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,
#3001
Adolf Dygasiński
1839 - 1902 (63 years)
Adolf Dygasiński was a Polish novelist, publicist and educator. In Polish literature, he was one of the leading representatives of Naturalism. Life During his literary career, Dygasiński wrote forty-two short stories and novels. Since 1884 his works were being published in book-form and enjoyed considerable success. They were translated into Russian and German. In 1891, Dygasiński went on a trip to Brazil on a trail of Polish emigrants from Partitioned Poland. He produced a series of letters describing the tragic fate of Polish émigrés in South America. In the following years Dygasiński maintained a position of a tutor and coach for numerous wealthy landowning families.
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Valentin A. Bazhanov
#25518
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Valentin A. Bazhanov is a professor and chairperson of the Philosophy Department at Ulyanovsk State University in Russia. Biography Bazhanov was born on 10 January 1953 in Kazan, Russia. He received his Candidate from Leningrad University in 1989, and was awarded the degree of Dr. Sci. in Philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988. He was on the faculty of Philosophy at Kazan University from 1979 to 1993. He was a senior research member at the Institute of Philosophy in 1987–1988. Since 1993 he has been at the Ulyanovsk branch of Moscow State Univer...
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Ann Heberlein
#24039
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Ann Helen Heberlein is a Swedish academic and author, who writes extensively on theology and ethics. She is best known for her autobiographical account of life with bipolar disorder, Jag vill inte dö, jag vill bara inte leva .
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Anne Conway
1631 - 1679 (48 years)
Anne Conway was an English philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Gottfried Leibniz. Conway's thought is a deeply original form of rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns that lead some to think of it as unique among seventeenth-century systems. Hugh Trevor-Roper called her "England's greatest female philosopher."
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Tang Yijie
#17115
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Tang Yijie was a Chinese scholar and professor at Peking University, who has been described as China's top scholar on philosophy and Chinese studies. He spearheaded the Confucian Canon project, seeking to compile all known classical works on Confucianism, and was the first director of the Institute of Confucian Studies at Peking University.
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Johannes Rehmke
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Johannes Rehmke was a German philosopher and since 1885 professor at Greifswald University, later also provost of this university. He offered sharp criticisms of Immanuel Kant's approach to epistemology. In his article "The Conquest of Subjectivism," Paul Ferdinand Linke pointed out that it was Rehmke who first made a courageous break from subjectivism, which was the pervasive philosophical paradigm in late modern German philosophy.
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Nancy Tuana
#20269
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nancy Tuana is an American philosopher who specializes in feminist philosophy. She holds the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professorship in Philosophy and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She came to Penn State from the University of Oregon in 2001 to serve as the founding director of the Rock Ethics Institute. She won the 2022 Victoria Davion Award.
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Catherine Clément
#11942
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. A member of the school of French feminism and écriture féminine, she has published books with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva.
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Laurence Lampert
#31002
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Laurence Lampert is a Canadian philosopher and a leading scholar in the field of Nietzsche studies. Philosopher Michael Allen Gillespie of Duke University has described Lampert as "North America's greatest living Nietzsche scholar." He is also well known for his interpretations of Plato and the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss.
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Hugo Dingler
1881 - 1954 (73 years)
Hugo Albert Emil Hermann Dingler was a German scientist and philosopher. Life Hugo Dingler studied mathematics, philosophy, and physics with Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, David Hilbert, Edmund Husserl, Woldemar Voigt, and Wilhem Roentgen at the universities of Göttingen and Munich. He graduated from the University of Munich with a thesis under Aurel Voss. Dingler earned his Ph.D. in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1906. His doctoral advisor was Ferdinand von Lindemann. In 1910 Dingler's first attempt to earn a Habilitation failed. His second try in 1912 was successful. Dingler then taught as a Privatdozent and hold lectures on mathematics, philosophy and the history of science.
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Gholamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani
#32243
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Gholam-hossein Ebrahimi Dinani is an Iranian philosopher. He is best known for his research and writings about illuminationism and Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi. The three-time winner of Book of the Year award in Iran, Dinani is a professor emeritus at the University of Tehran, and lectures at Tarbiat Modares University and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Moreover, his public lectures at Institute for Research in Philosophy attract a diverse audience from students and scholars of theology and philosophy in general.
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Ernest Radlov
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Ernest Leopoldovich Radlov or Ernst Radlow was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher and historian of philosophy of German origin. Co-founder of the St. Petersburg Philosophical Society, director of the Public Library in Petrograd .
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Alfred Mele
#28783
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher and the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is also the past Director of the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project and the Big Questions in Free Will Project . Mele is the author of thirteen books and over 250 articles.
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Brian Weatherson
#36450
Overall Influence
Brian Weatherson is the Marshall Weinberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language. Education and career Born in Australia, Weatherson received his PhD from Monash University in 1998, with a dissertation on formal models for reasoning under uncertainty, titled "On Uncertainty."
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Adrienne Clarkson
#1710
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Adrienne Louise Clarkson is a Hong Kong-born Canadian journalist who served from 1999 to 2005 as Governor General of Canada, the 26th since Canadian Confederation. Clarkson arrived in Canada with her family in 1941, as a refugee from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, and was raised in Ottawa. After receiving a number of university degrees, Clarkson worked as a producer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a journalist for various magazines. Her first diplomatic posting came in the early 1980s, when she promoted Ontarian culture in France and other European countries. In ...
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Roderick Firth
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Roderick Firth was an American philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1953 until his death. Education Firth earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1943. His thesis was entitled Sense-Data and the Principle of Reduction.
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Justin E. H. Smith
#19902
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Justin Smith-Ruiu is an American-Canadian professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité. His primary research interests include Leibniz, Post-structuralism, early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of biology, classical Indian philosophy, the history and philosophy of anthropology.
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880 - 1938 (58 years)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.
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Ahmad Fardid
#12597
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Seyyed Ahmad Fardid , born Ahmad Mahini Yazdi, was a prominent Iranian philosopher and a professor of Tehran University. He is considered to be among the philosophical ideologues of the Islamic government of Iran which came to power in 1979. Fardid was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, the influential German philosopher, whom he considered "the only Western philosopher who understood the world and the only philosopher whose insights were congruent with the principles of the Islamic Republic. These two figures, Khomeini and Heidegger, helped Fardid argue his position." What he decried w...
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Morton I. Grossman
#53073
Overall Influence
#3021
H. Evan Runner
#27785
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Howard Evan Runner was professor of philosophy at Calvin College from 1951 until his retirement in 1981. Runner was born in Oxford, Pennsylvania and graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia , and The Free University of Amsterdam. It was at the Free University that he was taught by Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven, whose ideas relating to the construction of a whole new way of doing philosophy Christianly from a biblical basis radically changed the direction of his life, and whose teachings he later brought to North America. Runner's dissertation applied D.
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Heraclides Ponticus
385 BC - 322 BC (63 years)
Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was born in Heraclea Pontica, now Karadeniz Ereğli, Turkey, and migrated to Athens. He is best remembered for proposing that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. He is also hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory; although this is disputed.
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Carl Wernicke
1848 - 1905 (57 years)
Carl Wernicke was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also the study of receptive aphasia, both of which are commonly associated with Wernicke's name and referred to as Wernicke encephalopathy and Wernicke's aphasia, respectively. His research, along with that of Paul Broca, led to groundbreaking realizations of the localization of brain function, specifically in speech. As such, Wernicke's area has been named after the scientist.
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David Olivier
#34746
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David Olivier Whittier is a French and British philosopher and antispeciesist activist. He is founder of the French journal Cahiers antispécistes , the annual event Veggie Pride and of the annual meeting Les Estivales de la question animale . Olivier is also the creator of the term "veggiephobia" and of numerous articles and conferences. He is an advocate of utilitarian and antinatauralist ethics, and defines himself politically as a progressive.
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Kasper Niesiecki
1682 - 1744 (62 years)
Kasper Niesiecki , also known as Kacper Niesiecki, was a Polish heraldist, Jesuit, lexicographer, writer, theologian and preacher. Biography Niesiecki was born in Greater Poland to a burgher family. In 1699 he began training as a Jesuit in Kraków. From 1701 to 1704 he studied philosophy in Lublin, earning a master's degree. In 1707 Niesiecki started his studies in theology at the Jagiellonian University, graduating in 1711. He undertook further study in Lutsk, Krosno, Bydgoszcz, Chojnice and Kalisz.
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Steven Blair
#24299
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Steven Noel Blair was an American exercise scientist. He has been a tenured professor in the Department of Exercise Science and Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health since 2006. He previously worked at the Dallas, Texas-based Cooper Institute, of which he was president and CEO from 2002 to 2006. He is known for his research on the health benefits of physical exercise. A 2005 New York Times article described Blair as "one of the nation's leading experts on the health benefits of exercise".
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Malachi
#1868
Overall Influence
Malachi , also known as Malachias, is the name used by the author of the Book of Malachi, the last book of the Nevi'im section of the Tanakh. According to the 1897 Easton's Bible Dictionary, it is possible that Malachi is not a proper name; because it simply means "messenger", many assume it to be a pseudonym. Jewish tradition claims that the real identity of Malachi is Ezra the scribe.
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Gloria Origgi
#19134
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher at the CNRS in Paris who works on the theory of mind, epistemology and social sciences applied to new technology. She is the founder and director of the innovative project, a portal where many international virtual conferences in the social and cognitive sciences are being organized.
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Miguel Benasayag
#26460
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Miguel Benasayag is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, epistemology researcher and former Franco-Argentinian Guévariste resistance fighter. He is close to the left-libertarian movement. Biography Miguel Benasayag was born in Argentina, into a family he describes as "intellectual Jews". He studied medicine in Argentina at the same time as he fought for the Guévariste guerillas.
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David G. Cogan
#53264
Overall Influence
#3031
Frank McEachran
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Frank McEachran , sometimes known as Kek, was a British schoolmaster and writer. He taught at English public schools and the University of Leipzig and wrote on philosophy, but his most commercially successful books were his anthologies Spells for Poets and More Spells which appeared in the 1950s.
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Michael Servetus
1511 - 1553 (42 years)
Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio . He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
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Éric Weil
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Éric Weil was a French-German philosopher noted for the development of a theory that places the effort to understand violence at the center of philosophy. Calling himself a post-Hegelian Kantian, Weil was a key figure in the 20th century reception of Hegel in France, as well as the renewed interest in Kant in that country. The author of major original works, critical studies, and numerous essays in French his adopted language, as well as German and English, Weil was both an active academic as well as public intellectual. Involved in various fecund moments of French intellectual life, Weil was...
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Michael P. Nelson
#26649
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Michael Paul Nelson is an environmental scholar, writer, teacher, speaker, consultant, and Professor of environmental philosophy and ethics at Oregon State University. Nelson is also the philosopher in residence of the Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Project, a senior fellow with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written word, and the co-founder and co-director of the Conservation Ethics Group. From 2012 to 2022 he served as the Lead Principal Investigator for the H.J. Andrews Long-Term Ecological Research Program and held the Ruth H. Spaniol Chair in Renewable Resources at Oregon Sta...
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Gideon Koren
#16587
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gideon Koren, FACMT, FRCP is an Israeli-Canadian pediatrician, clinical pharmacologist, toxicologist, and a composer of Israeli folk music. He was a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor at the University of Toronto. In 1985, Koren founded the Motherisk Program in Toronto, which was later shut down amid controversy. Furthermore, multiple scientific papers authored by Koren have been subject to concerns regarding academic and research misconduct, leading to the retraction of six research articles and editorial expression of concerns on multiple others. Koren currently has re...
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Wolfgang Spohn
#26837
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Wolfgang Konrad Spohn is a German philosopher. He is professor of philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Konstanz. Biography Wolfgang Spohn studied philosophy, logic and philosophy of science and mathematics at the University of Munich and acquired there the MA and the PhD with a thesis on the Grundlagen der Entscheidungstheorie. In his time as an assistant professor he earned the habilitation with a thesis about Eine Theorie der Kausalität. He held professorships at the University of Regensburg , the University of Bielefeld , and the University of Konstanz . Since 2019 ...
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Arkady Timiryasev
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Arkady Klimentievich Timiryazev was a Russian Marxist physicist and philosopher. Biography Arkady was the son of the prominent agronomist and biologist Kliment Timiryazev. He was closely associated with Maxim Gorky. Although he was deemed a professor of physics at Moscow State University, he was derided as the "monument's son" by people who questioned his competence. He was an ardent defender of the classical physics propounded by Isaac Newton and was particularly noted for his vitriolic denunciations of Albert Einstein. He used his Bolshevik ideology to attack other Soviet physicists such as Abram Ioffe and Sergei Vavilov.
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Bernard Lown
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#3643
Overall Influence
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Bernard Lown was a Lithuanian-American cardiologist and inventor. Lown was the original developer of the direct current defibrillator for cardiac resuscitation, and the cardioverter for correcting rapid disordered heart rhythms. He introduced a new use for the drug lidocaine to control heartbeat disturbances.
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Adalbert Stifter
1805 - 1868 (63 years)
Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing and has long been popular in the German-speaking world, while remaining almost entirely unknown to English readers.
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Frances Egan
#15672
Overall Influence
Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception. Education and career Egan graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1988. She has taught at Rutgers University since her appointment as an assistant professor in 1990. Besides her Rutgers appointment, she is also an associate editor of Noûs, a quarterly journal of philosophy.
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S. Barry Cooper
#16867
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
S. Barry Cooper was an English mathematician and computability theorist. He was a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Cooper grew up in Bognor Regis and attended Chichester High School for Boys, during which time he played scrum-half for the under-15s England rugby team.
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John G. Bartlett
#50709
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
John Gill Bartlett was an American physician and medical researcher, specializing in infectious diseases. He is known as a pioneer in HIV/AIDS research and for his work on vancomycin as a treatment for Clostridioides difficile infection.
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Claude Bouchard
#44548
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Claude Bouchard is Professor and the John W. Barton, Sr. Endowed Chair in Genetics and Nutrition at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center , where he is also the Director of the Human Genomics Laboratory. He is known for his research on the role of genetics in obesity and in the process of adaptation to regular physical activity. He was president of the Obesity Society in 1991–92.
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Jñanasrimitra
#27138
Overall Influence
Jñānaśrīmitra was an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the epistemological tradition of Buddhist philosophy, which goes back to Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Jñānaśrīmitra was also known as a Yogācāra Buddhist who defended a form of Buddhist idealism termed Sākāravada which holds that cognitive content or aspects of consciousness are real and not illusory.
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Eric Heinze
#14641
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at the School of Law Queen Mary, University of London. He has made contributions in the areas of legal philosophy, justice theory, jurisprudence, and human rights. He has also contributed to the law and literature movement.
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Karl Friedrich Schinkel
1781 - 1841 (60 years)
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a Prussian architect, city planner and painter who also designed furniture and stage sets. Schinkel was one of the most prominent architects of Germany and designed both Neoclassical and neo-Gothic buildings. His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin.
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Nicolaus of Damascus
64 BC - 4 (68 years)
Nicolaus of Damascus was a Greek historian and philosopher who lived during the Augustan age of the Roman Empire. His name is derived from that of his birthplace, Damascus. His output was vast, but is nearly all lost. His chief work was a universal history in 144 books. There exist considerable remains of two works of his old age; a life of Augustus, and an autobiography. He also wrote a life of Herod, some philosophical works, and some tragedies and comedies.
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Pierre Laffitte
1823 - 1903 (80 years)
Pierre Laffitte was a French positivist philosopher. Laffitte was born at Béguey, Gironde. Residing at Paris as a teacher of mathematics, he became a disciple of Auguste Comte, who appointed him his literary executor. On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte's death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhered to Émile Littré, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the philosophy of science of Comte's earlier period. From 1853 Laffitte delivered Positivist lectures in the room formerly occupied by Comte in the rue Monsieur le Prince.
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Howard Kainz
#46425
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Howard P. Kainz is professor emeritus at Marquette University, Milwaukee. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for 1977-1978, and Fulbright fellowships in Germany for 1980-1981 and 1987-1988. Kainz advocates aspects of the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel.
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Alabert Fogarasi
1891 - 1959 (68 years)
Alabert Fogarasi, also known as Béla Fogarasi was a Hungarian philosopher and politician. Life Fogarasi was born as Béla Freid on 25 July 1891 in Budapest, and studied in Budapest and Heidelberg. In 1910 he translated Henri Bergson's Introduction à la metaphysique into Hungarian. He was a member of the so-called Sunday circle around Béla Balázs and György Lukács. With Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser and Ervin Szabó he was also involved in the Budapest Free School of Humanities, founded by Lukács. A December 1915 lecture on historical materialism to the Hungarian Philosophical Society criticized economic determinism.
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