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,
#301
Aloysius Martinich
#6128
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Aloysius Patrick Martinich , usually cited as A. P. Martinich, is an American analytic philosopher. He is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language ; the history of political thinking and Thomas Hobbes.
Go to Profile#302
Paul Lorenzen
#3462
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Paul Lorenzen was a German philosopher and mathematician, founder of the Erlangen School and inventor of game semantics . Biography Lorenzen studied at the University of Göttingen until he earned his PhD there in 1938 under Helmut Hasse with a thesis titled Zur Abstrakten Begründung der multiplikativen Idealtheorie. In 1933, he joined the SA and the German Nazionalist Studenti Union , while, four years later, he became a member of the Nazi Party. In early 1940 he was drafted into the Army. Through Hasse's mediation, Lorenzen worked with Wilhelm Tranow from July 1940 to April 1941 on the Bavy...
Go to Profile#303
Wesley C. Salmon
#4974
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Wesley Charles Salmon was an American philosopher of science renowned for his work on the nature of scientific explanation. He also worked on confirmation theory, trying to explicate how probability theory via inductive logic might help confirm and choose hypotheses. Yet most prominently, Salmon was a realist about causality in scientific explanation, although his realist explanation of causality drew ample criticism. Still, his books on scientific explanation itself were landmarks of the 20th century's philosophy of science, and solidified recognition of causality's important roles in sci...
Go to Profile#304
Abdolkarim Soroush
#1379
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Abdolkarim Soroush , born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh , is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University. He is arguably the most influential figure in the religious intellectual movement of Iran. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He was also affiliated with other institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
Go to Profile#305
Vincent F. Hendricks
#5427
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Vincent Fella Rune Møller Hendricks is a Danish philosopher and logician. He holds a doctoral degree and a habilitation in philosophy and is Professor of Formal Philosophy and Director of the Center for Information and Bubble Studies at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was previously Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is member of IIP, the Institut International de Philosophie in Paris.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah
#1551
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#307
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
#1307
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor of the book series, Analecta Husserliana. She had a thirty-two-year friendship and occasional academic collaboration with Pope John Paul II.
Go to Profile#308
Keith Lehrer
#6997
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Keith Lehrer is Emeritus Regent's Professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona and a research professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where he spends half of each academic year. Education and career Lehrer received his PhD in philosophy from Brown University where he studied under Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. He joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1973, where he helped build a major graduate program. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Rochester.
Go to Profile#309
Pierre Hadot
#5655
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy specializing in ancient philosophy, particularly Epicureanism and Stoicism. Life In 1944, Hadot was ordained, but following Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis left the priesthood. He studied at the Sorbonne between 1946–1947. In 1961, he graduated from the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1964, he was appointed a Director of Studies at EPHE, initially occupying a chair in Latin Patristics, before his chair was renamed "Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity" in 1972. He became profe...
Go to Profile#310
Brian Massumi
#3052
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy. His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains. He is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de Montréal.
Go to Profile#311
Thiruvalluvar
#1171
Overall Influence
Thiruvalluvar, commonly known as Valluvar, was an Indian poet and philosopher. He is best known as the author of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, a collection of couplets on ethics, political and economic matters, and love. The text is considered an exceptional and widely cherished work of Tamil literature.
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Paul Kurtz
#2127
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Paul Kurtz was an American scientific skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism". He was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for Social Research.
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Michael Scriven
#4569
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Michael John Scriven was a British-born Australian polymath and academic philosopher, best known for his contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation. Biography Scriven was born in the UK and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. He held BSc and MS degrees in mathematics from the University of Melbourne, where he was in residence at Trinity College from 1946, winning an entrance scholarship. He then completed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford .
Go to Profile#314
Michel Serres
#1388
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose. Life and career The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Paris , and began teaching in 1969 at the University of Paris I.
Go to Profile#315
Robert Magliola
#3069
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Roberto Rino Magliola is an Italian-American academic specializing in European hermeneutics and deconstruction, comparative philosophy, and inter-religious dialogue. He is retired from National Taiwan University and Assumption University of Thailand.
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T. M. Scanlon
#6339
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon , usually cited as T. M. Scanlon, is an American philosopher. At the time of his retirement in 2016, he was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy, where he had taught since 1984. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
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Allen W. Wood
#5723
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity ...
Go to Profile#318
William Lycan
#5180
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
William G. Lycan is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was formerly the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. Since 2011, Lycan is also distinguished visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to research, teach, and advise graduate students.
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Paul W. Taylor
#6984
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Paul W. Taylor was an American philosopher best known for his work in the field of environmental ethics. Biography Taylor's theory of biocentric egalitarianism, related to but not identical with deep ecology, was expounded in his 1986 book Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, and has been taught in university courses on environmental ethics. Taylor taught philosophy for four decades at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and was professor emeritus there at the time of his death.
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George H. Smith
#3444
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
George Hamilton Smith was an American author, editor, educator, and speaker, known for his writings on atheism and libertarianism. Biography Smith grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, and attended the University of Arizona for several years before leaving without a degree; he relocated to Los Angeles during 1971. With the help of libertarian editor Roy A. Childs, Jr., he secured a contract from Nash Publishing to produce a book on atheism. The finished product was his first book, Atheism: The Case Against God .
Go to Profile#321
Ernest Mandel
#1163
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Ernest Ezra Mandel Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university.
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Hans Blumenberg
#4140
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Hans Blumenberg was a German philosopher and intellectual historian. He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics and is considered to be one of the most important German philosophers of the century. He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge , Germany.
Go to Profile#323
William MacAskill
#4194
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is an associate professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research. He co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty .
Go to Profile#324
Ernst Nolte
#713
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism . Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controvers...
Go to Profile#325
Roy Bhaskar
#3727
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Ram Roy Bhaskar was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism . Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it. He went on to apply that realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and...
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Brian McGuinness
#6524
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Brian McGuinness was a Wittgenstein scholar best known for his translation, with David Pears, of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. He was christened with the forenames "Bernard Francis" but changed his name to "Brian" in his youth. He commonly published, and was cited, as B. F. McGuinness.
Go to Profile#327
David Stove
#5852
Overall Influence
1927 - 1994 (67 years)
David Charles Stove was an Australian philosopher whose writings often challenged prevailing academic orthodoxy. He was known for his critiques of postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism. Philosophy His work in philosophy of science included criticisms of David Hume's Inductive scepticism. He offered a positive response to the problem of induction in his 1986 work, The Rationality of Induction. In Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Stove attacked the leading philosophers of science, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, on the grounds that their commitm...
Go to Profile#328
J. O. Urmson
#7758
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
James Opie Urmson , was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy .
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Philippe Van Parijs
#2915
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Philippe Van Parijs is a Belgian political philosopher and political economist, best known as a proponent and main defender of the concept of an unconditional basic income and for the first systematic treatment of linguistic justice.
Go to Profile#330
Norman Geisler
#2311
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Norman Leo Geisler was an American Christian systematic theologian, philosopher, and apologist. He was the co-founder of two non-denominational evangelical seminaries . He held a Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University and made scholarly contributions to the subjects of classical Christian apologetics, systematic theology, the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Biblical inerrancy, Bible difficulties, ethics, and more. He was the author, coauthor, or editor of over 90 books and hundreds of articles.
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Keith Ward
#3896
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Keith Ward is an English philosopher and theologian. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, until 2003. Comparative theology and the relationship between science and religion are two of his main topics of interest.
Go to Profile#332
Roger Scruton
#3790
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.
Go to Profile#333
Maurizio Ferraris
#5384
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Maurizio Ferraris is an Italian continental philosopher and scholar, whose name is associated especially with the philosophical current named "new realism"—Ferraris wrote the Manifesto of New Realism in 2012, which was published by SUNY Press in 2014
Go to Profile#334
Michael Stocker
#9642
Overall Influence
Michael Adam Gerber Stocker is an American philosopher and Irwin & Marjorie Guttag Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Syracuse University. He is known for his works on ethics. Stocker is the author of the seminal paper The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.
Go to Profile#335
Mario Kopić
#4185
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Mario Kopić is a philosopher, author and translator. His main areas of interest include: the history of ideas, the philosophy of art, the philosophy of culture, phenomenology and the philosophy of religion.
Go to Profile#336
Andy Clark
#1925
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Andy Clark, is a British philosopher who is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Prior to this, he was a professor of philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Clark is one of the founding members of the CONTACT collaborative research project whose aim is to investigate the role environment plays in shaping the nature of conscious experience. Clark's papers and b...
Go to Profile#337
Peter Unger
#8474
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#338
Brian Leiter
#2833
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#339
Greg Bahnsen
#2894
Overall Influence
1948 - 1995 (47 years)
Greg L. Bahnsen was an American Reformed philosopher, apologist, and debater. He was a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a full-time Scholar in Residence for the Southern California Center for Christian Studies . He is also considered a contributor to the field of Christian apologetics, as he popularized the presuppositional method of Cornelius Van Til. He is the father of David L. Bahnsen, an American portfolio manager, author, and television commentator.
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Myles Burnyeat
#6442
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Myles Fredric Burnyeat was an English scholar of ancient philosophy. Early life and education Myles Burnyeat was born on 1 January 1939 to Peter James Anthony Burnyeat and Cynthia Cherry Warburg. He received his secondary school education at Bryanston School.
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Dagfinn Føllesdal
#4881
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dagfinn Føllesdal is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Biography and career Føllesdal was born in Askim. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Oslo, he attended Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 under Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught at Harvard University from 1961 to 1964, and began teaching at Stanford University in 1968.
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Edward N. Zalta
#6817
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Edward Nouri Zalta is an American philosopher who is a senior research scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He received his BA from Rice University in 1975 and his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981, both in philosophy. Zalta has taught courses at Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Auckland. Zalta is also the Principal Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#343
Dominique Lecourt
#4739
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
Dominique Lecourt was a French philosopher. He is known in the Anglophone world primarily for his work developing a materialist interpretation of the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard. Biography Lecourt was born in Paris. A former student at the École normale supérieure , an agrégé in philosophy , and a Docteur d'État ès lettres , he was professor at the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 and, until 2011, was director of the Centre Georges Canguilhem .
Go to Profile#344
John P. Burgess
#4996
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Patton Burgess is an American philosopher. He is John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University where he specializes in logic and philosophy of mathematics. Education and career Burgess received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley's Group in Logic and Methodology of Science. His interests include logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaethics. He is the author of numerous articles on logic and philosophy of mathematics. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the brother of Barbara Burgess.
Go to Profile#345
Pascal Engel
#5975
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Pascal Engel is a French philosopher, working on the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of logic. He was a professor of philosophy of logic at the Sorbonne. He currently works at the University of Geneva, where he collaborates with, among others, Kevin Mulligan. He is a member of Institut Nicod.
Go to Profile#346
Kostas Axelos
#3904
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Kostas Axelos was a Greek-French philosopher. Biography Axelos was born in Athens in 1924 to a doctor and a woman from an old Athenian bourgeois family, and attended high school at the French Institute and the Varvakeio High School. He enrolled in the School of Law of the University of Athens in order to pursue studies in law and economics due to dissatisfaction with the philosophy taught at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, but did not attend. With the onset of World War II Axelos got involved in politics. Then during the German and Italian occupation he participated in t...
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Allen Buchanan
#3712
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Allen Edward Buchanan is a moral, political and legal philosopher. As of 2022, he held multiple academic positions: Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University, Visiting Professor of the philosophy of international law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, London, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University.
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Ludwig Landgrebe
#6337
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Ludwig Landgrebe was an Austrian phenomenologist and Professor of philosophy. He is the grandfather of award-winning German actor Max Landgrebe. Life Landgrebe studied philosophy, history and geography in Vienna. Influenced by Max Scheler, he continued his studies in Freiburg. In 1923 Landgrebe became assistant to Edmund Husserl . After the approval of his doctoral dissertation, Landgrebe transferred to Prague for his postdoctoral qualification under Oskar Kraus. From 1939 he collaborated with Eugen Fink at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven. Landgrebe's wife, Ilse Maria Goldschmidt, was of Jewish ancestry and sister of the writer Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.
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Hillel Steiner
#5540
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Hillel Isaac Steiner is a Canadian political philosopher and is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 1999.
Go to Profile#350
John Martin Fischer
#7244
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
