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,
#3851
Peter Koslowski
#29727
Overall Influence
1952 - 2012 (60 years)
Peter Koslowski was a professor of philosophy, especially philosophy of management and organisation and history of modern philosophy, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam . Biography He was born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1952, and studied at University of Tübingen, University of Munich, and Virginia Tech. He earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1979 and his master's degree in economics 1980 .1985-87 Professor and director, Institute for the Studium fundamentale, Witten/Herdecke University. Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Political Economy 1987-20041987-2001 Founding director, Forschungs...
Go to Profile#3852
Ruth Hagengruber
#46613
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ruth Hagengruber is a German philosopher, currently professor and head of philosophy at the University of Paderborn. She specialises in the history of women philosophers as well as philosophy of economics and computer science and is a specialist on Émilie Du Châtelet. Hagengruber is the director of the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists and founder of the research area EcoTechGender. She invented the Libori Summer School and is the creator of the Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers, for which she holds the position of editor in chief together with Ma...
Go to Profile#3853
Valerie Tiberius
#51577
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Valerie Tiberius is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, an institution she has been affiliated with since 1998. She has published numerous reviewed papers, as well as five books - Deliberation about the Good: Justifying What We Value; The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits; Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction; Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well; and What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters. Much of her work has taken a practical, empirical approach to philosophical questions,...
Go to Profile#3854
Nelson Goodman
#68298
Overall Influence
#3855
Zhu Guangqian
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Zhu Guangqian was one of the founder of the study of aesthetics in 20th-century China. History Zhu graduated from the Anhui Province Tongcheng Secondary School. After earning his BA from Hong Kong University, he went abroad to study aesthetics at the University of Edinburgh and University College, London, then to France and the University of Strasbourg where he earned his doctorate. Later, he returned to China to write The Psychology of Art , On Poetry , and A History of Western Aesthetics , Letters on Beauty . In the 1930s in Beijing, Zhu Guangqian hosted a literary salon that met monthly to recite prose and poetry, east and west.
Go to Profile#3856
H. J. Blackham
#19936
Overall Influence
1903 - 2009 (106 years)
Harold John Blackham was a leading British humanist philosopher, writer and educationalist. He has been described as the "progenitor of modern humanism in Britain". Biography Blackham was born in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, on 31 March 1903, to Harriet Mary and Walter Roland Blackham . His siblings were Olive Dingle Blackham , Lorna Langstone Blackham , Sylvia Kerslake Blackham , and Joyce Maude Blackham . Blackham left school following the end of World War I, and became a farm labourer, before gaining a place at Birmingham University to study divinity and history. He acquired a teaching d...
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Ossip Zadkine
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Ossip Zadkine was a Russian-French artist of the School of Paris. He is best known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs. Early years and education Zadkine was born on 28 January 1888 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in the city of Vitsebsk, Russian Empire . He was born to a baptized Jewish father and a mother named Zippa-Dvoyra, who he claimed to be of Scottish origin. Archival materials state that Iosel-Shmuila Aronovich Tsadkin was of Jewish faith and studied in the Vitebsk City Technical School between 1900 and 1904, including two years in one class with would-be artists Marc Chagall and Victor Mekler .
Go to Profile#3858
James Garson
#50156
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
James Garson is an American philosopher and logician. He has made significant contributions in the study of modal logic and formal semantics. He is author of Modal Logic for Philosophers and What Logics Mean by Cambridge University Press. Garson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Illinois at Chicago , and Rice University.
Go to Profile#3859
Tasuku Honjo
#2568
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 . He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
Go to Profile#3860
Christine Foyer
#33966
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christine Helen Foyer is professor of plant science at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. She is President Elect of the Association of Applied Biologists, the General Secretary of the Federation of European Societies of Plant Biologists, an elected Board Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists and a Member of the French Academy of Agriculture. She has published and co-authored many papers on related subjects.
Go to Profile#3861
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya
#41743
Overall Influence
1918 - 1993 (75 years)
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya was an Indian Marxist philosopher. He made contributions to the exploration of the materialist current in ancient Indian philosophy. He is known for Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, which is his exposition of the philosophy of Lokayata. He is also known for work on history of science and scientific method in ancient India, especially his 1977 book Science and Society in Ancient India on the ancient physicians Charaka and Sushruta. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour, posthumously, in 1998.
Go to Profile#3862
Eduard Hanslick
1825 - 1904 (79 years)
Eduard Hanslick was an Austrian music critic, aesthetician and historian. Among the leading critics of his time, he was the chief music critic of the Neue Freie Presse from 1864 until the end of his life. His best known work, the 1854 treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen , was a landmark in the aesthetics of music and outlines much of his artistic and philosophical beliefs on music.
Go to Profile#3863
James Young Simpson
1811 - 1870 (59 years)
Sir James Young Simpson, 1st Baronet, , was a Scottish obstetrician and a significant figure in the history of medicine. He was the first physician to demonstrate the anaesthetic properties of chloroform on humans and helped to popularise its use in medicine.
Go to Profile#3864
John Hardwig
#56936
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Hardwig is a retired philosopher who was head of the philosophy department at the University of Tennessee. He has published widely on bioethics, end of life issues and the notion of epistemic dependency and the role of experts. He is best known for a 1997 article proposing that individuals have a duty to die in situations when those who love them would have their lives seriously compromised by continuing to take care of them.
Go to Profile#3865
Carpocrates
100 - 138 (38 years)
Carpocrates of Alexandria was the founder of an early Gnostic sect from the first half of the 2nd century, known as Carpocratians. As with many Gnostic sects, the Carpocratians are known only through the writings of the Church Fathers, principally Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria. As these writers strongly opposed Gnostic doctrine, there is a question of negative bias when using this source. While the various references to the Carpocratians differ in some details, they agree as to the libertinism of the sect, a charge commonly levied by pagans against Christians and conversely by C...
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Boyd Henry Bode
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Boyd Henry Bode was an American academic and philosopher, notable for his work on philosophy of education. Bode was born in Ridott, Illinois. He grew up in rural areas of Iowa and South Dakota and attended Pennsylvania College in Iowa and later the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1900.
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Li Da
1890 - 1966 (76 years)
Li Da was a Chinese Marxist philosopher. He led the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party after the foundation of the party. Li left the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s due to what he viewed as its turn to reformism. However, he maintained close ties with the party and its underground apparatus. Li translated many European Marxist works into Chinese. Li's most important work was Elements of Sociology, which had a great influence on Mao Zedong. Li helped popularize the New Philosophy that gained dominance in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. After the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, Li rejoined the Chinese Communist Party.
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Arda Denkel
#58574
Overall Influence
1949 - 2000 (51 years)
Arda Denkel was a Turkish philosopher. He studied at the University of Oxford and, under Peter Strawson, wrote his D.Phil. dissertation which he later developed into a more expansive study with his book The Natural Background of Meaning in 1999.
Go to Profile#3869
Marc Allan Pfeffer
#68526
Overall Influence
#3870
Alejandro Korn
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Alejandro Korn was an Argentine psychiatrist, philosopher, reformist and politician. For eighteen years, he was the director of the psychiatry hospital in Melchor Romero . He was the first university official in Latin America to be elected thanks to the student's vote. He is considered to be the pioneer of Argentine philosophy. Along with Florentino Ameghino, Juan Vucetich, Almafuerte and Carlos Spegazzini, he is considered to be one of the five wise men of La Plata.
Go to Profile#3871
Shimon Sakaguchi
#13922
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Shimon Sakaguchi is an immunologist and a Distinguished Professor of Osaka University. He is best known for the discovery of regulatory T cells and to describe their role in the immune system. This discovery is used in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases.
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Donato Bramante
1444 - 1514 (70 years)
Donato Bramante , born as Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio and also known as Bramante Lazzari, was an Italian architect and painter. He introduced Renaissance architecture to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his plan for St. Peter's Basilica formed the basis of the design executed by Michelangelo. His Tempietto marked the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome when Pope Julius II appointed him to build a sanctuary over the spot where Peter was martyred.
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Martin D'Arcy
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Martin Cyril D'Arcy was a Roman Catholic priest, philosopher of love, and a correspondent, friend, and adviser of a range of literary and artistic figures including Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers, W. H. Auden, Eric Gill and Sir Edwin Lutyens. He has been described as "perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death".
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David Estlund
#28980
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Estlund is the Lombardo Family Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, where he has taught since 1991. He works primarily in political philosophy. Education and career Estlund earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and taught briefly at the University of California, Irvine, before moving to Brown. He has spent fellowship years at the Program in Ethics at Harvard University and at Australian National University. His research interests center on liberalism, justice, and especially democracy. He sits on the editorial board of the academic journal Representation.
Go to Profile#3875
James Garvey
#53513
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
James Garvey is an American philosopher based in Britain. Career He is Managing Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, an educational charity supporting philosophy inside and outside the academy. He is editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, a quarterly which aims to publish readable, accessible philosophy. With Jeremy Stangroom, he edits Think Now, a series of books on social and political philosophy. He is a regular and controversial contributor to The Guardian, commenting on morality and climate change, arguing that the developed nations have a moral obligation to take action. He ha...
Go to Profile#3876
James R. Lupski
#28438
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
James R. Lupski is the Cullen Endowed Chair in Molecular Genetics and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine. Lupski obtained his BA degree from New York University in 1979 and his PhD and MD degrees in 1984 and 1985, respectively, from the same institution. He later moved for his Residency in Pediatrics to Baylor College of Medicine, where he has stayed since. Lupski is affected by a genetic disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth and has studied the condition as part of his research. He has contributed to the discovery and definition of genomic disorders and se...
Go to Profile#3877
Lawrence M. Lichtenstein
#68636
Overall Influence
#3878
Yves Marie André
1675 - 1764 (89 years)
Yves Marie André , also known as le Père André, was a French Jesuit mathematician, philosopher, and essayist. André entered the Society of Jesus in 1693. Although distinguished in his scholastic studies, he adhered to Gallicanism and Jansenism and was thus considered unsuitable for responsible office by Church authorities. He therefore pursued scientific studies and became royal professor of mathematics at Caen.
Go to Profile#3879
William Ames
1576 - 1633 (57 years)
William Ames was an English Puritan minister, philosopher, and controversialist. He spent much time in the Netherlands, and is noted for his involvement in the controversy between the Calvinists and the Arminians.
Go to Profile#3880
Joseph Tanke
#49699
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Joseph Tanke is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work focuses on Continental philosophy, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, art theory, and historical ontology. Tanke is known for his analysis of major figures in the French philosophical tradition, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière. His book Foucault's Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity is one of the first systematic presentations of Michel Foucault's writings on visual art. Tanke is the first scholar to publish a comprehensive critical introduction to the th...
Go to Profile#3881
Maximus of Tyre
200 - 200 (0 years)
Maximus of Tyre , also known as Cassius Maximus Tyrius, was a Greek rhetorician and philosopher who lived in the time of the Antonines and Commodus, and who belongs to the trend of the Second Sophistic. His writings contain many allusions to the history of Greece, while there is little reference to Rome; hence it is inferred that he lived longer in Greece, perhaps as a professor at Athens. Although nominally a Platonist, he is really a sophist rather than a philosopher, although he is still considered one of the precursors of Neoplatonism.
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Sophie Oluwole
#22518
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Sophie Bosede Oluwole was a Nigerian professor and philosopher, and was the first doctorate degree holder in philosophy in Nigeria. She was a practitioner of Yoruba philosophy, a way of thinking which stems from the ethnic group based in Nigeria. She was vocal about the role of women in philosophy, and the underrepresentation of African thinkers in education.
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Sergei N. Artemov
#43041
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sergei Nikolaevich Artemov is a Russian-American researcher in logic and its applications. He currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he is the founder and head of its research laboratory for logic and computation. His research interests include proof theory and logic in computer science, optimal control and hybrid systems, automated deduction and verification, epistemology, and epistemic game theory. He is best known for his invention of logics of proofs and justifications.
Go to Profile#3884
Louis Dupré
#28201
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Louis Dupré was a Belgian-American philosopher, professor at Yale University. Life and work Dupré was born in Veerle/Laakdal, Belgium, studied at the University of Louvain where he graduated in 1956. His doctoral dissertation on The Starting Point of Marxist Philosophy received the University’s biennial J.M. Huyghe prize in social studies. Receiving a study grant from the Danish Government he went to Kopenhagen to do research on Kierkegaard. In 1958 he emigrated to the USA and taught modern philosophy at Georgetown University until 1973 when he was appointed T. Lawrason Riggs professor in th...
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Mark Lance
#62891
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Norris Lance is a professor in the Philosophy Department and Justice and Peace Studies Program at Georgetown University. Life Lance earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of Robert Brandom and Nuel Belnap. His main areas of expertise are philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophical logic, and metaphysics. He also writes and speaks extensively on anarchist theory. Lance is a critic of anarcho-primitivism and its rejection of language.
Go to Profile#3886
Yossi Dahan
#21342
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Yossi Dahan is a law professor and the Head of the Human Rights Division at the College of Law and Business. He is the chairperson and cofounder of Adva Center, an editor and cofounder of Haokets.org, and teaches philosophy at the Open University. Dahan is an expert in labor law, workers' rights and global justice, theories of social justice, the right to education and educational justice.
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Ronald Ross
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Sir Ronald Ross was a British medical doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria, becoming the first British Nobel laureate, and the first born outside Europe. His discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of a mosquito in 1897 proved that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, and laid the foundation for the method of combating the disease.
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Ludwig Strümpell
1812 - 1899 (87 years)
Ludwig Strümpell, after his ennoblement in 1870 von Strümpell , was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Biography Strümpell was born in Schöppenstedt in Lower Saxony, the son of a dyer. He studied philosophy at the University of Königsberg, where he was influenced by Johann Friedrich Herbart, and continued his studies at the University of Leipzig. In 1845, he became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dorpat , and after 1871 served as a professor at the University of Leipzig. He died in Leipzig in 1899 but was buried in his home town Schöppenstedt, which made him an honor...
Go to Profile#3889
Arnold Berleant
#55747
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Arnold Jerome Berleant is an American scholar and author who is active in both philosophy and music. Arnold Berleant was born in Buffalo, New York. He received his advanced musical education at the Eastman School of Music and his doctorate in philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University, former Secretary-General and Past President of the International Association of Aesthetics, and former Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books and articles in philosophy focus on aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and ethics.
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John Hyman
#54024
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
John Hyman is a British philosopher. He was Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Oxford before being appointed as Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London in September 2018.
Go to Profile#3891
Gilles Châtelet
#14456
Overall Influence
1944 - 1999 (55 years)
Gilles Châtelet was a French philosopher and mathematician. Biography Châtelet began studying at the École Normale Supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud-Lyon in 1963. During the student upheavals of the late 1960s and the following years, he was a member of the Communist Party and associated with the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire . He became a gay activist due to his time in California in 1969, but went to the FHAR as a "way of finding again the ambiance of the United States." He later studied at University of Paris XI where he obtained his PhD in pure mathematics on 20 December 1975 a...
Go to Profile#3892
Ana de Miguel
#45139
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ana de Miguel Álvarez is a Spanish philosopher and feminist. Since 2005 she has been a titular professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at King Juan Carlos University of Madrid. She directs the course History of Feminist Theory at the Complutense University of Madrid's .
Go to Profile#3893
Sisir Kumar Maitra
1887 - 1963 (76 years)
Sisir Kumar Maitra was Head of the Department of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University. His writings compared Eastern and Western philosophy, and the teachings of Sri Aurobindo in comparison with Western philosophers.
Go to Profile#3894
Aldo Capitini
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Aldo Capitini was an Italian philosopher, poet, political activist, anti-fascist, and educator. He was one of the first Italians to take up and develop Mahatma Gandhi's theories of nonviolence and was known as "the Italian Gandhi".
Go to Profile#3895
Bernard Ryosuke Inagaki
#49593
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Bernard Ryosuke Inagaki was a Japanese philosopher and Thomas Aquinas scholar. He wrote extensively on medieval philosophy, scholastic philosophy, and philosophy of law; while he was known as one of the leading members for the Japanese translation of Summa Theologiæ. A number of his works are dedicated to the study of Thomas Aquinas. He received Mainichi Shuppan Bunka Shō for the translation of Summa Theologiæ in 2013 and the Watsuji Tetsurō Bunka Shō for his Thomas Aquinas: Metaphysics of Existence in 2015.
Go to Profile#3896
Gábor Betegh
#55214
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Gábor Betegh is a Hungarian academic, specialising in ancient philosophy. He is the eighth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University, having succeeded David Sedley in October 2014. He is Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, where he is Director of Studies in Philosophy and Graduate Tutor.
Go to Profile#3897
Gershom Carmichael
1672 - 1729 (57 years)
Gershom Carmichael was a Scottish philosopher. Gershom Carmichael was a Scottish subject born in London, the son of Alexander Charmichael, a Church of Scotland minister who had been banished by the Scottish privy council for his religious opinions. As a child, he suffered from crooked limbs and was treated by "body menders" who made him wear limb braces. Through his friendship with the Duke of Hamilton, Carmichael visited Bath to take the waters and he was eventually able to dispense with the braces.
Go to Profile#3898
Antenor Orrego
1892 - 1960 (68 years)
Antenor Orrego Espinoza was a Peruvian writer and political philosopher of Basque ancestry. He was a member of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance . The Universidad Privada Antenor Orregoo , founded in Trujillo, Peru in 1988, is named after him.
Go to Profile#3899
Lewis Thomas
#5432
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Lewis Thomas was an American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher. Life and career Thomas was born in Flushing, New York and attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. His formative years as an independent medical researcher were at Tulane University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#3900
Frederick R. Appelbaum
#69116
Overall Influence
