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,
#3701
Jan Sten
1899 - 1937 (38 years)
Jan Ernestovich Sten was a Soviet Communist Party functionary and specialist in Marxist philosophy. Early career Born into a peasant family in modern-day Latvia, Jan Sten joined the Bolsheviks as a teenager, in 1914, shortly before taking up a place at a teachers' seminary in Valmiera. In 1917, when Latvia was overrun by the German army, he was evacuated to Syzran After graduating, in 1919, he fought in the Russian Civil War. In 1921, he was one of the original batch of students enrolled in the Institute of Red Professors, and graduated from its philosophy department in 1924, after which he t...
Go to Profile#3702
Marilyn Frye
#44826
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Marilyn Frye is an American philosopher and radical feminist theorist. She is known for her theories on sexism, racism, oppression, and sexuality. Her writings offer discussions of feminist topics, such as: white supremacy, male privilege, and gay and lesbian marginalization. Although she approaches the issues from the perspective of justice, she is also engaged with the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology of social categories.
Go to Profile#3703
Javad Tabatabai
#15729
Overall Influence
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Seyyed Javad Tabatabai was an Iranian philosopher and political scientist. He was Professor and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran. Biography Tabatabai, an Iranian Azeri, was born on 14 December 1945 in Tabriz, Iran. His father was a merchant in Bazaar of Tabriz. After pursuing studies in theology, law and philosophy in Tabriz and Tehran, he earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, with a dissertation on Hegel's political philosophy.
Go to Profile#3704
Donald Gotterbarn
#31488
Overall Influence
Donald William Gotterbarn is a computer ethics researcher. Gotterbarn received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1971 from the University of Rochester. He also earned his M. Div. from the Colgate Rochester Divinity School.
Go to Profile#3705
Gerald Berenson
#56333
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Gerald Sanders Berenson was an American cardiologist, heart researcher, and public health specialist who specialized in researching the causes of heart diseases. Berenson's fundamental research revealed that adult heart disease arises from practices and behaviors that begin in childhood. He also discovered that atherosclerosis was significantly more pronounced in individuals who had three or four cardiovascular risk factors compared to those who had none.
Go to Profile#3706
Stanisław Staszic
1755 - 1826 (71 years)
Stanisław Wawrzyniec Staszic was a leading figure in the Polish Enlightenment: a Catholic priest, philosopher, geologist, writer, poet, translator and statesman. A physiocrat, monist, pan-Slavist and laissez-fairist, he supported many reforms in Poland. He is particularly remembered for his political writings during the "Great Sejm" and for his large support towards the Constitution of 3 May 1791, adopted by that Sejm.
Go to Profile#3707
Stuart F. Schlossman
#65942
Overall Influence
#3708
Brian Greenwood
#48304
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Sir Brian Mellor Greenwood, CBE, FRCP, FRS is a British physician, biomedical research scientist, academic, and recipient of the first Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize. Greenwood is the Manson Professor of Clinical Tropical Medicine, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Go to Profile#3709
Prodicus
460 BC - 380 BC (80 years)
Prodicus of Ceos was a Greek philosopher, and part of the first generation of Sophists. He came to Athens as ambassador from Ceos, and became known as a speaker and a teacher. Plato treats him with greater respect than the other sophists, and in several of the Platonic dialogues Socrates appears as the friend of Prodicus. One writer claims Socrates used his method of instruction. Prodicus made linguistics and ethics prominent in his curriculum. The content of one of his speeches is still known, and concerns a fable in which Heracles has to make a choice between Virtue and Vice. He also interp...
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Elme Marie Caro
1826 - 1887 (61 years)
Elme Marie Caro was a French philosopher. Life His father, a professor of philosophy, gave him an education at the Stanislas College and the École Normale, where he graduated in 1848. After being professor of philosophy at several provincial universities, he received the degree of doctor, and came to Paris in 1858 as master of conferences at the École Normale.
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
1864 - 1901 (37 years)
Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa , known as Toulouse Lautrec , was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the sometimes decadent affairs of those times.
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Martin Cohen
#35148
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Martin Cohen is a British philosopher, an editor and reviewer who writes on philosophy, philosophy of science and political philosophy. Biography He studied philosophy and social science at Sussex University where his tutors included some of the early group of philosophers who launched the university's pioneering language and values programme, including Terry Diffey and Bernard Harrison. He obtained a teaching qualification at Keele University and his PhD in philosophy of education from the University of Exeter. After research posts at universities in Britain and Australia, Cohen moved to Fra...
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Agostino Steuco
1497 - 1548 (51 years)
Agostino Steuco , Italian humanist, Old Testament scholar, Counter Reformation polemicist and antiquarian, was born at Gubbio in Umbria. He discoursed on the subject of perennial philosophy and coined the term philosophia perennis.
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Michele Marsonet
#59491
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michele Marsonet is professor of philosophy of science and methodology of the human sciences, chairman of the philosophy department and vice-rector for international relations at the University of Genoa in Italy. Having worked as associate professor, first of logic and then of philosophy of science, at the University of Genoa from 1992 to 1999, he was then a full professor of theoretical philosophy and institutions of philosophy. He was also dean of the faculty of arts and humanities of the University of Genoa from 2002 to 2008. His main areas of study are in pragmatism, philosophy of science, metaphysics, methodology of the social sciences, political philosophy and philosophical logic.
Go to Profile#3715
Andrew Pyle
#45263
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Andrew Pyle is a British philosopher on the history of philosophical atomism. Pyle is professor Emeritus in Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where he also received his doctorate. His dissertation was titled Atomism and its Critics: Democritus to Newton. Pyle also writes on the history of science and has given talks within the university on the nature of science historically. Pyle is one of the editors of the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy. Andrew Pyle engaged in an apologetics debate with William Lane Craig in 2008 on the topic: Does the Christian God Exist...
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Paul Sugarbaker
#43620
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Paul Hendrick Sugarbaker is an American surgeon at the Washington Cancer Institute. He is known for developments in surgical oncology of the abdomen, including cytoreductive surgery followed by hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, or HIPEC, a treatment alternately referred to as the Sugarbaker Procedure.
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Jacopo Zabarella
1533 - 1589 (56 years)
Giacomo Zabarella was an Italian Aristotelian philosopher and logician. Life Zabarella was born into a noble Paduan family. He received a humanist education and entered the University of Padua, where he received a doctorate in 1553. His teachers included Francesco Robortello in humanities, Bernardino Tomitano in logic, Marcantonio Genua in physics and metaphysics, and Pietro Catena in mathematics. In 1564 he succeeded Tomitano in a chair of logic. In 1577 he was promoted to the first extraordinary chair of natural philosophy. He died in Padua at the age of 56 in 1589. His entire teaching career was spent at his native university.
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Michael S. Gottlieb
#8657
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael Stuart Gottlieb is an American physician and immunologist known for his 1981 identification of acquired immune deficiency syndrome as a new disease, and for his HIV/AIDS research, HIV/AIDS activism, and philanthropic efforts associated with HIV/AIDS treatment.
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Robert R Redfield III
#66093
Overall Influence
#3720
Yiannis N. Moschovakis
#24984
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Yiannis Nicholas Moschovakis is a set theorist, descriptive set theorist, and recursion theorist, at UCLA. His book Descriptive Set Theory is the primary reference for the subject. He is especially associated with the development of the effective, or lightface, version of descriptive set theory, and he is known for the Moschovakis coding lemma that is named after him.
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Henri Atlan
#8125
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Henri Atlan is a French biophysicist and philosopher. Early life and education Born to a Jewish family in French Algeria, Atlan gained degrees in medicine and biophysics at the University of Paris . He married Liliane Atlan in 1952; they had two children while living in Paris, Miri in 1953 and Michael in 1956. He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley working on ageing and mutation.
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Ágúst H. Bjarnason
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Ágúst H. Bjarnason was the son of Hákon Bjarnason, and Jóhanna K. Þorleifsdóttir. Ágúst was a pioneer in teaching psychology in Iceland and the first one to write books on psychology in Icelandic.
Go to Profile#3723
Lori Gruen
#53702
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Lori Gruen is an American philosopher, ethicist, and author who is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Gruen is also Professor of Science in Society, and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan.
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Rudolf Weigl
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl was a Polish biologist, physician and inventor, known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year between 1930 and 1934, and from 1936 to 1939.
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José Baselga
#23764
Overall Influence
1959 - 2021 (62 years)
Josep Baselga i Torres, known in Spanish as José Baselga , was a Spanish medical oncologist and researcher focused on the development of novel molecular targeted agents, with a special emphasis in breast cancer. Through his career he was associated with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology, and the Massachusetts General Hospital in their hematology and oncology divisions. He led the development of the breast cancer treatment Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody, that targets the HER2 protein, which is impacted in aggressive breast cancers.
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Richard Bett
#57073
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Richard Arnot Home Bett holds a joint appointment in Philosophy and Classics at Johns Hopkins University. He received his BA from Oxford University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He spent 1994-5 as a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C. From January 2000 to June 2001 he was Acting Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association, and he was Secretary-Treasurer of its Eastern Division from 2003 to 2013.
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Victor Dubowitz
#8437
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Victor Dubowitz, FRCP, Hon FRCPCH is a British neurologist and professor emeritus at Imperial College London. He is principally known along with his wife Lilly Dubowitz for developing two clinical tests, the Dubowitz Score to estimate gestational age and the other for the systematic neurological examination of the newborn.
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Herbert Stachowiak
#28214
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Herbert Stachowiak was a German philosopher. From 1973 to 1986 he taught as a full professor at the University of Paderborn. Life After a commercial apprenticeship in the aircraft industry, Stachowiak obtained his Abitur in 1941 through the second educational path. He continued to work in industry and as a teacher at a night school before he was drafted for military service in 1944. From 1946, he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Berlin, first at what is now Humboldt University and later at the Free University, which had been newly founded in 1948 because of the political conditions in the west of the city.
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Hugh Blair
1718 - 1800 (82 years)
Hugh Blair FRSE was a Scottish minister of religion, author and rhetorician, considered one of the first great theorists of written discourse. As a minister of the Church of Scotland, and occupant of the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh, Blair's teachings had a great impact in both the spiritual and the secular realms. Best known for Sermons, a five volume endorsement of practical Christian morality, and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, a prescriptive guide on composition, Blair was a valuable part of the Scottish Enlightenment.
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Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood
#12013
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Stewart Ross Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood, was a Scottish academic and public servant and one of Britain's most distinguished philosophers of religion. He sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
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Thomas Brown
1778 - 1820 (42 years)
Thomas Brown was a Scottish philosopher and poet. Biography Early life Brown was born at Kirkmabreck, Kirkcudbrightshire, the son of Rev. Samuel Brown and Mary Smith. Their son was a wide reader and an eager student. Educated at several schools in London, he went to the University of Edinburgh in 1792, where he attended Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy class, but does not appear to have completed his course. After studying law for a time he took up medicine; his graduation thesis De Somno was well received. But his strength lay in metaphysical analysis.
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Kathryn Sophia Belle
#61012
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Kathryn Sophia Belle, formerly known as Kathryn T. Gines , is an American philosopher. She is associate professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Much of her work has focused on increasing diversity within philosophy, and she is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.
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George Stuart Fullerton
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
George Stuart Fullerton was an American philosopher and psychologist. Early life and education Fullerton was born in Fatehgarh, India, the son of the Rev. Robert Stuart Fullerton and Martha White Fullerton, American Presbyterian missionaries. He moved to Philadelphia with his widowed mother and his siblings, after his father's death in 1865. He graduated in 1879 from the University of Pennsylvania and in 1884 from Yale Divinity School.
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Karl Christian Planck
1819 - 1880 (61 years)
Karl Christian Planck was a German philosopher. Life Planck was born in Stuttgart. He studied at Tübingen, where he became doctor of philosophy in 1840 and Privatdozent in 1848. During this period the influence of Reiff led him to oppose the dominant Hegelianism of the time.
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Columba Ryan
#53904
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Columba Ryan was a British priest of the Dominican Order and a philosophy teacher, university chaplain, and pastor. He was the brother of John Ryan, the British animator and cartoonist. Life Patrick Ryan was born in Hampstead in 1916, the second son of Sir Andrew Ryan, a British diplomat who was the last dragoman in Constantinople, and his wife Ruth. Patrick was educated at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire. In 1935 he entered the Dominican Order at Woodchester Priory in Gloucestershire where he was given the name Columba. His uncle was Patrick Finbar Ryan OP, Archbishop of Port of Spain, Trinid...
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Zeami Motokiyo
1363 - 1443 (80 years)
, also called , was a Japanese aesthetician, actor, and playwright. His father, Kan'ami Kiyotsugu, introduced him to Noh theater performance at a young age, and found that he was a skilled actor. Kan'ami was also skilled in acting and formed a family theater ensemble. As it grew in popularity, Zeami had the opportunity to perform in front of the Shōgun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. The Shōgun was impressed by the young actor and began to compose a love affair with him. Zeami was introduced to Yoshimitsu's court and was provided with an education in classical literature and philosophy while continuing to act.
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Sarane Alexandrian
#27178
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Sarane Alexandrian was a French philosopher, essayist, and art critic. Early life Alexandrian was born to a French mother and Armenian father, Vartan Alexandrian, a stomatologist under the service of Faisal I. At the age of six, he was sent to Paris to stay with his maternal grandmother.
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Adolph Diesterweg
1790 - 1866 (76 years)
Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg was a German educator, thinker, and progressive liberal politician, who campaigned for the secularization of schools. He is said to be precursory to the reform of pedagogy. Diesterweg is considered as "a teacher of teachers".
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Rudolf Pannwitz
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Rudolf Pannwitz was a German writer, poet and philosopher. His thought combined nature philosophy, Nietzsche, an opposition to nihilism and pan-European internationalism: Life Pannwitz was educated at the University of Marburg before moving to Berlin to continue studying. Through Gertrud Kantorowicz, a cousin of Ernst Kantorowicz and friend of Georg Simmel, he was introduced to Sabine Lepsius and the poetry of Stefan George. Pannwitz's poem 'Das Totengedicht' [The Poem of the Dead] was published in George's literary magazine, Blätter für die Kunst. George and Nietzsche were lasting influences upon Pannwitz.
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Jens Timmermann
#53923
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jens Timmermann is a German philosopher and the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is best known for his research on Kant’s ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law.
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Guido Reni
1575 - 1642 (67 years)
Guido Reni was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, although his works showed a classical manner, similar to Simon Vouet, Nicolas Poussin, and Philippe de Champaigne. He painted primarily religious works, but also mythological and allegorical subjects. Active in Rome, Naples, and his native Bologna, he became the dominant figure in the Bolognese School that emerged under the influence of the Carracci.
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Laurence Thomas
#36815
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Laurence Thomas is an American philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science at Syracuse University. Thomas is noted for his work on moral luck, social philosophy and American Blacks and Jews.
Go to Profile#3743
Thomas B. Warren
#30613
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Thomas Bratton Warren was an American professor of philosophy of religion and apologetics at the Harding School of Theology in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, and was an important philosopher and theologian in the Churches of Christ during the latter half of the twentieth century.
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George of Trebizond
1395 - 1472 (77 years)
George of Trebizond was a Byzantine Greek philosopher, scholar, and humanist. Life He was born on the Greek island of Crete , and derived his surname Trapezuntius from the fact that his ancestors were from the Byzantine Greek Trapezuntine Empire.
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Alan J. Wein
#66716
Overall Influence
#3746
Walpola Rahula Thero
#14823
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Walpola Rahula Thero was a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, scholar and writer. In 1964, he became the Professor of History and Religions at Northwestern University, thus becoming the first bhikkhu to hold a professorial chair in the Western world. He also once held the position of Vice-Chancellor at the then Vidyodaya University . He has written extensively about Buddhism in English, French and Sinhala. He wrote the book What the Buddha Taught about Theravada Buddhism.
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Pedanius Dioscorides
40 - 90 (50 years)
Pedanius Dioscorides , "the father of pharmacognosy", was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of —a 5-volume Greek encyclopedia about herbal medicine and related medicinal substances , that was widely read for more than 1,500 years. For almost two millennia Dioscorides was regarded as the most prominent writer on plants and plant drugs.
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Nathan Rotenstreich
#40303
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
Nathan Rotenstreich was an Israeli professor of philosophy. Biography Nathan Rotenstreich was born in Sambir, Galicia, then in Austria-Hungary, later in Poland, now in Ukraine. His father, Ephraim Fischel Rotenstreich, was a Zionist leader and a member of the Polish two houses of Parliament. In 1932, at the age of 18, Rotenstreich emigrated to Mandate Palestine.
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Madis Kõiv
#18158
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Madis Kõiv was an Estonian writer, philosopher and physicist. Education Kõiv attended school in Tartu after the second World War, graduating in the early 1950s with a degree in nuclear physics. Kõiv worked as a scientist and lecturer until 1991.
Go to Profile#3750
Asclepigenia
500 - 485 (-15 years)
Asclepigenia was an Athenian philosopher and mystic. Biography Asclepigenia was the daughter of Plutarch of Athens. She studied and taught, alongside her brother Hierius, at the Neoplatonic school of Athens. The school contended with the more scientific school in Alexandria. Like other Neoplatonists of the time, she mainly studied Aristotle and Plato, but also her father's own philosophy. She lived in a historical context of turmoil due to the conflict between Neoplatonic metaphysics, which was taught in Plutarch's academy, and Christianity, which had been gaining in popularity at the time.
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