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,
#2701
Jules Lequier
1814 - 1862 (48 years)
Jules Lequier was a French philosopher from Brittany. Lequier died, presumably by suicide, by swimming out into the ocean. Philosophical work Lequier wrote in favour of dynamic divine omniscience, wherein God's knowledge of the future is one of possibilities rather than actualities. Omniscience, under this view, is the knowledge of necessary facts as necessary, and contingent facts as contingent. Since the future does not yet exist as anything more than a realm of abstract possibilities, it is no impugning of divine omniscience to claim that God does not know the future as a fixed and unalterable state of affairs: that he does not know what is not there to be known.
Go to Profile#2702
Leonid Stolovich
#29062
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Leonid Naumovich Stolovich was a Russian-Estonian philosopher, Doctor of Philosophy and professor . Stolovich graduated from the Leningrad University in 1952, from 1953 on he worked at Tartu University, Estonia, from 1994 on as a professor emeritus. Above all, Stolovich studied esthetics: its history, theories of esthetics and axiology. He is the author of more than forty books and 400 publications in 20 languages.
Go to Profile#2703
John Haldane
#37851
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Joseph Haldane is a British philosopher, commentator and broadcaster. He is a former papal adviser to the Vatican. He is credited with coining the term 'analytical Thomism' and is himself a Thomist in the analytic tradition. Haldane is associated with The Veritas Forum and is the current chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#2704
Nicholas Talley
#27714
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nicholas "Nick" Talley FRACP, FAFPHM, FRCP , FRCP , FACP, FACG, AGAF, FAHMS is an Australian gastroenterologist, epidemiologist, researcher, and clinical educator. Early life Talley grew up in Sydney, Australia. He is a first-generation Australian and the son of a Hungarian gastroenterologist, also known as Nicholas Talley OAM FRACP.
Go to Profile#2705
Frank Van Dun
#21352
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Frank Van Dun is a Belgian philosopher of law and classical liberal natural law theorist. He is associated with the law faculty of the University of Ghent. In 2013 he was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think tank Libera!.
Go to Profile#2706
Agostinho da Silva
#9683
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
George Agostinho Baptista da Silva, GCSE was a Portuguese philosopher, essayist, and writer. His thought combines elements of pantheism and millenarism, an ethic of renunciation , and a belief in freedom as the most important feature of man. Anti-dogmatic, he asserts that truth is only found in the sum of all conflicting hypothesis . He may be considered a practical philosopher, living and working for a change in society, according to his beliefs.
Go to Profile#2707
Donald Livingston
#15368
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Donald Livingston is a former Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a David Hume scholar. In 2003 he founded the Abbeville Institute, which is devoted to the study of Southern culture and political ideas.
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Victor J. Stenger
#6517
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Victor John Stenger was an American particle physicist, philosopher, author, and religious skeptic. Following a career as a research scientist in the field of particle physics, Stenger was associated with New Atheism and he authored popular science books. He published twelve books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, including the 2007 best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. His final book was God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos . He was a regular...
Go to Profile#2709
David Edmonds
#28733
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
David Edmonds is a British philosopher, and a radio feature maker at the BBC World Service. He studied at Oxford University, has a PhD in philosophy from the Open University and has held fellowships at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Edmonds is the author of Caste Wars: A Philosophy of Discrimination and co-author with John Eidinow of Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers and Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time.
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Andrew Ure
1778 - 1857 (79 years)
Andrew Ure FRS was a Scottish physician, chemist, scriptural geologist, and early business theorist who founded the Garnet Hill Observatory. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society. Ure published a number of books based on his industrial consulting experiences.
Go to Profile#2711
Michael B. Sporn
#47534
Overall Influence
#2712
Étienne Borne
#20731
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Étienne Vincent Borne was born in Manduel . He was a professor of philosophy Hypokhâgne at Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Étienne Borne founded the Mouvement republicain populaire , and the French Christian Democratic Party. He was a columnist in the newspaper La Croix. Jacques Derrida was one of his students.
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Sebastiano Maffettone
#35762
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sebastiano Maffettone is a political philosopher and University Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome, where he teaches Political Philosophy and Theories of Globalization. He has taught in several Italian universities as well as International universities . Maffettone graduated summa cum laude from the University of Naples in 1970, and he completed his graduate studies in social philosophy LSE in 1976, under the supervision of philosophers such as Karl Popper and Amartya K. Sen.
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Ursula Wolf
#36873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ursula Wolf is a German philosophy professor and writer. Biography She has been philosophy teacher at the Free University of Berlin, at the University of Frankfurt, and, now, at the University of Mannheim, where she holds a full professorship in that specialty.
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Constance Jones
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones known as Constance Jones or E.E. Constance Jones, was an English philosopher and educator. She worked in logic and ethics. Life and career Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was born at Langstone Court, Llangarron, Herefordshire, to John Jones and his wife, Emily, daughter of Thomas Oakley JP, of Monmouthshire. She was the eldest of ten children. Constance was mostly tutored at home. She spent her early teenage years with her family in Cape Town, South Africa, and when they returned to England in 1865 she attended a small school, Miss Robinson's, in Cheltenham, fo...
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Kate Manne
#6241
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Kate Alice Manne is an Australian philosopher, associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, and author. Her work is primarily in feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and social philosophy.
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Walter Everett
#2968
Overall Influence
Walter Everett is a music theorist specializing in popular music who teaches at the University of Michigan. His books include The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology , which has been called "the most important work to appear on the Beatles thus far", and its follow-up volume, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul . He also wrote The Foundations of Rock: From 'Blue Suede Shoes' to 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes and has contributed to titles in the Cambridge Companions to Music series.
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Luís António Verney
1713 - 1792 (79 years)
Luís António Verney was a Portuguese philosopher, theologian, and pedagogue. An estrangeirado, Verney is sometimes called the most important figure of the Portuguese Enlightenment. Most notably, Verney advocated a plan to completely reform the educational system in Portugal, in radical opposition to the methods employed at the time by the Jesuits, who had long had a near-monopoly on teaching in the country; his controversial manifesto, Verdadeiro Método de Estudar , would later serve as the basis for many of the educational reforms instituted under the Marquis of Pombal.
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François Wahl
#9776
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
François Wahl was a French editor and structuralist. Biography François Wahl was editor at the Éditions du Seuil, a publishing company in Paris. He was the editor of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, among others.
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Thomas De Koninck
#12067
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Thomas De Koninck is a philosopher from Québec. After studying at Oxford , Université Laval , and Freie Universität Berlin, he became professor at University of Notre Dame in the United States and at Université Laval in Québec. A well-known rumor posits that as a child he inspired Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's character The Little Prince when Saint-Exupéry was living in the house of his father, Charles De Koninck, in Québec City, in 1942.
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André Lalande
1867 - 1963 (96 years)
André Lalande was a French philosopher. In 1904, he was appointed Professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. Whilst still at school in 1883-4 he was taught by Émile Durkheim, whom he greatly appreciated. His notes have provided the basis for the publication Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883–1884 in 2004.
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Grigory Pomerants
#14482
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Grigory Solomonovich Pomerants was a Russian philosopher and cultural theorist. He is the author of numerous philosophical works that circulated in samizdat and made an impact on the liberal intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Józef Tischner
#17043
Overall Influence
1931 - 2000 (69 years)
Józef Stanisław Tischner was a Polish priest and philosopher. The first chaplain of the trade union, "Solidarity" . Life Tischner was born in Stary Sącz to a Góral family and grew up in the village Łopuszna in the south east of Poland. He studied at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the 1970s he became an important writer of the opposition movement against the socialist government of the People's Republic of Poland. In 1980s he was considered the semi-official chaplain of the Solidarity movement, and was praised by Pope John Paul II.
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Benedict Ashley
#28161
Overall Influence
1915 - 2013 (98 years)
Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. , was an American theologian and philosopher who had a major influence on 20th century Catholic theology and ethics in America through his writing, teaching, and consulting with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Author of 19 books, Ashley was a major exponent of the River Forest Thomism. Health Care Ethics, which he co-authored in 1975 and now in its fifth edition, continues to be a fundamental text in the field of Catholic Medical Ethics. Ashley taught at numerous institutions and was an active teacher, consultant, and author. He was a faculty member o...
Go to Profile#2725
Marcia Angell
#6483
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Marcia Angell is an American physician, author, and the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Charles Frankel
1917 - 1979 (62 years)
Charles Frankel was an American philosopher, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State, professor and founding director of the National Humanities Center. Early life and personal life Born into a Jewish family in New York City, U.S., he was the son of Abraham Philip and Estelle Edith Frankel. After attending Cornell University, Frankel received Bachelor of Arts with honors in English and philosophy from Columbia University in 1937. He then continued his education at the same university, earning a Doctor of Philosophy in 1946. During World War II, Frankel served as lieutenant in the United States Nav...
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Wilhelm Schuppe
1836 - 1913 (77 years)
Ernst Julius Wilhelm Schuppe was a German positivist philosopher, born in Brieg, Silesia. He advocated what he called 'immanent philosophy'. Life In 1860 Schuppe received his doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Berlin with a thesis on Ciceronian rhetoric. From 1861 he was a school teacher in Berlin, Breslau, Neisse, Gliwice and Bytom. In 1873 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Greifswald, becoming university rector in 1884. He died in Breslau.
Go to Profile#2728
Andrew Lees
#37196
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Andrew John Lees FRCP FRCP FMedSci is Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London and University College London. In 2011 he was named as the world's most highly cited Parkinson's disease researcher.
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Hiroki Azuma
#7885
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Hiroki Azuma is a Japanese cultural critic, novelist, and philosopher. He is the co-founder and former director of Genron, an independent institute in Tokyo, Japan. Biography Azuma was born in Mitaka, Tokyo. Azuma received his PhD in Culture and Representation from the University of Tokyo in 1999 and became a professor at the International University of Japan in 2003. He was an Executive Research Fellow and Professor at the Center for Global Communications and a Research Fellow at Stanford University's Japan Center. Since 2006, he has been working at the Center for Study of World Civilizatio...
Go to Profile#2730
Maarten Boudry
#16656
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Maarten Boudry is a Dutch-speaking Belgian philosopher and skeptic. He has been a researcher and teaching member of the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University since 2006. To date, he has published over 30 articles in various philosophy of science journals.
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Kang Youwei
1858 - 1927 (69 years)
Kang Youwei was a prominent political thinker and reformer in China of the late Qing dynasty. His increasing closeness to and influence over the young Guangxu Emperor sparked conflict between the emperor and his adoptive mother, the regent Empress Dowager Cixi. His ideas were influential in the abortive Hundred Days' Reform. Following the coup by Cixi that ended the reform, Kang was forced to flee. He continued to advocate for a Chinese constitutional monarchy after the founding of the Republic of China.
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Theodore Parker
1810 - 1860 (50 years)
Theodore Parker was an American transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and popular quotations would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
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Milan Komar
#24735
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Milan Komar, also known as Emilio Komar was a Slovene Argentine Catholic philosopher and essayist. Life He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, to a Slovene family who had emigrated from the Italian-occupied Julian March. His father, Ludvik was a retired officer of the Austro-Hungarian Army. Milan spent his childhood in Ljubljana and Škofja Loka, and in 1939 he enrolled in the University of Ljubljana where he studied law. He specialized in Canonical law and continued his studies at the University of Turin, where he graduated in 1942. He firs...
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Mihailo Petrović Alas
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Mihailo Petrović Alas , was a Serbian mathematician and inventor. He was also a distinguished professor at Belgrade University, an academic, fisherman, philosopher, writer, publicist, musician, businessman, traveler and volunteer in the Balkan Wars, the First and Second World Wars. He was a student of Henri Poincaré, Paul Painlevé, Charles Hermite and Émile Picard. Petrović contributed significantly to the study of differential equations and phenomenology, founded engineering mathematics in Serbia, and invented one of the first prototypes of a hydraulic analog computer.
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Ivan Luppol
1896 - 1943 (47 years)
Ivan Kapitonovich Luppol was a Soviet philosopher, literary critic and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Biography Luppol attended the Faculty of Law of the Moscow University, graduating in 1919. In the same year he worked as a propagandist and political worker in the Red Army and in 1920 he became a member of the Russian Communist Party . He then studied at the Department of Philosophy of the Institute of Red Professors, being a member the Institute's first enrollment. His earlier works were about the philosophy of Denis Diderot.
Go to Profile#2736
Glenn Reynolds
#3738
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law, and is known for his American politics blog, Instapundit. Instapundit blog Reynolds' blog got started as a class project in August 2001, when he was teaching a class on Internet law. Much of Instapundit's content consists of links to other sites, often with brief comments.
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Shinya Yamanaka
#1157
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Shinya Yamanaka is the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (iPS – induced Pluripotent Stem Cell), senior investigator for the J. David Gladstone Institutes, a professor for Kyoto University’s Institute for Frontier Medical Services, and a professor of anatomy for the University of California at San Francisco. He studied at Osaka Kyoiku University before earning his M.D. at Kobe University and his Ph.D. from Osaka City University Graduate School. He completed a residency in orthopedic surgery at National Osaka Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship for the J. David Gladstone Institutes of Cardiovascular Disease.
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Robert Cummings Neville
#24061
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Cummings Neville is an American systematic philosopher and theologian, author of numerous books and papers, and ex-Dean of the Boston University School of Theology. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University.
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Renzo Novatore
1890 - 1922 (32 years)
Abele Rizieri Ferrari , better known by the pen name Renzo Novatore, was an Italian individualist anarchist, illegalist and anti-fascist poet, philosopher and militant, now mostly known for his posthumously published book Toward the Creative Nothing and associated with ultra-modernist trends of futurism. His thought was influenced by Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Palante, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Baudelaire.
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Nicole C. Karafyllis
#20012
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nicole C. Karafyllis is a German philosopher and biologist. As of 2010, she has been a Professor of Philosophy at the TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig/Brunswick Institute of Technology . Biography Nicole Christine Karafyllis was born in Germany to a German mother and a Greek father. From 1989 to 1994, she studied biology at the Universities of Erlangen and Tübingen. She was awarded her doctorate in biology from the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen in 1999. Her Habilitation in philosophy was completed at the University of Stuttgart in 2006, dealing with the topic Phenomenology of Growth.
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Erich Adickes
1866 - 1928 (62 years)
Erich Adickes , was a German philosopher who wrote many important works on Immanuel Kant and the Kantian philosophy. Adickes was a critical empiricist . Adickes was born in Lesum , and died in Tübingen where he had been professor of philosophy since 1904. He studied theology, philosophy, and history at Tübingen, then at Berlin under Friedrich Paulsen , graduating Dr. Phil. with a dissertation titled Kants Systematik als systembildender Factor . Habilitating at Kiel in 1895, he became a full professor there in 1898. In 1902 he moved to Münster as full professor, then in 1904 succeeded Christop...
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Hitoshi Nagai
#40056
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
is one of the most influential Japanese philosophers, who taught philosophy at Chiba University and later at Nihon University. His main research fields are metaphysics and metaethics. His books include "Philosophy for Kids!" and "A Transfer Student and Black Jack: A Seminar on Solipsity," which interpret solipsism from a unique metaphysical point of view. Nagai's philosophy has been heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, however, his philosophy successfully elucidates an important aspect of solipsism which Wittgenstein could not fully express in his philosophical works. Nagai stresses that the so...
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Georges Bénézé
1888 - 1978 (90 years)
Georges Bénézé was a French philosopher with a scientific background, which enabled him to temper the French critics of Einstein's Relativity theory during the 1920s. Bénézé was a disciple and editor of French philosopher Alain. Having completed his higher education as a student of the École normale supérieure , he taught Hegel's philosophy in a number of provincial lycées, most notably in Poitiers where Jean Hyppolite was a student, then became Professor of Lycée Henri-IV starting in 1936. A regular contributor to L'Œuvre, a collaborationist paper of Vichy France, Bénézé was sentenced to Indignité nationale by virtue of the 1944 Ordonnances, and then fired from public employment.
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Andreas Röschlaub
1768 - 1835 (67 years)
Andreas Röschlaub was a German physician born in Lichtenfels, Bavaria. He studied medicine at the Universities of Würzburg and Bamberg, gaining his doctorate at the latter institution in 1795. In 1798 he became a full professor of pathology at Bamberg, and in 1802 transferred to the University of Landshut, where he was director of the medical school. In 1826 he relocated to the University of Munich as a professor of medicine. He died on 7 July 1835 during a recreational trip to Ulm.
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Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum
1899 - 1942 (43 years)
Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum was a Polish logician and philosopher. She published some twenty research papers along with translations into Polish of three books by Bertrand Russell. The main focus of her writings was on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation. She is noted especially for authoring the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox which she credits to Carl Hempel and the probabilistic solution she outlined to it. Shot by the Gestapo in 1942, she, like her husband Adolf Lindenbaum, and many other eminent representatives of Polish logic, shared t...
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Stephen Darwall
#41025
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Stephen Darwall is a contemporary moral philosopher, best known for his work developing Kantian and deontological themes. He was named Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University in 2008.
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Abul A'la Maududi
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Abul A'la al-Maududi was an Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist, activist, and scholar active in British India and later, following the partition, in Pakistan. Described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as "the most systematic thinker of modern Islam", his numerous works, which "covered a range of disciplines such as Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, law, philosophy, and history", were written in Urdu, but then translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Burmese, Malayalam and many other languages. He sought to revive Islam, and to propagate what he understood to be "true Islam".
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Mihai Șora
#10069
Overall Influence
1916 - 2023 (107 years)
Mihai Șora was a Romanian philosopher and essayist. Career After travelling back to Romania in 1948, Șora became a member of the Romanian Communist Party and was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the time led by communist leader Ana Pauker. In interviews published after the fall of Communist Party rule in 1989, Șora said that he was unofficially "arrested". He was barred from holding a teaching appointment in Communist Romania, but nevertheless became an influential editor for one of the main Romanian publishers, ESPLA. Șora's family emigrated to the West in the 1970s, and he was allowed to visit them in the 1980s.
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António Castanheira Neves
#12311
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
António Castanheira Neves is a Portuguese legal philosopher and a professor emeritus at the law faculty of the University of Coimbra. According to Castanheira Neves, law can only be understood through legal problems , which have to be solved within the legal system . Law, he claims, is not something given or previous, but the solution to legal problems. Legal problems are the decisive starting point. His opposition to positivism, to natural law and to the several theories of legal syllogism would make him one of the first and most accomplished advocates of interpretivism.
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Steven Kuhn
#31486
Overall Influence
Steven Kuhn is a philosophy professor at Georgetown University whose research focuses on logic, ethics and the philosophy of language. Early life, family and education Kuhn earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University.
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