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,
#2151
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
#5747
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher, jurist and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics. In natural philosophy he is known for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. In social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. In legal theory he was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools.
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James Luther Adams
#14628
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
James Luther Adams , an American professor at Harvard Divinity School, Andover Newton Theological School, and Meadville Lombard Theological School, and a Unitarian parish minister, was the most influential theologian among American Unitarian Universalists in the 20th century.
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Michael Bratman
#9671
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael E. Bratman is an American philosopher who is Durfee Professor in the School of Humanities & Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. Education and career Bratman graduated from Haverford College in 1967 and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Rockefeller University in 1974, where he worked with Donald Davidson. He joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1974, where he has taught ever since.
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Julian Nida-Rümelin
#6221
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Julian Nida-Rümelin is a German philosopher and public intellectual. He served as State Minister for Culture of the Federal Republic of Germany under Chancellor Schröder. He was professor of philosophy and political theory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich until 2020. Nida-Rümelin is vice chairman of the German Ethics Council.
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Victor A. McKusick
#8048
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Victor Almon McKusick was an American internist and medical geneticist, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was a proponent of the mapping of the human genome due to its use for studying congenital diseases. He is well known for his studies of the Amish. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man . He is widely known as the "father of medical genetics".
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Philip Wheelwright
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Philip Ellis Wheelwright was an American philosopher, classical scholar and literary theorist. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a stockbroker, and died in Santa Barbara, California. Wheelwright was educated at Princeton University, with a B.A. in 1921 and a Ph.D. in 1924 with his dissertation "The Concepts of Liberty and Contingency in the Philosophy of Charles Renouvier," the French Kantian philosopher who so influenced William James.
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Jonathan Wolff
#24102
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jonathan Wolff is a British philosopher and academic. He was Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London in 2012–16. Life and career Wolff was born on 25 June 1959 to Herbert Wolff and Doris Wolff . He earned his Master of Philosophy from UCL under the direction of G.A. Cohen in 1985. Apart from one year as a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University, he has taught at UCL ever since. As of 1 September 2016, he holds the Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.
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Dimitris Liantinis
#8504
Overall Influence
1942 - 1998 (56 years)
Dimitris Liantinis was a Greek philosopher. He was associate professor at the Department of Pedagogy of the Faculty of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the University of Athens, teaching the course "Philosophy of Education and Teaching of Greek Language and Literature". He has written nine books. His last and most seminal work Gemma has been translated into several languages.
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Dong Zhongshu
179 BC - 104 BC (75 years)
Dong Zhongshu was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer of the Han dynasty. He is traditionally associated with the promotion of Confucianism as the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state. He apparently favored heaven worship over the tradition of cults celebrating the five elements. Ultimately banished to the Chancellery of Weifang by his adversary Gongsun Hong, Gongsun effectively promoted Dong's partial retirement from political life, and his teachings were transmitted from there. However, he apparently enjoyed great influence in the court in the last decades of his life l...
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Brad Hooker
#21288
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Brad Hooker is a British-American philosopher who specialises in moral philosophy. He is a professor at the University of Reading and is best known for his work defending rule consequentialism . His book Ideal Code, Real World received a number of favourable reviews from high-profile philosophers. Derek Parfit, for example, wrote: "This book seems to me the best statement and defence, so far, of one of the most important moral theories."
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Guy Debord
#11346
Overall Influence
1931 - 1994 (63 years)
Guy-Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
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Bertrando Spaventa
1817 - 1883 (66 years)
Bertrando Spaventa was a leading Italian philosopher of the 19th century whose ideas had an important influence on the changes that took place during the unification of Italy and on philosophical thought in the 20th century.
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Hassan Hassanzadeh Amoli
#8552
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Ḥasan Ḥasan-zādih Ãmulī was an Iranian Shi'ite theologian known for his mystical tendencies and Islamic philosophy. He was among clerics who overcomed the traditional opposition to teaching philosophy courses at Shi'ite seminaries. He wrote many books in philosophy, mysticism, mathematics, astronomy, Persian and Arabic literature.He interpreted the Islamic philosophical tradition in a similar way to Mulla Sadra, which is a reconciliation of religion, reason and mysticism. His books include Sharh fusus al-hikam, Tashih nahj al-balagha, Insan dar 'urf-i 'irfan, Tashih kalila wa dimna.
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Choh Hao Li
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Choh Hao Li was a Chinese-born American biochemist who discovered, in 1966, that human pituitary growth hormone consists of a chain of 256 amino acids. In 1970 he succeeded in synthesizing this hormone, the largest protein molecule synthesized up to that time.
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Ivan Soll
#26356
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ivan Soll is an American philosopher who is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. He taught at UW from 1965 until his retirement in May 2011. His teaching and research focused on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosophy in general, existentialism, aesthetics, and various figures of continental philosophy.
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Philo the Dialectician
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Philo the Dialectician was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He is sometimes called Philo of Megara although the city of his birth is unknown. He is most famous for the debate he had with his teacher Diodorus Cronus concerning the idea of the possible and the criteria of the truth of conditional statements.
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Candace Vogler
#20250
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Candace A. Vogler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and a specialist in moral philosophy, philosophy of action, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Education and career Vogler received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995, and has taught at the University of Chicago since 1994.
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Cleobulus
630 BC - 560 BC (70 years)
Cleobulus was a Greek poet and a native of Lindos. He is one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Life Cleobulus was the son of Evagoras and a citizen of Lindus in Rhodes. Clement of Alexandria called Cleobulus king of the Lindians, and Plutarch spoke of him as the tyrant. The letter quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, in which Cleobulus invites Solon to Lindus as a democratic place of refuge from the tyrant Peisistratus in Athens, is undoubtedly a later forgery. Cleobulus is also said to have studied philosophy in Egypt. He had a daughter, Cleobulina, who found fame as a poet, composing riddles in hexameter verse.
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Jizang
549 - 623 (74 years)
Jizang was a Persian-Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar who is often regarded as the founder of East Asian Mādhyamaka. He is also known as Jiaxiang or Master Jiaxiang because he acquired fame at the Jiaxiang Temple.
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Jacob Needleman
#8490
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jacob Needleman was an American philosopher, author, and religious scholar. Needleman was Jewish and was educated at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Freiburg, Germany. He was deeply involved in the Gurdjieff Work and the Gurdjieff Foundation of San Francisco. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at San Francisco State University and is said to have "popularized the term 'new religious movements'." He was a former visiting professor at the Duxx Graduate School of Business Leadership in Monterrey, Mexico, and former director of the center for the study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.
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Dmitry Galkovsky
#14813
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky is a Russian writer, journalist, philosopher and blogger. Most famous as author of the novel The Infinite Deadlock . Biography Dmitry Galkovsky was born in Moscow in a working-class family, his father being an engineer, and his mother a tailor. Both his parents were originated from the families of Russian Orthodox clerics. He graduated from school No. 51 in Moscow in 1977.
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Pandurang Shastri Athavale
#10303
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Rev. Pandurang Shastri Athavale , also known as Dada /Dadaji, which literally translates as "elder brother" in Marathi, was an Indian activist, philosopher, spiritual leader, social revolutionary, and religion reformist, who founded the Swadhyaya Parivar in 1954. Swadhyaya is a self-study process based on the Bhagavad Gita which has spread across nearly 100,000 villages in India, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Oceania and other Asian countries with five million adherents. Noted for his discourses on the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas and the Upanishads, Dadaji is also known for his selfless work an...
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Carl Cohen
#31555
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Carl Cohen was an American philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the Residential College of the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. Cohen was co-author of The Animal Rights Debate , a point-counterpoint volume with Tom Regan; he is also the author of Democracy ; the author of Four Systems ; the editor of Communism, Fascism, and Democracy ; the co-author of Affirmative Action and Racial Preference , co-author of Introduction to Logic, 13th edition , and author of A Conflict of Principles: The Battle over Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan .
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Harald zur Hausen
#848
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
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Utpaladeva
900 - 950 (50 years)
Utpaladeva was an Indian philosopher and theologian from Kashmir. He belonged to the Trika Shaiva tradition and is the most important thinker of the Pratyabhijñā school of monistic idealism. His Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā were the most important and central work of the Pratyabhijñā school. Utpaladeva was a major influence on the great exegete Abhinavagupta, whose works later overshadowed those of Utpaladeva. However, according to the Indologist Raffaele Torella "most of Abhinavagupta’s ideas are just the development of what Utpaladeva had already expounded."
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Didier Eribon
#4976
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Didier Eribon is a French author and philosopher, and a historian of French intellectual life. He lives in Paris. Life Didier Eribon was born in Reims into a working-class family. He was the first in his family to finish secondary education. He credits his mother with helping him achieve this; a factory worker, she had to work overtime to be able to pay for his education.
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Alan Lomax
#841
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone ...
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Gilbert Hottois
#23553
Overall Influence
1946 - 2019 (73 years)
Gilbert Hottois was a Belgian professor of philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles who specialised in Bioethics. Hottois was born in Brussels. His positions included:Vice-Président of the Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française ;Member of the Advisory Board of " Utopean studies " ;President of the Société Belge de Philosophie ;Founder member and vice-président of the Société pour la philosophie de la technique ; Président ;Member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique ;He was chair of the programme committee of the 20...
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Johann Jakob Brucker
1696 - 1770 (74 years)
Johann Jakob Brucker was a German historian of philosophy. Life He was born at Augsburg. He was destined for the Lutheran Church, and graduated at the University of Jena in 1718. He returned to Augsburg in 1720, but became parish minister of Kaufbeuren in 1723.
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Cesare Cremonini
1550 - 1631 (81 years)
Cesare Cremonini , sometimes Cesare Cremonino, was an Italian professor of natural philosophy, working rationalism and Aristotelian materialism inside scholasticism. His Latinized name was Cæsar Cremoninus or Cæsar Cremonius.
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Andrzej Przyłębski
#32027
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Andrzej Przyłębski is a Polish philosopher, author of six books on neokantianism and on hermeneutics; past Służba Bezpieczeństwa informer codename TW Wolfgang; between 2016 and 2022 serving as an ambassador to Germany.
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André Tosel
#27233
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
André Tosel was a French Marxist philosopher and academic administrator. He taught Philosophy at the University of Franche-Comté and Pantheon-Sorbonne University until he became a full professor of philosophy at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. He served as its vice president from 1992 to 1998, and as the director of its Center for the History of Ideas from 1998 to 2003. He was the author of several books about Marxism and Marxist theorists.
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Philo of Larissa
145 BC - 79 BC (66 years)
Philo of Larissa was a Greek philosopher. It is very probable that his actual name was Philio - with a second iota. He was a pupil of Clitomachus, whom he succeeded as head of the Academy. During the Mithridatic wars which would see the destruction of the Academy, he travelled to Rome where Cicero heard him lecture. None of his writings survive. He was an Academic sceptic, like Clitomachus and Carneades before him, but he offered a more moderate view of skepticism than that of his teachers, permitting provisional beliefs without certainty.
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John Anderson
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
John Anderson was a Scottish philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism.
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Herbert McCabe
#18135
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Herbert John Ignatius McCabe was a Dominican priest, theologian and philosopher. Biography Herbert McCabe was born in Middlesbrough in the North Riding of Yorkshire. He studied chemistry at Manchester University, but influenced by Dorothy Emmet switched to philosophy. He contributed a number of pieces to Humanitas, and became friends with Eric John among others.
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Favorinus
85 - 200 (115 years)
Favorinus was a Roman sophist and skeptic philosopher who flourished during the reign of Hadrian and the Second Sophistic. Early life He was of Gaulish ancestry, born in Arelate . He received a refined education, first in Gallia Narbonensis and then in Rome, and at an early age began his lifelong travels through Greece, Italy and the East.
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Charlotte Witt
#35512
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Charlotte Witt is a professor of philosophy and humanities at the University of New Hampshire. Education and career Witt double majored at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1975 with degrees both classics and philosophy. She went on to receive her master's and doctorate in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1978 and 1980, respectively.
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Nasir Khusraw
1004 - 1088 (84 years)
Nasir Khusraw was a Isma'ili poet, philosopher, traveler, and missionary for the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate. Despite being one of the most prominent Isma'ili philosophers and theologians of the Fatimids and the writer of many philosophical works intended for only the inner circle of the Isma'ili community, Nasir is best known to the general public as a poet and writer who ardently supported his native Persian tongue as an artistic and scientific language. All of Nasir's philosophical Isma'ili works are in Persian, a rarity in the Isma'ili literature of the Fatimids, which primarily used Arab...
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William Henry Channing
1810 - 1884 (74 years)
William Henry Channing was an American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher. Biography William Henry Channing was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Channing's father, Francis Dana Channing, died when he was an infant, and responsibility for the young man's education was assumed by his uncle, William Ellery Channing, the pre-eminent Unitarian theologian of the early nineteenth century. The younger William graduated from Harvard College in 1829 and from Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was ordained and installed over the Unitarian church in Cincinnati in 1835. He became warmly interested in the schemes of Charles Fourier and others for social reorganization.
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Maurice Natanson
#19105
Overall Influence
1924 - 1996 (72 years)
Maurice Alexander Natanson was an American philosopher "who helped introduce the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl in the United States". He was a student of Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social Research and helped popularize Schutz' work from the 1960s onward.
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Stephen R. Bloom
#28705
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir Stephen Robert Bloom FRS is a British Professor of Medicine at Imperial College London where he leads the Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism division. Education Bloom was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Master of Arts degree in 1968 and a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1979. He received his Doctor of Science degree from the University of London in 1982. Bloom completed appointments as a house officer, senior house officer and specialist registrar at Middlesex Hospital, University College London, where he also received his Medical Research Council Clinica...
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Randall Dipert
#26289
Overall Influence
1951 - 2019 (68 years)
Randall Roy Dipert was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia, the United States Military Academy, and the University at Buffalo where he retired as the C. S. Peirce Chair of American Philosophy.
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Ivan Kireyevsky
1806 - 1856 (50 years)
Ivan Vasilyevich Kireyevsky was a Russian literary critic and philosopher who, together with Aleksey Khomyakov, is credited as a co-founder of the Slavophile movement. Early life and career Ivan Kireyevsky and his brother Pyotr were born into a cultivated noble family of considerable means. Their father was known for hating French atheism so passionately that he would burn heaps of Voltaire's books, acquired specifically for the purpose. He contracted a fatal case of typhus while treating wounded soldiers during the French invasion of Russia. The boy was just six at the time of his death; he ...
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Jennifer Whiting
#31378
Overall Influence
Jennifer Elaine Whiting is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also taught at Harvard University and Cornell University, and was Chancellor Jackman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
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Jiyuan Yu
#26205
Overall Influence
1964 - 2016 (52 years)
Jiyuan Yu was a Chinese moral philosopher noted for his work on virtue ethics. Yu was a long-time and highly admired Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in Buffalo, New York, starting in 1997. Prior to his professorship, Yu completed a three-year post as a research fellow at the University of Oxford, England . He received his education in China at both Shandong University and Renmin University, in Italy at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and in Canada at the University of Guelph. His primary areas of research and teaching included Ancient Greek Philosoph...
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Herbert McLean Evans
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Herbert McLean Evans was an American anatomist and embryologist best known for co-discovering Vitamin E. Education He was born in Modesto, California. In 1908, he obtained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University.
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Harvey Cushing
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Harvey Williams Cushing was an American neurosurgeon, pathologist, writer, and draftsman. A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of physician William Osler in three volumes.
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Czesław Znamierowski
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Czesław Znamierowski was a Polish philosopher, jurist and sociologist. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Poznań and chaired its Department of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law. Znamierowski is noted in Polish law for his contributions to social sciences and jurisprudence, particularly the concept of legal system which is similar to H.L.A. Hart's ideas, but was published almost forty years before Hart's The Concept of Law.
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Zygmunt Ziembiński
#12939
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Zygmunt Ziembiński OPR , usually cited as Z. Ziembinski, was a Polish legal philosopher, logician, and one of the most prominent theoreticians of law in Poland in the second half of the 20th century.
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Jonardon Ganeri
#16449
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jonardon Ganeri, FBA, is a philosopher, specialising in philosophy of mind and in South Asian and Buddhist philosophical traditions. He holds the Bimal Matilal Distinguished Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was Global Network Professor in the College of Arts and Science, New York University, previously having taught at several universities in Britain. Ganeri graduated from Churchill College, Cambridge, with his undergraduate degree in mathematics, before completing a DPhil in philosophy at University and Wolfson Collegess, Oxford. He has published eight monographs, and is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy.
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