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,
#401
Massimo Pigliucci
#1004
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Massimo Pigliucci is an Italian-American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education.
Go to Profile#402
Frithjof Schuon
#3178
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Frithjof Schuon was a Swiss metaphysician of German descent, belonging to the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages. He was also a painter and a poet.
Go to Profile#403
Rodolphe Gasché
#5000
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Rodolphe Gasché holds the Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Career Gasché obtained his doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has also taught. Before going to Buffalo he taught at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#404
Gregory Vlastos
#8159
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Gregory Vlastos was a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy, and author of many works on Plato and Socrates. He transformed the analysis of classical philosophy by applying techniques of modern analytic philosophy to restate and evaluate the views of Socrates and Plato.
Go to Profile#405
Paolo Virno
#4198
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Paolo Virno is an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurehead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. Virno currently teaches philosophy at the University of Rome.
Go to Profile#406
Robert Spaemann
#6343
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Robert Spaemann was a German Catholic philosopher. He is considered a member of the Ritter School. Spaemann's focus was on Christian ethics. He was known for his work in bioethics, ecology and human rights. Although not yet widely translated into languages other than his native German, Spaemann was internationally known, and his work was highly regarded by Pope Benedict XVI.
Go to Profile#407
Daniel W. Smith
#8095
Overall Influence
Daniel W. Smith is an American philosopher, academic, researcher, and translator. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, where his work is focused on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy.
Go to Profile#408
Sam Harris
#1440
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
Go to Profile#409
William Hasker
#7341
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
R. William Hasker is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University. For many years he was editor of the prestigious journal Faith and Philosophy. He has published many journal articles and books dealing with issues such as the mind–body problem, theodicy, and divine omniscience. He has argued for "open theism" and a view known as "emergentism" regarding the nature of the human person. Hasker regards the soul as an "emergent" substance, dependent upon the body for its existence.
Go to Profile#410
John Milbank
#4912
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alasdair John Milbank is an English Anglo-Catholic theologian and is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he is President of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. Milbank previously taught at the University of Virginia and before that at the University of Cambridge and the University of Lancaster. He is also chairman of the trustees of the think tank ResPublica.
Go to Profile#411
Michael Otsuka
#8867
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Michael H. Otsuka is an American left-libertarian political philosopher and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Career Otsuka earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in politics from Balliol College, Oxford, under the direction of G. A. Cohen, on a Marshall Scholarship, after graduating from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science summa cum laude in 1986.
Go to Profile#412
Jean Guitton
#3947
Overall Influence
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
Jean Guitton was a French Catholic philosopher and theologian. Le Monde called him "the last of the great Catholic philosophers." Biography Born in Saint-Étienne, Loire in August 1901, he was the son of an industrialist. He studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1920. His principal religious and intellectual influence was from a blind priest, Francois Pouget. He finished his philosophical studies in the early 1920s and taught in a number of secondary schools. Guitton was a disciple of philosopher Henri Bergson.
Go to Profile#413
David Pearce
#3147
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
David Pearce is a British transhumanist philosopher. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. Pearce approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.
Go to Profile#414
Louis Farrakhan
#121
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Louis Farrakhan is an American black supremacist and religious leader who heads the Nation of Islam . Prior to joining the NOI, he was a calypso singer who used the stage name Calypso Gene. Earlier in his career, he served as the minister of mosques in Boston and Harlem and was appointed National Representative of the Nation of Islam by then NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. He adopted the name Louis X, before being named Louis Farrakhan.
Go to Profile#415
Jean-Claude Milner
#2792
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis . In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
Go to Profile#416
Harry Binswanger
#6814
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Harry Binswanger is an American professor and author. He is an Objectivist and a board member of the Ayn Rand Institute. He was an associate of Ayn Rand, working with her on The Ayn Rand Lexicon and helping her edit the second edition of Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. He is the author of How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation .
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Paul Gottfried
#2099
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.
Go to Profile#418
David Hull
#5032
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
David Lee Hull was an American philosopher who was most notable for founding the field philosophy of biology. Additionally, Hull is recognized within evolutionary culture studies as contributing heavily in early discussions of the conceptualization of memetics. In addition to his academic prominence, he was well known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers. Hull was partnered with Richard "Dick" Wellman, a Chicago school teacher, until Wellman's passing during the drafting of Science as Process.
Go to Profile#419
Philip Kitcher
#3188
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#420
Silvia Federici
#4758
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.
Go to Profile#421
Peter Kreeft
#2289
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter John Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King's College. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he is the author of over eighty books on Christian philosophy, theology and apologetics. He also formulated, together with Ronald K. Tacelli, Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics.
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Albrecht Wellmer
#6490
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Albrecht Wellmer was a German philosopher at the Freie Universität Berlin. Biography He studied mathematics and physics at Berlin and Kiel, then philosophy and sociology at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. He was an assistant to Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt from 1966 to 1970. He has held Professorships at the Universität Konstanz , the New School for Social Research and at the Freie Universität Berlin . He has held guest Professorships at Haverford, Stony Brook, Collège International de Philosophie, the New School of Social Research and the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#423
Sally Haslanger
#9576
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#424
Henry Babcock Veatch
#12272
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Henry Babcock Veatch Jr. was an American philosopher. Life and career Veatch was born September 26, 1911, in Evansville, Indiana. He attended Harvard University, where he received his A.B. and M.A. degrees and obtained his PhD in 1937. Veatch came to the Philosophy Department at Indiana University as an instructor in 1937. He was named assistant professor in 1941 and full professor in 1952. While at Indiana University, Veatch received many awards and honors. In 1954, he became the first recipient of the Frederick Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was popular with his students and was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi "Brown Derby" Award for most popular professor.
Go to Profile#425
Leon Kass
#2731
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Leon Richard Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual. Kass is best known as a proponent of liberal arts education via the "Great Books," as a critic of human cloning, life extension, euthanasia and embryo research, and for his tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."
Go to Profile#426
Brian Barry
#3346
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Brian Barry, was a moral and political philosopher. He was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining the degrees of B.A. and D.Phil. under the direction of H. L. A. Hart. Along with David Braybrooke, Richard E. Flathman, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, he is widely credited with having fused analytic philosophy and political science. Barry also fused political theory and social choice theory and was a persistent critic of public choice theory.
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Alison Jaggar
#6274
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Alison Mary Jaggar is an American feminist philosopher born in England. She is College Professor of Distinction in the Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She was one of the first people to introduce feminist concerns in to philosophy.
Go to Profile#428
Max More
#1660
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Max More is a philosopher and futurist who writes, speaks, and consults on advanced decision-making about emerging technologies. He is the current Ambassador and President Emeritus after serving almost nine and a half years as president and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Go to Profile#429
Toby Ord
#2652
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Toby David Godfrey Ord is an Australian philosopher. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
Go to Profile#430
Linda Martín Alcoff
#6700
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#431
Peter Hallward
#6267
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Peter Hallward is a political philosopher, best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Go to Profile#432
Joel Feinberg
#3355
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Joel Feinberg was an American political and legal philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy as well as individual rights and the authority of the state. Feinberg was one of the most influential figures in American jurisprudence of the last fifty years.
Go to Profile#433
Miguel A. De La Torre
#4094
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Miguel A. De La Torre is a professor of Social Ethics and Latino Studies at Iliff School of Theology, author, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister. Biography Born in Cuba months before the Castro Revolution, De La Torre and his family migrated to the United States as refugees when he was an infant. For a while the U.S. government considered him and his family as "illegal aliens". On 6 June 1960, De La Torre received an order from Immigration and Naturalization Service to "self-deport." He attended Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic elementary school in Queens, New York, and was baptized and confirmed by the Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#434
Donald A. Gillies
#5744
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donald Angus Gillies is a British philosopher and historian of science and mathematics. He is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Career After undergraduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, Gillies became a graduate student of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics, where he completed a PhD on the foundations of probability.
Go to Profile#435
Douglas B. Rasmussen
#10038
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Douglas B. Rasmussen is professor of philosophy at St. John's University, where he has taught since 1981. Biography Rasmussen earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University. Rasmussen's areas of scholarly interest include Political Philosophy, Ethics, Ontology, Epistemology, Business Ethics, and Political Economy.
Go to Profile#436
Hans Sluga
#7563
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Hans D. Sluga is a German philosopher who spent most of his career as professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Sluga teaches and writes on topics in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of continental philosophy, as well as on political theory, and ancient philosophy in Greece and China. He has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.
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Michael A. Smith
#10221
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Andrew Smith is an Australian philosopher who teaches at Princeton University . He taught previously at the University of Oxford, Monash University, and was a member of the Philosophy Program at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is the author of a number of important books and articles in moral philosophy. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#438
Richard Tarnas
#3055
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Theodore Tarnas is a cultural historian and astrologer known for his books The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Tarnas is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is the founding director of its graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.
Go to Profile#439
Sidney Morgenbesser
#5949
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Sidney Morgenbesser was a Jewish American philosopher and professor at Columbia University. He wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms. Life and career Sidney Morgenbesser was born on September 22, 1921, in New York City and raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Go to Profile#440
Deepak Chopra
#399
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American author and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterised as technobabble – "incoherent babbling strewn with scientific terms" which drives those who actually understand physics "crazy" and as "redefining Wrong".
Go to Profile#441
Roger T. Ames
#8732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roger T. Ames is a Canadian-born philosopher, translator, and author. He is Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing, China, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a Berggruen Fellow. He has made significant contributions to the study of Chinese and comparative philosophy, in which he emphasizes the importance of understanding Chinese philosophy on its own terms rather than through the lens of Western philosophy.
Go to Profile#442
André Gorz
#2214
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
André Gorz , more commonly known by his pen names Gérard Horst and Michel Bosquet , was an Austrian and French social philosopher and journalist and critic of work. He co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology.
Go to Profile#443
Nader El-Bizri
#4776
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Nader El-Bizri is the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. He served before as a tenured longstanding full Professor of philosophy and civilization studies at the American University of Beirut, where he also acted as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of the General Education program. El-Bizri specializes in phenomenology, Islamic science and philosophy, and architectural theory. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger .
Go to Profile#444
Leonardo Boff
#1953
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Leonardo Boff , born as Genézio Darci Boff , is a Brazilian theologian, philosopher writer, and former Catholic priest known for his active support for Latin American liberation theology. He is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the Rio de Janeiro State University. In 2001, he received the Right Livelihood Award for "his inspiring insights and practical work to help people realise the links between human spirituality, social justice and environmental stewardship."
Go to Profile#445
David Kaplan
#6218
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Benjamin Kaplan is an American philosopher. He is the Hans Reichenbach Professor of Scientific Philosophy at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. His philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of Frege and Russell. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, propositions, and reference in intensional contexts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
Go to Profile#446
Virginia Held
#9199
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Virginia Potter Held is an American moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and critiques of the traditional roles of women in society.
Go to Profile#447
Christopher Norris
#5643
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Christopher Charles Norris is a British philosopher and literary critic. Career Norris completed his PhD in English at University College London in 1975. After an early career in literary and music criticism , Norris moved in 1991 to the Cardiff Philosophy Department. In 1997, he was awarded the title of Distinguished Research Professor in the Cardiff School of English, Communication & Philosophy. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, the City University of New York, Aarhus University, and Dartmou...
Go to Profile#448
Janet Radcliffe Richards
#11785
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist , Philosophical Problems of Equality , Human Nature after Darwin , and The Ethics of Transplants .
Go to Profile#449
Maurice de Gandillac
#6010
Overall Influence
1906 - 2006 (100 years)
Maurice de Gandillac was a French philosopher. He was born in Koléa, French Algeria and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. He wrote his thesis under Étienne Gilson on the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. In 1946 he was appointed professor in the history of medieval and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne. He supervised the doctoral dissertations of numerous students, including Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Go to Profile#450
Daniel M. Hausman
#5081
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Daniel M. Hausman is an American philosopher. His research has focused primarily on methodological, metaphysical, and ethical issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy. He is currently Herbert A. Simon Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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