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,
#401
André Malraux
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Georges André Malraux was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency .
Go to Profile#402
Joseph Margolis
#2863
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Joseph Zalman Margolis was an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he authored many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and elaborated a robust form of relativism.
Go to Profile#403
James Childress
#2515
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Franklin Childress is a philosopher and theologian whose scholarship addresses ethics, particularly biomedical ethics. Currently he is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is also Professor of Medical Education at this university and directs its Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. He holds a B.A. from Guilford College, a B.D. from Yale Divinity School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He was vice-...
Go to Profile#404
Solomon Feferman
#1484
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Solomon Feferman was an American philosopher and mathematician who worked in mathematical logic. In addition to his prolific technical work in proof theory, recursion theory, and set theory, he was known for his contributions to the history of logic and as a vocal proponent of the philosophy of mathematics known as predicativism, notably from an anti-platonist stance.
Go to Profile#405
Eric Voegelin
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Go to Profile#406
Val Plumwood
#2827
Overall Influence
1939 - 2008 (69 years)
Val Plumwood was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist known for her work on anthropocentrism. From the 1970s she played a central role in the development of radical ecosophy. Working mostly as an independent scholar, she held positions at the University of Tasmania, North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney, and at the time of her death was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University. She is included in Routledge's Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment .
Go to Profile#407
Peter van Inwagen
#2800
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher and the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a research professor of philosophy at Duke University each spring. He previously taught at Syracuse University, earning his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1969 under the direction of Richard Taylor. Van Inwagen is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. He was the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 2010 to 2013.
Go to Profile#408
Keiji Nishitani
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Keiji Nishitani was a Japanese philosopher. He was a scholar of the Kyoto School and a disciple of Kitarō Nishida. In 1924, Nishitani received his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University for his dissertation "Das Ideale und das Reale bei Schelling und Bergson". He studied under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg from 1937 to 1939.
Go to Profile#409
Aenesidemus
80 BC - 10 BC (70 years)
Aenesidemus was a 1st-century BC Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher from Knossos who revived the doctrines of Pyrrho and introduced ten skeptical "modes" for the suspension of judgment. He broke with the Academic Skepticism that was predominant in his time, synthesizing the teachings of Heraclitus and Timon of Phlius with philosophical skepticism. Although his primary work, the Pyrrhonian Discourses, has been lost, an outline of the work survives from the later Byzantine empire, and the description of the modes has been preserved by few ancient sources.
Go to Profile#410
Laurence BonJour
#3937
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Laurence BonJour is an American philosopher and Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Education and career He received his bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Macalester College and his doctorate in 1969 from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Richard Rorty. Before moving to UW he taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#411
Raymond Geuss
#2758
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Raymond Geuss, FBA is an American political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. He is currently Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. Geuss is primarily known for three reasons: his early account of ideology critique in The Idea of a Critical Theory; a recent collection of works instrumental to the emergence of political realism in Anglophone political philosophy over the last decade, including Philosophy and Real Politics; and a variety of free-standing essays on issues including aesthetics, Nietzsche, contextualism, pheno...
Go to Profile#412
Ernesto Laclau
#1023
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
Go to Profile#413
Michael Sandel
#1123
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Michael Joseph Sandel is an American political philosopher and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory at Harvard Law School, where his course Justice was the university's first course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the 2011's "most influential foreign figure of the year" . He is also known for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice . He was elected a Fellow of the American Ac...
Go to Profile#414
Gustav Bergmann
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Gustav Bergmann was an Austrian-born American philosopher. He studied at the University of Vienna and was a member of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann was influenced by the philosophers Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and Rudolf Carnap, who were members of the Circle. In the United States, he was a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Iowa.
Go to Profile#415
François Laruelle
#2843
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
François Laruelle is a French philosopher, formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle is notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. He currently directs an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.
Go to Profile#416
Humberto Maturana
#192
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Humberto Maturana Romesín was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld, but in fact he was biologist, scientist.
Go to Profile#417
Paracelsus
1493 - 1541 (48 years)
Paracelsus , born Theophrastus von Hohenheim , was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology". Paracelsus also had a substantial influence as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 17th century. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.
Go to Profile#418
Ralph Cudworth
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew , 26th Master of Clare Hall , and 14th Master of Christ's College . A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe .
Go to Profile#419
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 - 1859 (90 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt . Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
Go to Profile#420
Robert Stalnaker
#2542
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile#421
Friedrich Pollock
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Friedrich Pollock was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory.
Go to Profile#422
Adolf Grünbaum
#1159
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Adolf Grünbaum was a German-American philosopher of science and a critic of psychoanalysis, as well as Karl Popper's philosophy of science. He was the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1960 until his death, and also served as co-chairman of its Center for Philosophy of Science , research professor of psychiatry , and primary research professor in the department of history and philosophy of science . His works include Philosophical Problems of Space and Time , The Foundations of Psychoanalysis , and Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanal...
Go to Profile#423
Paul Arthur Schilpp
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Paul Arthur Schilpp was an American philosopher and educator. Biography Schilpp was born in Dillenburg, Germany and immigrated to the United States prior to World War I. Schilpp taught at Northwestern University, University of Puget Sound, UC Santa Barbara, University of the Pacific and spent the last years of his professional career teaching undergraduate philosophy courses at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Schilpp was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association .
Go to Profile#424
Lewis Carroll
1832 - 1898 (66 years)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass . He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.
Go to Profile#425
Chanakya
375 BC - 283 BC (92 years)
Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Vishnugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century.
Go to Profile#426
Karl Mannheim
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Karl Mannheim was an influential Hungarian sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia , in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.
Go to Profile#427
Frances Kamm
#3497
Overall Influence
Frances Myrna Kamm is an American philosopher specializing in normative and applied ethics. Kamm is currently the Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is also the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy Emerita at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.
Go to Profile#428
Judith Jarvis Thomson
#3490
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Judith Jarvis Thomson was an American philosopher who studied and worked on ethics and metaphysics. Her work ranges across a variety of fields, but she is most known for her work regarding the thought experiment titled the trolley problem and her writings on abortion. She is credited with naming, developing, and initiating the extensive literature on the trolley problem first posed by Philippa Foot which has found a wide range use since. Thomson also published a paper titled "A Defense of Abortion", which makes the argument that the procedure is morally permissible even if it is assumed that a fetus is a person with a right to life.
Go to Profile#429
Paul Weiss
#2741
Overall Influence
1901 - 2002 (101 years)
Paul Weiss was an American philosopher. He was the founder of The Review of Metaphysics and the Metaphysical Society of America. Early life and education Paul Weiss grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City. His father, Samuel Weiss , was a Jewish emigrant who moved from Europe in the 1890s. He worked as a tinsmith, a coppersmith, and a boilermaker. Paul Weiss's mother, Emma Rothschild , was a Jewish emigrant who worked as a servant until she married Samuel. Born into a Jewish family, Paul lived among other Jewish families in a working-class neighborhood in the Yorkville section of Manhattan.
Go to Profile#430
György Lukács
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
Go to Profile#431
Fred Dretske
#3638
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. Life and career Born to Frederick and Hattie Dretske, Dretske first planned to be an engineer, attending Purdue University. He changed his mind after taking the university's only philosophy course, deciding philosophy was the only thing he wanted to do in his life.
Go to Profile#432
Avital Ronell
#1103
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
Go to Profile#433
Allan Gibbard
#2532
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Allan Fletcher Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gibbard has made major contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics, where he has developed a contemporary version of non-cognitivism. He has also published articles in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and social choice theory.
Go to Profile#434
William Stanley Jevons
1835 - 1882 (47 years)
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna and by Léon Walras in Switzerland , marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal ...
Go to Profile#435
Quentin Smith
#3117
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Quentin Persifor Smith was an American philosopher. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He worked in the philosophy of time, philosophy of language, philosophy of physics and philosophy of religion.
Go to Profile#436
Antoine Arnauld
1612 - 1694 (82 years)
Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Contemporaries called him le Grand to distinguish him from his father.
Go to Profile#437
Heinrich Rickert
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
Heinrich John Rickert was a German philosopher, one of the leading neo-Kantians. Life Rickert was born in Danzig, Prussia to the journalist and later politician Heinrich Edwin Rickert and Annette née Stoddart. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany and Heidelberg .
Go to Profile#438
Aristippus
434 BC - 355 BC (79 years)
Aristippus of Cyrene was a hedonistic Greek philosopher and the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates, but adopted a different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by adapting circumstances to oneself and by maintaining proper control over both adversity and prosperity. His view that pleasure is the only good came to be called ethical hedonism. Due to the ideological and philosophical differences between Socrates and himself, Aristippus faced backlash by Socrates and many of his fellow-pupils. Out of his hedonistic belie...
Go to Profile#439
William Frankena
#3410
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
William Klaas Frankena was an American moral philosopher. He was a member of the University of Michigan's department of philosophy for 41 years , and chair of the department for 14 years . Life Frankena's father and mother immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers, in 1892 and 1896 respectively, from Friesland, a province in the north of the Netherlands. William Frankena was the middle one of three children. He was born in Manhattan, Montana, grew up in small Dutch communities in Montana and western Michigan, and spoke West Frisian and Dutch. In primary school, his given name, Wiebe, was Anglicized to William.
Go to Profile#440
Rembrandt
1606 - 1669 (63 years)
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn , usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. It is estimated Rembrandt produced a total of about three hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings.
Go to Profile#441
Iain Hamilton Grant
#3666
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Iain Hamilton Grant is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German Idealism , and both contemporary and historical philosophy of nature. He is often associated with the recent philosophical current known as Speculative Realism.
Go to Profile#442
John Venn
1834 - 1923 (89 years)
John Venn, FRS, FSA was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in logic, set theory, probability, statistics, and computer science. In 1866, Venn published The Logic of Chance, a groundbreaking book which espoused the frequency theory of probability, arguing that probability should be determined by how often something is forecast to occur as opposed to "educated" assumptions. Venn then further developed George Boole's theories in the 1881 work Symbolic Logic, where he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams.
Go to Profile#443
Todd May
#2450
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Todd Gifford May is a political philosopher who writes on topics of anarchism, poststructuralism, and post-structuralist anarchism. More recently he has published books on existentialism and moral philosophy. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Warren Wilson College.
Go to Profile#444
Ernest Gellner
#935
Overall Influence
1925 - 1995 (70 years)
Ernest André Gellner FRAI was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by The Daily Telegraph, when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by The Independent as a "one-man crusader for critical rationalism".
Go to Profile#445
Alberto Toscano
#2569
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
Go to Profile#446
Aleksei Losev
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev was a Soviet and Russian philosopher, philologist and culturologist, one of the most prominent figures in Russian philosophical and religious thought of the 20th century. Early life Losev was born in Novocherkassk, the administrative center of the Don Host Oblast, the far western Russian territory held by the Don Cossacks on the banks of the Don River. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Aleksei Polyakov; a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. Losev's paternal great-grandfather was also named Aleksei, and was awarded for heroism during the Napoleonic Wars, while fighting in a Cossack Brigade.
Go to Profile#447
Panayot Butchvarov
#4284
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Panayot Butchvarov is a Bulgarian-born American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. Career Butchvarov left Syracuse University in 1968 as a full professor to move to the University of Iowa, where he was at the time of his retirement in 2005 the University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He was President of the American Philosophical Association in 1992–93, and has served as editor of the Journal of Philosophical Research.
Go to Profile#448
José Ferrater Mora
#4703
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
José María Ferrater Mora was a Spanish philosopher, essayist and writer. He is considered the most prominent Catalan philosopher of the 20th-century and was the author of over 35 books, including a four-volume Diccionario de filosofía and Being and Death: An Outline of Integrationist Philosophy . Subjects he worked on include ontology, history of philosophy, metaphysics, anthropology, the philosophy of history and culture, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, and ethics. He also directed several films.
Go to Profile#449
W. D. Ross
1877 - 1971 (94 years)
Sir William David Ross , known as David Ross but usually cited as W. D. Ross, was a Scottish Aristotelian philosopher, translator, WWI veteran, civil servant, and university administrator. His best-known work is The Right and the Good , in which he developed a pluralist, deontological form of intuitionist ethics in response to G. E. Moore's consequentialist form of intuitionism. Ross also critically edited and translated a number of Aristotle's works, such as his 12-volume translation of Aristotle together with John Alexander Smith, and wrote on other Greek philosophy.
Go to Profile#450
David Ray Griffin
#1105
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
David Ray Griffin was an American professor of philosophy of religion and theology and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Along with John B. Cobb, Jr., he founded the Center for Process Studies in 1973, a research center of Claremont School of Theology that promotes process thought. Griffin published numerous books about the September 11 attacks, claiming that elements of the Bush administration were involved. An advocate of the controlled demolition conspiracy theory, he was a founder member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
Go to Profile