockefeller University, 1969–71, and the University of California, Berkeley, 1971–73. The balance of his academic career was spent in Europe at the University of Bonn, the University of Oslo, the University of Freiburg, the University of Oxford, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, from which he retired in 2001.
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Susan R. Wolf
#25820
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Susan Rose Wolf is an American moral philosopher and philosopher of action who is currently the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught previously at Johns Hopkins University , the University of Maryland and Harvard University .
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Adela Cortina
#21471
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Adela Cortina is a Spanish philosopher. Biography After studying philosophy and letters in the Universidad de Valencia, she was admitted into the department of metaphysics in 1969. In 1976, she defended her doctoral thesis on the notion of God in Kant's transcendental philosophy and during some time she taught at middle schools and highschools. A research scholarship allowed her to go to the University of Munich, where she got acquainted with critical rationalism, pragmatism and marxist ethics and, more concretely, with the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Upon coming back to the Spanish scholar scene, she devoted her research time to ethics.
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Roger Caillois
1913 - 1978 (65 years)
Roger Caillois was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, ludology and philosophy by focusing on diverse subjects such as games and play as well as the sacred. He was also instrumental in introducing Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Ángel Asturias to the French public. After his death, the French Literary award Prix Roger Caillois was named after him in 1991.
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