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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#251
Lloyd P. Gerson
#5207
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lloyd P. Gerson is an American-Canadian scholar of ancient philosophy, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and Neoplatonism. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is best-known for his work on Plotinus, particularly his full-length translation of the Enneads that is based primarily on the Henry-Schwyzer editio minor Greek text.
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Stephen R. L. Clark
#5606
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Stephen Richard Lyster Clark is an English philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Clark specialises in the philosophy of religion and animal rights, writing from a philosophical position that might broadly be described as Christian Platonist. He is the author of twenty books, including The Moral Status of Animals , The Nature of the Beast , Animals and Their Moral Standing , G.K. Chesterton , Philosophical Futures , and Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy , as well as 77 scholarly articles, and chapters in another 109 books. He is a former editor-in-chie...
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David Benatar
#2964
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David Benatar is a South African philosopher, academic, and author. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which he argues that coming into existence is serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings.
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Paul Boghossian
#5229
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Artin Boghossian is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he is chair of the department . His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is also director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.
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Zaki Naguib Mahmoud
#4614
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Zaki Naguib Mahmoud was an Egyptian intellectual and thinker, and is considered a pioneer in modern Arabic philosophical thought. He was described by Abbas Mahmoud al-Akkad as "the philosopher of authors and author of philosophers". Mahmoud adhered to logical positivism and adopted science interpretation with social motivations to reconcile the Arab tradition with modernism. Mahmoud defines the "Arab tradition" as the configuration of techniques by which our ancestors lived, and he viewed logical positivism as the spirit of "Modernism".
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Peter Sloterdijk
#1689
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.
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Allan Bloom
#1429
Overall Influence
1930 - 1992 (62 years)
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Chicago.
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Ray Monk
#3692
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ray Monk is a British biographer who is renowned for his biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he taught in various capacities from 1992 to 2018.
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Richard J. Bernstein
#4172
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Richard Jacob Bernstein was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for Social Research, where he was Vera List Professor of Philosophy. Bernstein wrote extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics.
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Onora O'Neill
#3081
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. Early life and education Onora Sylvia O'Neill was born on 23 August 1941 in Aughafatten. The daughter of Sir Con O'Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul's Girls' School, London, before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Somerville College, Oxford. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor.
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David Pears
#5321
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
David Francis Pears, FBA was a British philosopher renowned for his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein. An Old Boy of Westminster School, he was in the Royal Artillery during World War II, and was seriously injured in a practice gas attack. After leaving the army he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and was then for many years a Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
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Philip Pettit
#3139
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.
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Morton White
#4526
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Morton White was an American philosopher and historian of ideas. He was a proponent of a doctrine he called holistic pragmatism and also a noted scholar of American intellectual history. He was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard from 1953 to 1970. He was Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where he served as Professor in the School of Historical Studies from 1970 until he retired in 1987.
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Paul Guyer
#4992
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics. Since 2012, he has been Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University. Education and career Guyer grew up on Long Island, New York, and attended public schools there, graduating from Lynbrook High School in 1965. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1969, where he studied in the Departments of Philosophy and German; his Ph.D. in Philosophy was also taken at Harvard University, with a dissertation directed by Stanley Cavell. Guyer joined the University ...
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John Lennox
#2098
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Carson Lennox is an Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian philosopher. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God , and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
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Paul Thagard
#2087
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Richard Thagard is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He is a writer, and has contributed to research in analogy and creativity, inference, cognition in the history of science, and the role of emotion in cognition.
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Ruth Millikan
#5197
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ruth Garrett Millikan is a leading American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language. Millikan has spent most of her career at the University of Connecticut, where she is now Professor Emerita of Philosophy.
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Viktor Frankl
#254
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.
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David Papineau
#5802
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Papineau is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught for several years at Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of Robinson College.
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Nick Land
#2387
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nick Land is an English philosopher, theorist, short story writer and blogger. He has been described as "the father of accelerationism", and his work has been tied to the development of speculative realism. He was a leader of the 1990s "theory-fiction" collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit after its original founder cyberfeminist theorist Sadie Plant departed from it. His work departs from the formal conventions of academic writing and embraces a wide range of influences, as well as exploring unorthodox and "dark" philosophical interests.
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John Cottingham
#3869
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#272
Mario Perniola
#3802
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Mario Perniola was an Italian philosopher, professor of aesthetics and author. Many of his works have been published in English. Biography Mario Perniola was born in Asti, Piedmont. He studied philosophy under Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin where he graduated in 1965. While he was reading philosophy in Turin, he met Gianni Vattimo and Umberto Eco, who all became prominent scholars of Pareyson's school. From 1966 to 1969 he was connected to the avant-garde Situationist International movement founded by Guy Debord with whom he kept on friendly terms for several years. He became a ful...
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Ullin Place
#5554
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Ullin Thomas Place , usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. After several years at the University of Adelaide, he taught for some years in the Department of Philosophy in the University of Leeds.
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Mou Zongsan
#5162
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Mou Zongsan was a Chinese philosopher and translator. He was born in Shandong province and graduated from Peking University. In 1949 he moved to Taiwan and later to Hong Kong, and he remained outside of mainland China for the rest of his life. His thought was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, whose three Critiques he translated from English, possibly first, into Chinese, and above all by Tiantai Buddhist philosophy.
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Marcia Baron
#6216
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marcia Baron is an American philosopher and the Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Her main research interests include moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophical issues in criminal law. Baron is an associate editor of Inquiry, a member of the editorial board of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, a series editor for New Directions in Ethics, and a member of the editorial board of the North American Kant Studies in Philosophy.
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Cornel West
#789
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#277
Keith DeRose
#7287
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Keith DeRose is an American philosopher teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is currently Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy. He taught previously at New York University and Rice University. His primary interests include epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and history of modern philosophy. He is best known for his work on contextualism in epistemology, especially as a response to the traditional problem of skepticism.
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Elizabeth S. Anderson
#3004
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.
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Cora Diamond
#5692
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.
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Robert P. George
#1874
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#281
Robert Rauschenberg
#360
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines , a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
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Joseph Agassi
#2650
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Joseph Agassi was an Israeli academic with contributions in logic, scientific method, and philosophy. He studied under Karl Popper and taught at the London School of Economics. Agassi taught in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Hong Kong from 1960 to 1963. He later taught at the University of Illinois, Boston University, and York University in Canada. He had dual appointments in the last positions with Tel Aviv University.
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Douglas Kellner
#2358
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Douglas Kellner is an American academic who works at the intersection of "third-generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible. He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Miranda Fricker
#6414
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Miranda Fricker, FBA FAAS is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield. Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone "specifically in their capacity as a knower", and explored the concept in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice.
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C. West Churchman
#647
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Charles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research, system analysis and ethics.
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Ivor Grattan-Guinness
#2286
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Ivor Owen Grattan-Guinness was a historian of mathematics and logic. Life Grattan-Guinness was born in Bakewell, England; his father was a mathematics teacher and educational administrator. He gained his bachelor degree as a Mathematics Scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and an MSc in Mathematical Logic and the Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics in 1966. He gained both the doctorate in 1969, and higher doctorate in 1978, in the History of Science at the University of London. He was Emeritus Professor of the History of Mathematics and Logic at Middlesex University, and...
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Enrique Dussel
#3589
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini was an Argentine-Mexican academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014.
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J. Anthony Blair
#3458
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Anthony Blair is a Canadian philosopher. Along with his colleague Ralph Johnson, he has been credited as one of the founding members of the informal logic movement in North America. The two co-published one of the movement's most influential texts, "Logical Self-Defense". Blair is also co-founder of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric, co-founder of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation , and a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation .
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Étienne Balibar
#2766
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
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Evandro Agazzi
#6576
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Evandro Agazzi is an Italian philosopher and professor at the University of Genoa. His fields of interest are ethics of science and technology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, and systems theory.
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Stanley Hauerwas
#2321
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stanley Martin Hauerwas is an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas originally taught at the University of Notre Dame before moving to Duke University. Hauerwas was a longtime professor at Duke University, serving as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. In the fall of 2014, he also assumed a chair in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one of the world's most influential living theologians and was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001.
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Jean-Yves Girard
#2961
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Yves Girard is a French logician working in proof theory. He is a research director at the mathematical institute of University of Aix-Marseille, at Luminy. Biography Jean-Yves Girard is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.
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Torbjörn Tännsjö
#5727
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ulf Torbjörn Harald Tännsjö is a Swedish professor of philosophy and public intellectual. He has held a chair in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University since 2002 and he is Affiliated Professor of Medical Ethics at Karolinska Institute. Tännsjö was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University from 1976 to 1993 and Research Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Swedish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences between 1993 and 1995. Thereafter, he was a professor of Practical Philosophy at Göteborg University 1995–2001.
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Bruce L. Benson
#2891
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bruce L. Benson is an American academic economist who is recognized as an authority on law and economics and a major exponent of anarcho-capitalist legal theory. He is chair of the department of economics, DeVoe L. Moore Professor, distinguished research professor and courtesy professor of law at Florida State University and the recipient of the 2006 Adam Smith Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and has recently been a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Czech Republic, visiting professor at t...
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Manuel DeLanda
#3291
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Manuel DeLanda is a Mexican-American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches courses on the philosophy of urban history and the dynamics of cities as historical actors with an emphasis on the importance of self-organization and material culture in the understanding of a city. DeLanda also teaches architectural theory as an adjunct professor of architecture and urban design at the Pratt Institute and serves as the Gilles Deleuze Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School.
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Robert M. Pirsig
#2775
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Robert Maynard Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher. He was the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals , and he co-authored On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings along with his wife and editor, Wendy Pirsig.
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Carl Mitcham
#3381
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Carl Mitcham is a philosopher of engineering and technology, Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines and Visiting International Professor of Philosophy of Technology at Renmin University of China.
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Timothy Morton
#5225
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Timothy Bloxam Morton is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Morton's use of the term 'hyperobjects' was inspired by Björk's 1996 single 'Hyperballad', although the term 'Hyper-objects' has also been used in computer science since 1967. Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam. Their recent book Humankind: So...
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Joseph Fletcher
#5314
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Joseph Francis Fletcher was an American professor who founded the theory of situational ethics in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in the field of bioethics. Fletcher was a leading academic proponent of the potential benefits of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, and cloning. Ordained as an Episcopal priest, he later identified himself as an atheist.
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Hazel Barnes
#4956
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hazel Estella Barnes was an American philosopher, author, and translator. Best known for her popularization of existentialism in America, Barnes translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as writing original works on the subject. After earning her Ph.D. in Classics from Yale in 1941, she spent much of her career at the University of Colorado. In 1979, Barnes became the first woman to be named Distinguished Professor at CU-Boulder. In recognition of her long tenure and service to the University, in 1991 CU established the Hazel Barnes Prize for faculty who best embody "the enriching int...
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