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,
#2401
Quassim Cassam
#21870
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Quassim Cassam, is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He writes on self-knowledge, perception, epistemic vices and topics in Kantian epistemology. As blurbed for his book, Vices of the Mind , Cassam defines epistemic vice as "character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that prevent us from gaining, keeping or sharing knowledge".
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Edvard Westermarck
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. Biography Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off Lutheran family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsinki as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there, obtaining his first degree in philosophy in 1886, but developing also an interest in anthropology and reading the works of Charles Darwin. His thesis, The History of...
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Johann Heinrich Abicht
1762 - 1816 (54 years)
Johann Heinrich Abicht was a German philosopher. Biography Abicht was born at . His grandfather was teacher and organist in Wilmersdorf, Gehren, and his father was a teacher in Volkstedt. Johann Abicht himself finished the college in Rudolstadt and visited the University of Erlangen in 1781. In 1784 he became controller at the house of chief equerry von Schall in Öhringen. Abicht made his magister in 1786 and his doctor in philosophy in 1790. In the same year, he was appointed adjunct and then extraordinary professor in the philosophical faculty. He became regular professor in 1796. On 4 Aug...
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Friedrich Karl Forberg
1770 - 1848 (78 years)
Friedrich Karl Forberg was a German philosopher and classical scholar. Biography Born in 1770 in Thuringia, Forberg studied under Karl Leonhard Reinhold at Jena. In 1791 he travelled to Klagenfurt, writing to Reinhold that there was much sympathy for the French Revolution, and to the followers of Immanuel Kant that the young ladies of Klagenfurt substituted Kant's writings for their prayer books.
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Isaac Passy
#24670
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Isaac Passy was a Bulgarian Jewish philosopher specializing in history, literature and aesthetics. He was a prominent professor at Sofia University from 1952 until 1993. He published over 40 monographs and edited some 80 volumes with philosophical texts and in history of philosophy from various epochs. He is the father of the Bulgarian politician and diplomat Solomon Passy.
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Eknath
1533 - 1599 (66 years)
Eknath , was an Indian Hindu saint, philosopher and poet. He was a devotee of the Hindu deity Vitthal and is a major figure of the Warkari movement. Eknath is often viewed as a spiritual successor to the prominent Marathi saints Dnyaneshwar and Namdev.
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Nancy Sherman
#28172
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nancy Sherman is a distinguished university professor and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. She was also the inaugural Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy. Sherman is the author of several books, and her views on military ethics have been influential.
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Juliane Rebentisch
#32502
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Juliane Rebentisch is a German philosopher and art historian whose research focuses on the history and politics of aesthetics. She is the author of three books: Aesthetics of Installation Art , The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence , and Theorien der Gegenwartskunst , and has edited numerous volumes on aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy in both German and English. Josef Chytry, in the academic journal Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, called Aesthetics of Installation Art a "formidable work." In 2017, she received the Lessing Prize from the city of Ha...
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Hannes Leitgeb
#22350
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Hannes Leitgeb is an Austrian philosopher and mathematician. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and has received a Humboldt Professorship in 2010. His areas of research include logic , epistemology , philosophy of mathematics , philosophy of language , cognitive science , philosophy of science , and history of philosophy .
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Rufino Tamayo
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Tamayo was active in the mid-20th century in Mexico and New York, painting figurative abstraction with surrealist influences.
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Yasuo Yuasa
#25990
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
was a Japanese philosopher of religion. Yuasa is known for his works on the theory of the body in Western and Asian philosophy and for his teaching. He has been referred to as "one of the most provocative and far-reaching" among Japan's contemporary philosophers.
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Bernard of Chartres
1070 - 1130 (60 years)
Bernard of Chartres was a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist philosopher, scholar, and administrator. Life The date and place of his birth are unknown. He was believed to have been the elder brother of Thierry of Chartres and to be of Breton origin, but research has shown that this is unlikely. He is recorded at the cathedral school of Chartres by 1115 and was chancellor until 1124. There is no proof that he was still alive after 1124.
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Ford Madox Brown
1821 - 1893 (72 years)
Ford Madox Brown was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work . Brown spent the latter years of his life painting the twelve works known as The Manchester Murals, depicting Mancunian history, for Manchester Town Hall.
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Cheryl Misak
#25850
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Cheryl J. Misak is a Canadian philosopher who works in pragmatism, the history of analytic philosophy, and bioethics. She is a University Professor at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in intellectual and cultural history. In 2011, Misak served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society. In December 2020, Misak became the interim director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
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Jennifer Lackey
#33379
Overall Influence
Jennifer Lackey is an American academic; she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Lackey is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of The Epistemology of Testimony and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays.
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Ignaz Semmelweis
1818 - 1865 (47 years)
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, and was described as the "saviour of mothers". Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth, and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated...
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Thomas Sheehan
#30977
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Thomas Sheehan is an American philosopher who is the current professor at the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago. He is known for his books on Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His philosophical specialties are in philosophy of religion, twentieth-century European philosophy, and classical metaphysics. He is the author of The First Coming, a controversial account of Easter.
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Jorge J. E. Gracia
#24352
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jorge J. E. Gracia was a Cuban-born American philosopher who was the Samuel P. Capen Chair, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Department of Comparative Literature in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gracia was educated in Cuba, the United States, Canada, and Spain, and received his Ph.D. in Medieval Philosophy from the University of Toronto.
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Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Russ Shafer-Landau
#33083
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Russ Shafer-Landau is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Education and career Shafer-Landau is a graduate of Brown University and completed his PhD work at the University of Arizona under the supervision of Joel Feinberg. He has been teaching philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 2002, where he became chair of the department. From 1992 to 2002 Shafer-Landau taught at the University of Kansas.
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Madsen Pirie
#4791
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Duncan Madsen Pirie is a British researcher and author. He is a co-founder and current President of the Adam Smith Institute, a UK neoliberal think tank which has been in operation since 1977. Early life and education Born in Hull, Pirie is the son of Douglas Pirie and Eva Madsen. As a child he attended the Humberstone Foundation School in Old Clee, Lincolnshire.
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Max Freedom Long
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Max Freedom Long was an American novelist and New Age author. Early life and career Max Freedom Long was born on October 26, 1890, in Sterling, Colorado to Toby Albert Long and his wife Jessie Diffendaffer. At the time of the 1910 census he was working as a photographer in his hometown, and was living in his grandfather's household with his parents. He attended Los Angeles State Normal School from September 1914 to June 1916, and graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in general education. After graduating, he worked briefly as an auto-mechanic in Los Angeles.
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Julian
331 - 363 (32 years)
Julian was the Caesar of the West from 355 to 360 and Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher and author in Greek. His rejection of Christianity, and his promotion of Neoplatonic Hellenism in its place, caused him to be remembered as Julian the Apostate in Christian tradition. He is sometimes referred to as Julian the Philosopher.
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Edward Dembowski
1822 - 1846 (24 years)
Edward Dembowski was a Polish philosopher, literary critic, journalist, and leftist independence activist. Life Edward Dembowski was the son of Julia, née Kochanowska, and a conservative castellan-voivode of the Congress Poland, Leon Dembowski. On account of Edward's szlachta origins and contrasting radical social views, he was called "the red castellan's-son."
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Donald Metcalf
#21088
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Donald Metcalf AC FRS FAA was an Australian medical researcher who spent most of his career at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. In 1954 he received the Carden Fellowship from the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria; while he officially retired in 1996, he continued working and held his fellowship until his death in December 2014.
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George Boas
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
George Boas was a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Education Boas received his education at Brown University, obtaining both a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy there, after which he studied shortly at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1917.
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Charles Andler
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Charles Philippe Théodore Andler was a French Germanist and philosopher. Life Andler was born to a Protestant family in Strasbourg. In 1887 and 1888, Andler failed to achieve his agrégation in philosophy, judged by Jules Lachelier, inspector-general in charge of philosophy, as showing "excessive bias" towards German philosophy. He therefore changed to take the German literature agrégation in 1889, passing out top of his class. Andler became professor of German at the Sorbonne in 1901 and at the Collège de France in 1926. Amongst his works were writings on Nietzsche, a commentary on The Commun...
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Hugo Bergmann
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Hugo Bergmann was an Israeli philosopher, born in Prague. Biography Hugo Samuel Bergmann was born and raised in Prague, Austria-Hungary. He was a member of the Prague intelligentsia visiting the salon group that met at the house of Berta Fanta. Bergmann married her daughter Else Fanta.
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Friedrich Christian Baumeister
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Friedrich Christian Baumeister was a German philosopher. Baumeister studied philosophy in Jena and Wittenberg. He became director of the Görlitz gymnasium in 1736. His textbooks propagated the metaphysics of Christian Wolff.
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Charles Best
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...
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Jakob Thomasius
1622 - 1684 (62 years)
Jakob Thomasius was a German academic philosopher and jurist. He is now regarded as an important founding figure in the scholarly study of the history of philosophy. His views were eclectic, and were taken up by his son Christian Thomasius.
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Fyodor Stepun
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was a Russian and German writer, philosopher, historian and sociologist. Biography Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was born in Russia on 18 February 1884, in Moscow. After attending secondary school in Moscow he went as a student to Heidelberg, and there in 1910 he obtained his doctorate for a thesis on Vladimir Solovyov's philosophy of history.
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Lev Tikhomirov
1852 - 1923 (71 years)
Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov , originally a Russian revolutionary and one of the members of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya, following his disenchantment with violent revolution became one of the leading conservative thinkers in Russia. He authored several books on monarchism, Orthodoxy, and Russian political philosophy.
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Lucian Freud
#1191
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the Briti...
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Antonio Escohotado
#15575
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Antonio Escohotado Espinosa , commonly called Antonio Escohotado, was a Spanish philosopher, jurist, essayist and university professor. His life's work primarily focused on law, philosophy and sociology, yet extended to many other disciplines. Escohotado gained public renown for his research on drugs and for his well-known anti-prohibitionist positions. His crown jewel The General History of Drugs, is the most comprehensive book ever written regarding drugs, in any language, in all of academia . The leitmotif of his work is, in the same way, an affirmation of freedom as an antidote to fear or the constraints that push the human being towards all kinds of servitude.
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Jean Tinguely
#2680
Overall Influence
1925 - 1991 (66 years)
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.
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Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
#2438
Jack Balkin
#3577
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jack M. Balkin is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project , a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society." He also directs the Knight Law and Media Program and the Abrams Institute for Free Expression at Yale Law School.
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Erich Rothacker
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Erich Rothacker was a German philosopher, a leading exponent of philosophical anthropology. Rothacker's first major work, Logik und Systematik der Geisteswissenschaften , presents the view that actual historical individuals, whose cognitive equipment is partially created by a specific cultural community while at the same time constantly modifying it, are the elements that constitute the subject of knowledge, rather than a timeless universal entity as it is represented by Descartes or Locke.
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Victor Reppert
#19143
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Victor Reppert is an American philosopher best known for his development of the "argument from reason". He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo, and Philosophia Christi. He is also a philosophy blogger, with two blogs.
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Jacek Salij
#28394
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jacek Salij OP is a Polish theologian and Thomist, philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, Dominican, translator, writer and publicist. Biography During the years 1960-1967 he studied theology at The Dominican Philosophical-Theological College in Cracow, followed by studies during the years 1968-1970 at The Academy of Catholic Theology in Warsaw. In 1971, he obtained the title Doctor of Law and obtained a post-doctorate diploma in 1979. In 1984, he worked at The Catholic University of Leuven . In 1990, he was appointed extraordinary professor of The Academy of Catholic Theology, Warsaw and in 19...
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Rogers Albritton
#38650
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Rogers Garland Albritton was an American philosopher who served as chair of the Harvard and UCLA philosophy departments. He published little and inspired the entry "albritton" - a contraction of "all but written" - in the Philosophical Lexicon begun by Daniel Dennett . Albritton's specialties included ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind, free will, skepticism, metaphysics and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Anthony J. Lisska
#22958
Overall Influence
Anthony J. Lisska was Maria Theresa Barney professor of philosophy at Denison University. He was a specialist in Thomism and analytic philosophy and the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas. He described his "intellectual avocation" as regional history and wrote several books on the history of Ohio. In 2016, the Denison University Gilpatrick Center was rededicated as the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement in honor of Anthony Lisska and his contributions to the university. These contributions include serving as dean, chairing the philosophy department, and founding and chairing the Honors Program...
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Jeremy Butterfield
#19540
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jeremy Nicholas Butterfield FBA is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, noted particularly for his work on philosophical aspects of quantum theory, relativity theory and classical mechanics.
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Daniel N. Robinson
#8890
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Daniel Nicholas Robinson was an American psychologist who was a professor of psychology at Georgetown University and later in his life became a fellow of the faculty of philosophy at Oxford University.
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Stanisław Wyspiański
1869 - 1907 (38 years)
Stanisław Mateusz Ignacy Wyspiański was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer. A patriotic writer, he created a series of symbolic, national dramas within the artistic philosophy of the Young Poland Movement.
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Max Jacob
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. Life and career After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend . Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916.
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Shoghi Effendi
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Shoghí Effendi was the grandson and successor of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, appointed to the role of Guardian of the Baháʼí Faith from 1921 until his death in 1957. He created a series of teaching plans that oversaw the expansion of the faith to many new countries, and also translated many of the writings of the Baháʼí central figures. He was succeeded by an interim arrangement of the Hands of the Cause until the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963.
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William Kneale
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
William Calvert Kneale was an English logician best known for his 1962 book The Development of Logic, a history of logic from its beginnings in Ancient Greece written with his wife Martha. Kneale was also known as a philosopher of science and the author of a book on probability and induction. Educated at the Liverpool Institute High School for boys, he later became a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and in 1960 succeeded to the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy previously occupied by the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin. He retired in 1966.
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Arthur Ransome
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.
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