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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#3651
Luiz Felipe Pondé
#32488
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Luiz Felipe de Cerqueira e Silva Pondé is a Brazilian writer and professor of philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. He was awarded a Doctor's Degree by the University of Sao Paulo, together with an exchange program with the University of Paris. He finished his Post-Doctorate at the University of Tel Aviv. Currently, he works as a professor in the Brazilian Educational Institution Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado and Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.
Go to Profile#3652
J. N. Findlay
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
John Niemeyer Findlay , usually cited as J. N. Findlay, was a South African philosopher. Education and career Findlay read classics and philosophy as a boy and then at the Transvaal University College, .
Go to Profile#3653
Joel Roth
#13545
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joel Roth is a prominent American rabbi in the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the rabbinical body of Conservative Judaism. He is a former member and chair of the assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which deals with questions of Jewish law and tradition, and serves as the Louis Finkelstein Professor of Talmud and Jewish Law at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, where he formerly served as dean of the Rabbinical School. He is also Rosh Yeshiva of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Israel, an institution founded and maintained by the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and under the academic auspices of JTS.
Go to Profile#3654
Alison McIntyre
#57019
Overall Influence
Alison McIntyre is the Virginia Onderdonk '29 Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. McIntyre received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Tufts University, before going on to receive a doctoral degree from Princeton.
Go to Profile#3655
Dafna D. Gladman
#26754
Overall Influence
Dafna D. Gladman, MD, FRCPC, is a Canadian doctor and medical researcher working in the fields of psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and rheumatoid arthritis. She is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Senior Scientist at the Krembil Research Institute. She is Deputy Director, Centre for Prognosis Studies in the Rheumatic Diseases , Co-Director, Lupus Clinic, Toronto Western Hospital and Director, Psoriatic Arthritis Program, Toronto Western Hospital.
Go to Profile#3656
David Malament
#26269
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David B. Malament is an American philosopher of science, specializing in the philosophy of physics. Biography Malament attended Stuyvesant High School and received a B.A. in mathematics 1968 at Columbia College, Columbia University, and Ph.D. in philosophy 1975 at Rockefeller University. After teaching for nearly a quarter-century at the University of Chicago, Malament left to become Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is now emeritus. His book Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Th...
Go to Profile#3657
Thomas Francis Jr.
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Thomas Francis Jr. was an American physician, virologist, and epidemiologist who guided the discovery and development of the polio vaccine being worked on by his student Jonas Salk. Francis was the first person to isolate influenza virus in the United States, and in 1940 showed that there are other strains of influenza, and took part in the development of influenza vaccines.
Go to Profile#3658
Delfim Santos
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
Delfim Pinto dos Santos , was a Portuguese academic, philosopher, educationist, essayist and book and movie reviewer. Life Delfim Santos was born in Oporto, Portugal in 1907, to Arnaldo Pinto and Amelia dos Santos Oliveira. His father was a goldsmith and trained him for his craft, which Delfim successfully practiced as apprentice until Arnaldo's untimely death, occurred when the son was aged 15. Still under the impact of his recent orphan condition, the young Delfim kept the family business running for a while, only to become aware that his vocation and motivation lay elsewhere and thereby decided to pursue a lifelong engagement with study and intellectual quest.
Go to Profile#3659
Dan Wikler
#39046
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Isaac Wikler is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health . His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transpl...
Go to Profile#3660
Robert P. Crease
#10747
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert P. Crease is a philosopher and historian of science best known for his work in performance theory and historical research on Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is currently the chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#3661
Kathleen Carley
#4235
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kathleen M. Carley is an American computational social scientist specializing in dynamic network analysis. She is a professor in the School of Computer Science in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds appointments in the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#3662
Noretta Koertge
#12208
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Noretta Koertge is an American philosopher of science noted for her work on Karl Popper and scientific rationality. Career She worked since 1981 as a Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University and is now an Emeritus Professorship. She was editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophy of Science, her election as a Fellow, in 1999, by American Association for the Advancement of Science and her being Editor-in-Chief of The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography . She is also a novelist.
Go to Profile#3663
Richard L. Simmons
#65092
Overall Influence
#3664
Thomas Naum James
#41677
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Thomas Naum James was a leading American cardiologist during the last half of the twentieth century. He was chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and then president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He is best known for his research in the anatomy of the coronary arteries and the electrical conduction system of the heart. He served as president of the American Heart Association, the International Society and Federation of Cardiology, and the Tenth World Congress of Cardiology. He retired in 2004, and returned to Birmingham, Alabama, where he died in 2010.
Go to Profile#3665
Anandavardhana
820 - 890 (70 years)
Ānandavardhana was the author of Dhvanyāloka, or A Light on Suggestion , a work articulating the philosophy of "aesthetic suggestion" . The philosopher Abhinavagupta wrote an important commentary on it, the Locana, or The Eye.
Go to Profile#3666
Walter Jaeschke
#55724
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Walter Jaeschke was a German philosopher, educated at Freie Universität Berlin and at the Technischen Universität Berlin, where he studied philosophy, history of religion, and sinology. He directed the critical Gesammelte Werke edition of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He also co-directed critical editions of the works of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Jaeschke is known in particular for his scholarship on Hegel's philosophy of religion.
Go to Profile#3667
Peter A. Singer
#36633
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Peter Alexander Singer, OC, FRSC, is special advisor to the director general of the World Health Organization, and also adjunct professor of medicine at University of Toronto. From 2008-2018 Singer was chief executive officer of Grand Challenges Canada and Director of the Sandra Rotman Centre, University Health Network. From 1996-2006 Singer was director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.
Go to Profile#3668
James F. Thomson
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
James F. Thomson was a British philosopher who devised the puzzle of Thomson's lamp, to argue against the possibility of supertasks Academic career Thomson was born in London in 1921 and graduated from the University of London in 1949. He was an assistant in the Department of Philosophy, and John Stuart Mill Scholar at University College, London, from 1949–1950. He was Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Harvard and Princeton from 1950–1951; assistant lecturer at University College from 1951–1953 and University Lecturer in Moral Science at the University of Cambridge from 1953–1956. Thomson was appo...
Go to Profile#3669
Christopher Tindale
#40150
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christopher William Tindale is a Canadian philosopher specializing in rhetoric, argumentation theory, and ancient Greek philosophy. Tindale is an editor of the journal Informal Logic, and currently serves as the chair of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric. He has published numerous books and articles, translated into several languages, with a focus on argumentation and rhetoric.
Go to Profile#3670
Roman Frigg
#37429
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Roman Frigg is a Swiss philosopher, Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and director of its Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. In 2016 he was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award.
Go to Profile#3671
Robert Kirk
#32446
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Robert Kirk is a British philosopher. He is emeritus professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Kirk is best known for his work on philosophical zombies—putatively unconscious beings physically and behaviourally identical to human beings. Although Kirk did not invent this idea, he introduced the term zombie in his 1974 papers "Sentience and Behaviour" and "Zombies v. Materialists". In the latter he offered a formulation of physicalism that aimed to make clear that if zombies are possible, physicalism is false: an argument that was not much noticed until David Chalmers's development of it in The Conscious Mind.
Go to Profile#3672
Francis Jeanson
#12602
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Francis Jeanson was a French political activist known for his commitment to the FLN during the Algerian war. Life Although his father's name was Henri, Francis Jeanson was not related to the Henri Jeanson who was a journalist at Le Canard enchaîné, Le Crapouillot, and a screenwriter.
Go to Profile#3673
Rasmus Nielsen
1809 - 1884 (75 years)
Rasmus Nielsen was a Danish philosopher and professor, as well as a critic of Søren Kierkegaard. Nielsen was the son of a farmer. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, starting in 1832 and graduating in 1837. He then went on to get a licentiate degree and, after giving some lectures on theological topics, succeeded Poul Martin Møller as professor of moral theology.
Go to Profile#3674
Øystein Linnebo
#53308
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Øystein Linnebo is a Norwegian philosopher. As of 2020 he is currently employed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, having earlier held a position as Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#3675
Ryan T. Anderson
#24754
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Ryan Timothy Anderson is an American conservative political philosopher who is best known for his opposition to same-sex marriage. He is currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was previously the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Discourse, the Witherspoon Institute's online journal.
Go to Profile#3676
Moses Montefiore
1784 - 1885 (101 years)
Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Baronet, was a British financier and banker, activist, philanthropist and Sheriff of London. Born to an Italian Sephardic Jewish family based in London, after he achieved success, he donated large sums of money to promote industry, business, economic development, education and health among the Jewish community in the Levant. He founded Mishkenot Sha'ananim in 1860, the first Jewish settlement outside the Old City of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#3677
James F. Fries
#63012
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
James Franklin Fries was an American rheumatologist and author.
Go to Profile#3678
Burghart Schmidt
#25732
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Burghart Schmidt was a German philosopher. He was professor at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Education He was born in Wildeshausen, Oldenburg, Germany. Schmidt was educated in biology, chemistry, physics and then philosophy and history of art at the University of Tübingen. He was coworker for many years of Ernst Bloch, over whom he submitted later also numerous publications, among them the standard work Ernst Bloch . From 1968 to 1977 he worked as a scientific coworker of the philosopher and published his complete work at Suhrkamp. After the graduation in 1982 at the University of Tübingen as a Dr.
Go to Profile#3679
Martin B. Leon
#65509
Overall Influence
#3680
Yamazaki Ansai
1619 - 1682 (63 years)
Yamazaki Ansai was a Japanese philosopher and scholar. He began his career as a Buddhist monk, but eventually came to follow the teachings of Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi. He combined Neo-Confucian ideas with Shinto to create Suika Shinto.
Go to Profile#3681
Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann
1775 - 1839 (64 years)
Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann was a German philosopher and anthropologist. Biography Windischmann attended the Gymnasium in Mainz, and in 1772 took the course in philosophy at the university there. He continued this course at Würzburg, where he also studied the natural sciences and medicine until 1796. After a year at Vienna he settled in 1797 as a practising physician at Mainz, where he also gave medical lectures. In 1801 the Elector of Mainz, Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal, summoned him to Aschaffenburg as court physician.
Go to Profile#3682
Diderik Batens
#46042
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Diderik Batens , is a Belgian logician and epistemologist at the University of Ghent, faculty of Arts and Philosophy, department of Philosophy and moral sciences. Known chiefly for his work on adaptive and paraconsistent logics, his epistemological views may be broadly characterized as fallibilist.
Go to Profile#3683
Francis J. Beckwith
#16934
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Francis J. "Frank" Beckwith is an American philosopher, professor, scholar, speaker, writer, and lecturer. He is currently Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies, Affiliate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy, at Baylor University, where he first served as Associate Director of Baylor's J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies.
Go to Profile#3684
Roger de La Fresnaye
1885 - 1925 (40 years)
Roger de La Fresnaye was a French Cubist painter. Early years and education La Fresnaye was born in Le Mans where his father, an officer in the French army, was temporarily stationed. The La Fresnayes were an aristocratic family whose ancestral home, the Château de La Fresnaye, is in Falaise. His education was classically based, and was followed from 1903 to 1904 by studies at the Académie Julian in Paris, and from 1904 to 1908 at the École des Beaux-Arts. From 1908 he studied at the Académie Ranson under Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, whose joint influence is evident in early works such as Woman with Chrysanthemums, 1909.
Go to Profile#3685
Anna Willess Williams
1857 - 1926 (69 years)
Anna Willess Williams was a teacher and philosophical writer best known as the model for George T. Morgan's silver dollar design, popularly known as the Morgan dollar. Morgan dollar In 1876, George T. Morgan began creating a series of new coin designs at the behest of Director of the Mint, Dr. Henry R. Linderman. Morgan opted to use the profile of an American girl to depict the Goddess of Liberty instead of simply creating an imaginary figure for the obverse of his new design. After he rejected several possible candidates, Morgan's friend, artist Thomas Eakins, recommended Anna Williams of Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#3686
Jacques Aumont
#23094
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jacques Aumont is a French academic and writer on film theory. Born in Avignon he initially trained as an engineer but started contributing film criticism to Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1960s. He is professor emeritus at University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Go to Profile#3687
Magdi Yacoub
#3392
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub , is an Egyptian retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London, best known for his early work in repairing heart valves with surgeon Donald Ross, adapting the Ross procedure, where the diseased aortic valve is replaced with the person's own pulmonary valve, devising the arterial switch operation in transposition of the great arteries, and establishing the heart transplantation centre at Harefield Hospital in 1980 with a heart transplant for Derrick Morris, who at the time of his death was Europe's longest-surviving heart transplant recipient. Y...
Go to Profile#3688
Arundhati Roy
#2015
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things , which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
Go to Profile#3689
Eurytus
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Eurytus was an eminent Pythagorean philosopher from Magna Graecia who Iamblichus in one passage describes as a native of Croton, while in another, he enumerates him among the Tarentine Pythagoreans.
Go to Profile#3690
Severino Antinori
#16921
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Severino Antinori is an Italian gynecologist and embryologist. He has publicly taken controversial positions over in vitro fertilisation and human cloning. On 13 May 2016 Antinori was arrested and accused of kidnapping a woman, and stealing her ovules.
Go to Profile#3691
Ofelia Schutte
#43059
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ofelia Schutte is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where she had served as Professor of Philosophy since 2004, and as Professor of Women's Studies from 1999 until 2004. Schutte is recognized by many as a senior Latina feminist philosopher, who has played a crucial role in launching the field of Latin American Philosophy and Latinx philosophy within the United States.
Go to Profile#3692
Ian Rumfitt
#52007
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ian Rumfitt is a British philosopher specializing in the philosophy of language and philosophy of math, who is currently Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Education and career He was educated at Victoria College, Jersey, at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was also a junior research fellow, and at Princeton University. His graduate studies at Oxford were supervised by Sir Michael Dummett. He has taught at Keele University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University College, Oxford, where he served as a tutorial fellow from 1998 until 2005, Birkbeck College, Univer...
Go to Profile#3693
Patricia Blanchette
#44408
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Patricia A. Blanchette is an American philosopher and logician, the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in the history of philosophy, history of logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and is the author of a book on the logic of Gottlob Frege.
Go to Profile#3694
Carlos Andrés Segovia
#45290
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Carlos Andrés Segovia y Corral, 2nd Marquis of Salobreña , is a Spanish nobleman and academic specialising in philosophy and religious studies. Segovia y Corral is an independent philosopher and scholar, formerly associate professor of religious studies at Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, and currently lecturer in philosophy at that same university.
Go to Profile#3695
Tomas Ganz
#45816
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Tomas Ganz is an American physician-scientist who has made important contributions to innate immunology and the pathophysiology of iron regulation. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1948, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. He studied physics at University of California, Los Angeles and obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1976 and an M.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. In 1983, after receiving training in pulmonology and internal medicine, he became a faculty member at UCLA in the department of medicine.
Go to Profile#3696
Mostafa Malekian
#56834
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mostafa Malekian is a prominent Iranian philosopher, thinker, translator and editor. He is working on a project called Rationality and Spirituality. His most important book, that is about spirituality and wisdom, is A Way to Freedom.
Go to Profile#3697
Gary Dorrien
#28254
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gary John Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.
Go to Profile#3698
Carlo Lottieri
#31030
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Carlo Lottieri is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Verona. He holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Genoa, a M.A. from the Institut Universitaire d’Etudes Européens , a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Paris-Sorbonne University. His research interests cover Philosophy of Law, Federalism, Libertarianism, political theology, Religion and Public Life, Military Ethics, Elitism, Evolutionary Theory of Law, Commons and Private Property, Modern State. He edited many works by Bruno Leoni in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Czech.
Go to Profile#3699
Frederik Stjernfelt
#15768
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Frederik Stjernfelt is a Danish professor and writer. As a professor, he lectures in science studies, history of ideas, and semiotics, at Aalborg University's Copenhagen department. Career Stjernfelt has been working as a reviewer and writer at 'Weekendavisen' since 1994. Earlier in his career, he was employed as an editor at Gyldendal's cultural journal 'Kritik' between 1993 and 2012. Stjernfelt has been a member of 'Danish Academy' since 2001. Also, he is cofounder of the political network 'Fri debat', which functions to promote freedom of speech. Subsequently, he has published a number of...
Go to Profile#3700
Stephen H. Webb
#27419
Overall Influence
1961 - 2016 (55 years)
Stephen H. Webb was a theologian and philosopher of religion. Webb graduated from Wabash College in 1983, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and taught at Wabash College as Professor of Religion and Philosophy from 1988 to 2012. Born in 1961 and reared in Indianapolis, Indiana, he grew up at Englewood Christian Church, an evangelical church in the Restoration Movement. He recounts his experiences there in Taking Religion to School and in an essay, "Recalling: A Theologian Remembers His Church," in Falling Toward Grace: Images of Religion and Culture from the Heartland, ed. Kent Calder and Susan Neville .
Go to Profile