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,
#3051
Carl Raschke
#31549
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Carl A. Raschke is an American philosopher and theologian. Raschke is a Past Chair and Professor of Religious Studies Department at the University of Denver, specializing in continental philosophy, the philosophy of religion and the theory of religion. He was given the university lecturer award for 2020-2021. He is also listed with the affiliated faculty of the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
Go to Profile#3052
Sebastiano Serlio
1475 - 1554 (79 years)
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva .
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Maulana Azad
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al-Hussaini Azad was an Indian independence activist, writer and a senior leader of the Indian National Congress. Following India's independence, he became the First Minister of Education in the Indian government. He is commonly remembered as Maulana Azad; the word Maulana is an honorific meaning 'Our Master' and he had adopted Azad as his pen name. His contribution to establishing the education foundation in India is recognised by celebrating his birthday as National Education Day across India.
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Napoleone Ferrara
#12571
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Napoleone Ferrara , is an Italian-American molecular biologist who joined University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center in 2013 after a career in Northern California at the biotechnology giant Genentech, where he pioneered the development of new treatments for angiogenic diseases such as cancer, age-related macular degeneration , and diabetic retinopathy. At Genentech, he discovered VEGF—and made the first anti-VEGF antibody—which suppresses growth of a variety of tumors. These findings helped lead to development of the first clinically available angiogenesis inhibitor, bevacizumab ...
Go to Profile#3055
Irwin Edman
1896 - 1954 (58 years)
Irwin Edman was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy. Biography Irwin Edman was born in New York City to Jewish parents. He grew up in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, adjacent to Columbia University, with which he was to be affiliated his entire adult life. Edman spent his high-school years at Townsend Harris Hall, a New York high school for superior pupils. He then attended Columbia University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and earned his bachelor's degree in 1917 and his Ph.D. in 1920. During his student years at Columbia he was a member of the Boar's Head Society.
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Maurice de Vlaminck
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense colour. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1905.
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Robert Edward Gross
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Robert Edward Gross was an American surgeon and a medical researcher. He performed early work in pediatric heart surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. Gross was president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Federico Lombardi
#3411
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Federico Lombardi is an Italian Catholic priest and the former director of the Holy See Press Office. He succeeded Joaquín Navarro-Valls and was succeeded by Greg Burke. Lombardi also serves as the postulator for the sainthood cause of Fr Bernardo Mattio.
Go to Profile#3059
Haribhadra
800 - 850 (50 years)
Haribhadra, also known as Shizi Xian or Sengge Zangpo was an 8th-century CE Buddhist philosopher, and a disciple of Śāntarakṣita, an early Indian Buddhist missionary to Tibet. He was one of the founding monks of the Vikramashila monastery. Haribhadra's commentary on the Abhisamayalankara was one of the most influential of the twenty-one Indian commentaries on that text, perhaps because of its author's status as Shantarakshita's student. Like his master, Haribhadra is retrospectively considered by Tibetan doxographical tradition to represent the Yogācāra-Svatantrika-Mādhyamaka school.
Go to Profile#3060
David E. Cooper
#35381
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Edward Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. Life and work David E. Cooper is a British author and philosopher. He was brought up in Surrey and educated at Highgate School and then St Edmund Hall, Oxford, the University at which he was given his first job in 1967, as a Lecturer in Philosophy. He went on to teach at the universities of Miami, London and Surrey before being appointed, in 1986, as Professor of Philosophy at Durham University – where he remained until retiring in 2008. During his academic career, David was a Visiting Professor at universities in the United States, Canada, Malta, Sri Lanka and South Africa.
Go to Profile#3061
Valerie Solanas
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist known for the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and for her attempt to murder artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government,...
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Hannah Arendt
#53689
Overall Influence
#3063
Catia Faria
#31896
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.
Go to Profile#3064
Joseph Levine
#28241
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Joseph Levine is an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981. He works on philosophy of mind and is best known for formulating the explanatory gap argument against a materialist explanation for consciousness. This has been cited as a precursor to David Chalmers's formulation of the hard problem of consciousness and as one of the main objections materialist theories in philosophy of mind must address. The idea of the explanatory gap is that an unbridgeable gap exists when trying to comprehend consciousness from the per...
Go to Profile#3065
Matthew Tindal
1657 - 1733 (76 years)
Matthew Tindal was an eminent English deist author. His works, highly influential at the dawn of the Enlightenment, caused great controversy and challenged the Christian consensus of his time. Life Tindal was baptised on 12 May 1657 at Bere Ferrers in Devon, son of the Reverend John Tindal, who was rector of the parish, and his wife Anne Halse. Through his mother, he was a first cousin of Thomas Clifford, 1st Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, and therefore descended from the Clifford and Fortescue families.
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David Kaufmann
1852 - 1899 (47 years)
David Kaufmann was a Jewish-Austrian scholar born at Kojetín, Moravia . From 1861 to 1867 he attended the gymnasium at Kroměříž, Moravia, where he studied the Bible and Talmud with Jacob Brüll, rabbi of Kojetín, and with the latter's son Nehemiah.
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Warwick Fox
#20805
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Warwick Fox is an Australian-UK philosopher. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire, and his books include Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism; Ethics and the Built Environment ; A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment; and On Beautiful Days Such as This: A Philosopher's Search for Love, Work, Place, Meaning, and Suchlike. His main areas of philosophical interest are environmental philosophy, General Ethics , and the nature of the interior lives of humans and other animals.
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Ernst Kapp
1808 - 1896 (88 years)
Ernst Christian Kapp was a German-American philosopher of technology and geographer, and a follower of Carl Ritter. He was prosecuted for sedition in the late 1840s for publishing a small article entitled 'Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit' and was subsequently forced to leave Germany. He then emigrated to the German pioneer settlements of central Texas where he worked as a farmer, geographer and inventor.
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A. W. Benn
1843 - 1915 (72 years)
Alfred William Benn was an agnostic and an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. His book A History of Modern Philosophy was republished in the Thinker's Library series in 1930.
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Eric Hoffer
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer , was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. The Eric Hoffer Book Award is an international literary prize established in his honor. The University of California, Berkeley awards an annual literary prize named jointly for Hoffer.
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Robert S. Corrington
#16086
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert S. Corrington is an American philosopher and author of many books exploring human interpretation of the universe as well as biographies on C.S. Peirce and Wilhelm Reich. He is currently the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Before that he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is a Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.
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Konrad Johann Martin Langenbeck
1776 - 1851 (75 years)
Konrad Johann Martin Langenbeck was a German surgeon, ophthalmologist and anatomist who was a native of Horneburg. Biography Langenbeck studied medicine at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and in 1802 received his habilitation under August Gottlieb Richter at University of Göttingen. In 1804 he became an associate professor, and three years later established his own institute for surgery and ophthalmology. In 1814 he was appointed full professor at Göttingen and general surgeon of the Hannoverian Army.
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Dolores Huerta
#1518
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, is a co-founder of the United Farmworkers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers . Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California and was the lead negotiator in the workers' contract that was created after the strike.
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Pyotr Chaadayev
1794 - 1856 (62 years)
Pyotr or Petr Yakovlevich Chaadayev was a Russian philosopher. He was one of the Russian Schellingians. Chaadayev wrote eight "Philosophical Letters" about Russia in French between 1826 and 1831, which circulated among intellectuals in Russia in manuscript form for many years. They comprise an indictment of Russian culture for its laggard role far behind the leaders of Western civilization. He cast doubt on the greatness of the Russian past, and ridiculed Orthodoxy for failing to provide a sound spiritual basis for the Russian mind. He extolled the achievements of Europe, especially in ratio...
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Donald W. Sherburne
#44802
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Donald W. Sherburne was an American philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University. He was a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America . He was born in Rutland, Vermont, the son of Hermon Kirk Sherburne, Jr. and Alma May Bixby Sherburne.
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Henry Kaplan
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Henry Seymour Kaplan was an American radiologist who pioneered in radiation therapy and radiobiology. Career Kaplan earned his degree from Rush Medical College in Chicago, after which he trained at the University of Minnesota, Yale University and the National Cancer Institute. He once said he became interested in oncology after his father died of lung cancer, the same disease which killed Dr. Kaplan, a non-smoker.
Go to Profile#3077
Chris Cuomo
#37872
Overall Influence
Chris Cuomo is the Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies Before moving to the University of Georgia, Cuomo was the Obed J. Wilson Professor of Ethics at the University of Cincinnati.
Go to Profile#3078
Trisha Greenhalgh
#19712
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Patricia Mary Greenhalgh is a British professor of primary health care at the University of Oxford, and retired general practitioner. Early life and education Trisha Greenhalgh was born on 11 March 1959. She attended Folkestone Grammar School. She gained a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1980, and three years later graduated in medicine from the University of Oxford.
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Hubert Damisch
#14732
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Hubert Damisch , was a French philosopher specialised in aesthetics and art history, and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1975 until 1996. Damisch studied at the Sorbonne with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, later, with Pierre Francastel. In 1967 he founded the Cercle d’histoire/théorie de l’art that would later become the CEHTA at the EHESS.
Go to Profile#3080
Pedro Cuatrecasas
#54055
Overall Influence
#3081
Frank Cioffi
#6648
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Frank L. Cioffi, of Baruch College is Frank Cioffi's nephew.Frank Cioffi was an American philosopher educated in New York and Oxford. Cioffi held posts at the University of Singapore, the University of Kent and the University of Essex, where he was a founding member of the Department of Philosophy.
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Eric T. Olson
#43496
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Eric Todd Olson is an American philosopher who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Olson is best known for his research in the field of personal identity, and for advocating animalism, the theory that persons are animals. Olson received a BA from Reed College and a PhD from Syracuse University. Olson is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield.
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Gilbert LaFreniere
#20561
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gilbert LaFreniere is an American ecological philosopher, active in the study of geology, ecology, and human impact upon nature. Biography Gilbert attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst and earned a Masters of Geology from Dartmouth College before completing a Ph.D in intellectual history from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1976.
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Ladislav Klíma
1878 - 1928 (50 years)
Ladislav Klíma , was a Czech philosopher and novelist influenced by George Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His philosophy is referred to varyingly as existentialism and subjective idealism. Life Ladislav Klíma was born in the town of Domažlice in western Bohemia. He came from a moderately wealthy family. After expulsion from the school system in 1895 for allegedly insulting the State, the Church, and — out of what he described as “historical analphabetism” — the Habsburgs, he lived alternately in Tyrol, Zurich, and Prague. As part of his philosophy he only ever took on short term work. F...
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John E. Thomas
#26434
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
John Edward Thomas was a British-born Canadian philosopher and pioneer of medical ethics in Canada. Biography Early life and education Born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales in 1926, John Thomas moved to Birmingham, England with his parents, David Llewlyn Thomas and Ann Olwyn Thomas, where he worked for two years at the Birmingham Small Arms. Thomas moved to Scotland to enter the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, and there met Moreen Duff Muir , daughter of William C. Muir a noted herbalist and Jeanne Duff. Thomas married Muir in 1947 and they left the United Kingdom for Canada, where they settled in St.
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Désiré Collen
#26771
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Désiré, Baron Collen is a Belgian physician, chemist, biotechnology entrepreneur and life science investor. He made several discoveries in thrombosis, haemostasis and vascular biology in many of which serendipity played a significant role. His main achievement has been his role in the development of tissue-type plasminogen activator from a laboratory concept to a life-saving drug for dissolving blood clots causing acute myocardial infarction or acute ischemic stroke. Recombinant t-PA was produced and marketed by Genentech Inc as Activase and by Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH as Actilyse, and is c...
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Antoine Berman
#15842
Overall Influence
1942 - 1991 (49 years)
Antoine Berman was a French translator, philosopher, historian and theorist of translation. Life Antoine Berman was born in the small town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, near Limoges, to a Polish-Jewish father and a French-Yugoslav mother. After living in hiding during the Second World War, the family settled near Paris. Berman attended the Lycée Montmorency. Later he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, where he met his wife Isabelle. In 1968, they moved to Argentina where they remained for five years. On their return to Paris, Berman directed a research program and taught several seminar...
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Joseph Owens
#35637
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
Joseph Owens was a Canadian Roman Catholic priest and a philosopher specializing in the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and medieval philosophy. Life and career Owens received his PhD in 1951 from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, an affiliate of the University of Toronto, and remained at the institute as a teacher and distinguished researcher for the rest of his career. He authored nine books and almost 150 academic papers.
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Felix Weltsch
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Felix Weltsch , was a German-speaking Jewish librarian, philosopher, author, editor, publisher and journalist. A close friend of Max Brod, Ludwig Winder and Franz Kafka, he was one of the most important Zionists in Bohemia.
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Bonnie Steinbock
#39374
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Bonnie Steinbock is a professor emerita of philosophy at the University at Albany and a specialist in bioethics who has written on topics such as abortion, end of life issues, and animal rights. Biography Steinbock received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. She now lives in Oakland, CA, with her husband, Paul Menzel. In retirement, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In retirement, she continues to publi...
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Herbert James Paton
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Herbert James Paton FBA FSA Scot , usually cited as H. J. Paton, was a Scottish philosopher who taught at various university institutions, including Glasgow and Oxford. He worked in British intelligence during the two world wars and played a diplomatic role on behalf of Poland at the 1919 Versailles conference. In 1968, the year before his death, he published The Claim of Scotland, a plea for greater general understanding of the constitutional position of his own native country.
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Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir
#46545
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir , who publishes as Ásta, is an Icelandic philosopher. She was a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and is currently a professor at Duke University.
Go to Profile#3093
Johannes Clauberg
1622 - 1665 (43 years)
Johannes Clauberg was a German theologian and philosopher. Clauberg was the founding Rector of the first University of Duisburg, where he taught from 1655 to 1665. He is known as a "scholastic cartesian".
Go to Profile#3094
Barbara Skarga
#44247
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Barbara Skarga was a Polish philosophy historian and philosopher who worked mainly in ethics and epistemology. Biography Skarga was born in 1919 at Warsaw to a Calvinist family with gentry roots. Her sister was actress Hanna Skarżanka and brother was Edward Skarga. Skarga studied philosophy at Wilno University. During World War II she was a member of the resistance movement Armia Krajowa. In 1944 the Soviet NKVD arrested and sentenced her to ten years at the katorga. Afterwards, she was forced to live at a collective farm. After the war she wrote an anonymous memoir about her time in the gul...
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Simon Caney
#24134
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Simon Caney is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Warwick and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Caney studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Merton College, Oxford, and was a postgraduate student of G. A. Cohen at Nuffield College, Oxford. He taught at the University of Newcastle, the University of Birmingham, and at Magdalen College, at the University of Oxford before taking up his position at Warwick as Professor of Political Theory.
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Robert J. Richards
#16532
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert J. Richards is an author and the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. He has written or edited seven books about the history of science as well as dozens of articles.
Go to Profile#3097
Gerard Casey
#32193
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gerard Casey is an Irish academic who is Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin. Career He holds law degrees from the University of London and UCD as well as a primary degree in philosophy from University College Cork, an MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame and the higher doctorate, DLitt, from the National University of Ireland. He was formerly Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America 1983–1986. He was a member of the School of Philosophy in University College Dublin from 1986 until he retired in December 2015. He is a Fellow of Mises UK, an Associated...
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Rob Buckman
#11726
Overall Influence
1948 - 2011 (63 years)
Robert Alexander Amiel Buckman was a British doctor of medicine, comedian and author, and president of the Humanist Association of Canada. He first appeared in a Cambridge University Footlights Revue in 1968, and subsequently presented several television and radio programmes about medicine, as well as appearing on comedy programmes such as Just a Minute. He was also the author of many popular books on medicine.
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Kamo no Mabuchi
1697 - 1769 (72 years)
Kamo no Mabuchi, or Mabuchi of Kamo was a kokugaku scholar, poet and philologist during mid-Edo period Japan. Along with Kada no Azumamaro, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane, he was regarded as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku, and through his research into the spirit of ancient Japan he expounded on the theory of magokoro, which he held to be fundamental to the history of Japan. Independently of and alongside his contemporary Motoori Norinaga, Mabuchi is accredited with the initial discovery of Lyman's Law, governing rendaku in the Japanese language, though which would later be name...
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Roberta Millstein
#29623
Overall Influence
Roberta L. Millstein is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, with affiliations in the Science and Technology Studies Program and the John Muir Institute for the Environment. She is the Senior Co-chair of the Philosophy of Science Association’s Women's Caucus and an Editor of the peer-reviewed online open-access journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology. She also serves as a member of the executive committee and Council for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division as well as the council for the International Society for the ...
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