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,
#2851
John Herman Randall Jr.
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
John Herman Randall Jr. was an American philosopher, New Thought author, and educator. Early life Randall was born on February 14, 1899, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The son of John Herman Randall Sr., a Baptist minister, he obtained his A.B. from Columbia University in 1918. He obtained an A.M. the following year and a PhD in 1922, with a dissertation titled "The Problem of Group Responsibility to Society". He was influenced by a close group of friends, including James Gutmann, Horace Fries, Herbert Schneider and Irwin Edman. Other influences were his teacher John Dewey, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, John J.
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Branden Fitelson
#34724
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Branden Fitelson is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. He is known for his expertise on formal epistemology and philosophy of science. Bibliography Edward N. Zalta and Branden Fitelson, "Steps Toward a Computational Metaphysics", Journal of Philosophical Logic 36 : 227–247.
Go to Profile#2853
Ishida Baigan
1685 - 1744 (59 years)
Ishida Baigan was a Japanese lecturer and philosopher, born in Tanba Province, who founded the Shingaku movement based on Neo-Confucianism, the study of the doctrines of Zhu Xi, incorporating Shinto, Buddhism and so on, which advocated all education include teachings in ethics and morality.
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Thomas S. Hibbs
#19559
Overall Influence
Thomas S. Hibbs is an American philosopher and the 9th President of the University of Dallas, a Catholic liberal arts university. He served as president from July 1, 2019 until March 7, 2021. As of July 1, 2021 he is the J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, where had served as dean of the honors college and distinguished professor of ethics and culture from 2003 until 2019. Hibbs' predecessor in the Rayzor Chair was the Scottish Catholic philosopher, John Haldane.
Go to Profile#2855
Rinaldo Bellomo
#50178
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#2856
Tsang Lap Chuen
#33156
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Tsang Lap Chuen is a Chinese philosopher in the analytic tradition. He is known for his theory of the sublime in which he presents the notion of limit-situations in life as being central to the human experience.
Go to Profile#2857
Crito of Alopece
469 BC - 500 BC (-31 years)
Crito of Alopece was an ancient Athenian agriculturist depicted in the Socratic literature of Plato and Xenophon, where he appears as a faithful and lifelong companion of the philosopher Socrates. Although the later tradition of ancient scholarship attributed philosophical works to Crito, modern scholars do not consider him to have been an active philosopher, but rather a member of Socrates' inner circle through childhood friendship.
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John Plamenatz
1912 - 1975 (63 years)
John Petrov Plamenatz was a Montenegrin political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his analysis of political obligation and his theory of democracy.
Go to Profile#2859
William Westmoreland
#299
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
William Childs Westmoreland was a United States Army general, most notably commander of United States forces during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968. He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1968 to 1972.
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Hara Tanzan
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Hara Tanzan was a Japanese philosopher and Sōtō Buddhist monk. He served as abbot of Saijoji temple in Odawara and as professor at the University of Tokyo during the Bakumatsu and Meiji era. He was a forerunner of the modernization of Japanese Buddhism and the first to attempt to incorporate concepts from the natural sciences into Zen Buddhism.
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Lyubov Axelrod
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Lyubov Isaakovna Axelrod was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist philosopher and an art theoretician. Early life Axelrod was born in the family of a rabbi in Vilenkovichi, a village in the Vilna gubernia of the Russian Empire, now in Pastavy Raion, Belarus. She became involved with the narodnik organization at age 16. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1887, with the assistance of Leo Jogiches when the Vitebsk organisation collapsed in the wake of an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III of Russia organised by Aleksandr Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Lenin.
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Herman Cappelen
#30681
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Herman Wright Cappelen is a Norwegian philosopher. He is currently the Chair Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Biography Cappelen is the son of author and publisher Peder Wright Cappelen and actress Kari Simonsen. Cappelen received a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford, Balliol College, in 1989. In 1996, Cappelen received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. The title of his dissertation was "The Metaphysics of Words and the Semantics of Quotation". His advisors were Charles Chihara, Stephen Neale, and John Searle.
Go to Profile#2863
John F. X. Knasas
#38844
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Francis Xavier Knasas is an American philosopher. He is a leading existential Thomist in the Neo-Thomist movement, best known for engaging such thinkers as Bernard Lonergan, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeremy Wilkins in disputes over human cognition to affirm a Thomistic epistemology of direct realism and defending the thought of Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson and Fr. Joseph Owens. He holds the Bishop Wendelin J. Nold Endowed Chair as Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, under the direction of Fr.
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Ferdinand Fellmann
#24277
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Ferdinand Fellmann was a German philosopher. After the expulsion of his family in 1946 out of Hirschberg Fellmann grew up in Hameln/Weser . Biography Fellmann studied at the University of Münster and the University of Pavia, promoted by the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes” . He graduated from his studies in English and Romance Languages and Literature in 1959. From 1962 to 1965 Fellmann continued his studies in Giessen . He studied there under his most influential professors: Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Hans Robert Jauss, and Professor of Philosophy Hans Blumenberg. ...
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Alena Buyx
#23398
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Alena Michaela Buyx is a German medical ethicist. She has been Chair of the German Ethics Council since 2020. Early life and education Buyx studied medicine, philosophy and sociology at the University of Münster, the University of York and the University College London from 1997, and earned a PhD.
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Eduardo Mendieta
#31864
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Eduardo Mendieta is a Colombian-born Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, and former acting director of the Rock Ethics Institute. Mendieta's research focuses on Ethics, Political Philosophy, Latinx philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, Critical Theory , Philosophy of Race, and Feminist Philosophy.
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Eudorus of Alexandria
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Eudorus of Alexandria was an ancient Greek philosopher, and a representative of Middle Platonism. He attempted to reconstruct Plato's philosophy in terms of Pythagoreanism. Life Little is known about Eudorus' life. Chronologically, he lived in the 1st century BC, and did his work prior to Strabo and Arius Didymus, both of whom quote him. He was involved in a plagiarism controversy with Aristo of Alexandria, one of Antiochus of Ascalon's students, as they had both written a work on the Nile. but he is not mentioned by Antiochus' contemporary Cicero, implying he was not one of Antiochus' students.
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Alastair Hannay
#21676
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Alastair Hannay is professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Educated in Edinburgh and London, where he studied under A. J. Ayer and Bernard Williams and since 1961 resident in Norway. Hannay has written extensively on the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. His book "The Public" as well as examining the roles of the 'public' as audience and political participant, brings several Kierkegaardian insights to bear on contemporary political life. Hannay has written a novella and several pocket books on philosophical themes, as well as a memoir . From 2006 to 2020 he was a member of the te...
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Elizabeth Barnes
#45313
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Barnes is an American philosopher working in feminist philosophy, metaphysics, social philosophy and ethics. Barnes is a professor of philosophy at the Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia.
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Georgia Warnke
#37007
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Georgia Warnke is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Center for Ideas & Society at the University of California, Riverside. She chaired the Department from 2002 to 2004. She also acted as the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UCR from 2006 to 2011.
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Germaine de Staël
1766 - 1817 (51 years)
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël , was a prominent woman of letters and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan intellectual circles. She was the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a respected salonhostess. Throughout her life, she held a moderate stance during the tumultuous periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, persisting until the time of the French Restoration.
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Monique Canto-Sperber
#22527
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Monique Canto-Sperber is a French philosopher. Her works, translated in several languages, are focused on ethics and contemporary political issues. A former Director of the École normale supérieure from 2005 to 2012, she has been President of Paris Sciences et Lettres – Quartier latin, a French higher education and research institution, since 2012.
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Susan Finsen
#42195
Overall Influence
Susan Finsen is an American philosopher, currently professor emeritus of philosophy and former chair of the department at California State University, San Bernardino. She specializes in moral philosophy, with a particular interest in animal rights, as well as philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. She is the co-author, with her husband Lawrence Finsen, of The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect , and is the director of Californians for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
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Heinrich Ahrens
1808 - 1874 (66 years)
Julius Heinrich Ahrens was a German philosopher, jurist, and professor in Brussels, Graz, and Leipzig. Life Born in Salzgitter, Ahrens studied in Wolfenbüttel and the University of Göttingen. Ahrens, whose main interest was the philosophy of law and the state, was a disciple of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, with whom he defended his habilitation De confoederatione germanica in 1830.
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Thomas Hurka
#28413
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Thomas Hurka is a Canadian philosopher who holds the Jackman Distinguished Chair in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto and who taught previously, from 1978 to 2002, at the University of Calgary.
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Herbert Benson
#4204
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Herbert Benson was an American medical doctor, cardiologist, and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was a professor of mind/body medicine at Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute at MGH. He was a founding trustee of The American Institute of Stress. He contributed more than 190 scientific publications and 12 books. More than five million copies of his books have been printed in different languages.
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Aroj Ali Matubbar
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Aroj Ali Matubbar was a self-taught philosopher and rationalist from Bangladesh. Early life and education Matubbar was born in the village of Charbaria Lamchari, about from the city of Barisal in British India, now Bangladesh, to a poor peasant family. His original name was Aroj Ali; he later adopted the name Matubbar . He studied for only a few months at the village maqtab, where he focused on the Qur'an and Islamic studies.
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Colin Howson
#32021
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Colin Howson was a British philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he joined the faculty on 1 July 2008. Previously, he was Professor of Logic at the London School of Economics. He completed a PhD on the philosophy of probability in 1981. In the late 1960s he had been a research assistant of Imre Lakatos at LSE. He died on Sunday 5 January 2020.
Go to Profile#2879
Lorenz Bruno Puntel
#33517
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Lorenz Bruno Puntel is a Brazilian philosopher based in Germany, who established the school of Structural-systematic philosophy. Professor emeritus at the University of Munich, Puntel has been named as one of the great contemporary philosophers, articulating his ideas from the most varied traditions.
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Julius Caesar Scaliger
1484 - 1558 (74 years)
Julius Caesar Scaliger , or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the New Learning. In spite of his contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high. Jacques Auguste de Thou claimed that none of the ancients could be placed above him and that he had no equal in his own time.
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Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias
#24953
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias was a Peruvian philosopher, journalist and politician. In his works he discusses the belief in "human nature" on the basis that any collective assumption about such a nature will be frustrating, and will have negative public results. He was interested in so-called "unorthodox logics". The term "paraconsistent logic" was coined in 1976 by him. He made his editorial debut in 1941, with Sense of the phenomenological movement.
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Rupa Goswami
1489 - 1564 (75 years)
Rupa Goswami was a devotional teacher , poet, and philosopher of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. With his brother Sanatana Goswami, he is considered the most senior of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavan associated with Caitanya Mahaprabhu, a hidden avatar of Krishna in Kali Yuga.
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Carla Fehr
#39190
Overall Influence
Carla Fehr is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo where she holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy. Education and career Fehr received her bachelor's from the University of Saskatchewan in biology and philosophy, and her doctorate in philosophy from Duke University.
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Dino Formaggio
#41440
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
Dino Formaggio was an Italian philosopher, art critic, and academic. He is part of the Italian phenomenological school or the School of Milan and is noted for his development of an organic description of the experiential complexity where art is phenomenologically constituted.
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Lawrence Finsen
#31601
Overall Influence
Lawrence Finsen is a professor of philosophy at University of Redlands in California, specializing in animal ethics. With his wife Susan Finsen, he is the author of The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect .
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Nina Karin Monsen
#41116
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nina Karin Monsen is a Norwegian moral philosopher and author. She has written several books, both non-fiction and fiction, and has been active in Norwegian public debate since the early 1970s. Life Monsen has a Magister's degree in Philosophy and was one of the founders of the Norwegian new feminist movement in 1970. Her early work was on the logician Quine and she later studied feminist philosophy. She has become the most visible proponent of Personalism in Norway, with Det elskende menneske as her most central work.
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Abdul Jabbar Al Rifai
#32923
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Abdul Jabbar Al Rifai is an Iraqi professor of Islamic philosophy, born in Dhi Qar, Iraq, 1954. He obtained several academic degrees, including: a PhD degree cum laude in Islamic philosophy – 2005, a master's degree of Islamic Ilm Al-Kalam – 1990, a bachelor's degree in Islamic studies – 1988, and an agricultural art diploma in 1975. He has a philosophical vision on religious reformation and religious thinking approaches. "The Vatican's Pontifical Institute of Rome" devoted its yearbook to the Contemporary Islamic Issues Magazine in 2012, in recognition of its mission in building new Ilm Al-K...
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Nostradamus
1503 - 1566 (63 years)
Michel de Nostredame , usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties , a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
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Jon Stewart
#35552
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jon Bartley Stewart is an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He specializes in 19th century Continental philosophy with an emphasis on the thought of Kierkegaard and Hegel. Stewart works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
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Gregg C. Fonarow
#50737
Overall Influence
#2891
Al-Battani
858 - 930 (72 years)
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Raqqī al-Ḥarrānī aṣ-Ṣābiʾ al-Battānī , usually called al-Battānī, a name that was in the past Latinized as Albategnius, was an astronomer, astrologer and mathematician, who lived and worked for most of his life at Raqqa, now in Syria. He is considered to be the greatest and most famous of the astronomers of the medieval Islamic world.
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Paul Terasaki
#33140
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Paul Ichiro Terasaki was an American scientist in the field of human organ transplant technology, and professor emeritus of surgery at UCLA School of Medicine. He spent three high school years during World War II interned with his family and other Japanese Americans in the Gila River War Relocation Center. Later he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in zoology all from UCLA and was appointed to the medical school faculty.
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Stathis Psillos
#25898
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Stathis Psillos is a Greek philosopher of science. He is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics at the University of Athens, Greece and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy of the University of Western Ontario. In 2013–15, he held the Rotman Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Science at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
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Lucy Allais
#37223
Overall Influence
Lucy Allais is a philosopher who holds academic positions at both the University of the Witwatersrand and Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the philosophy of Immanuel Kant as well as forgiveness, punishment, and bioethics.
Go to Profile#2895
Carl von Ossietzky
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Carl von Ossietzky was a German journalist and pacifist. He was the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German rearmament. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force and training pilots in the Soviet Union. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was granted amnesty in December 1932.
Go to Profile#2896
Thomas A. Waldmann
#48699
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Thomas A. Waldmann was an American immunologist who has worked on therapeutic monoclonal antibodies to the IL-2 receptor, Interleukin 15 , and Adult T-cell Leukemia . Until the week he died, he was an active distinguished investigator at the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch of the National Cancer Institute.
Go to Profile#2897
Eugene Garfield
#43813
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index , Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.
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Clitomachus
187 BC - 110 BC (77 years)
Clitomachus or Cleitomachus was a Greek philosopher, originally from Carthage, who came to Athens in 163/2BC and studied philosophy under Carneades. He became head of the Academy around 127/6BC. He was an Academic skeptic like his master. Nothing survives of his writings, which were dedicated to making known the views of Carneades, but Cicero made use of them for some of his works.
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Peter Nowell
#19283
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Peter Carey Nowell was a cancer researcher and co-discoverer of the Philadelphia chromosome. At the time of his death, he was the Gaylord P. and Mary Louise Harnwell Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Ahmad Shah Massoud
#381
Overall Influence
1953 - 2001 (48 years)
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
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