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,
#451
Andronicus of Rhodes
100 BC - 60 BC (40 years)
Andronicoos of Rhodes was a Greek philosopher from Rhodes who was also the scholarch of the Peripatetic school. He is most famous for publishing a new edition of the works of Aristotle that forms the basis of the texts that survive today.
Go to Profile#452
Nancy Fraser
#1039
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#453
Jon Elster
#1446
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jon Elster is a Norwegian philosopher and political theorist who holds the Robert K. Merton professorship of Social Science at Columbia University. He received his PhD in social science from the École Normale Superieure in 1972. He has previously taught at the University of Paris, the University of Oslo, and the University of Chicago, where he became professor of political science in 1984. Since 1995, he has held the Robert K. Merton professorship of Social Science at Columbia University, as well as being professor of social science at the Collège de France since 2005.
Go to Profile#454
Moses Schönfinkel
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. Life Moses Schönfinkel was born on in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire . Moses Schönfinkel was born to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in а grocery store trade, and his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel came from a prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii , who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics.
Go to Profile#455
Peter Hacker
#1719
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.
Go to Profile#456
Emil Cioran
#894
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorisms. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, until his death in 1995.
Go to Profile#457
Johann Friedrich Herbart
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline. Herbart is now remembered amongst the post-Kantian philosophers mostly as making the greatest contrast to Hegel—in particular in relation to aesthetics. His educational philosophy is known as Herbartianism.
Go to Profile#458
Emanuel Swedenborg
1688 - 1772 (84 years)
Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic. He became best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell . Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions, notably on Easter Weekend, on 6 April 1744. His experiences culminated in a "spiritual awakening" in which he received a revelation that Jesus Christ had appointed him to write The Heavenly Doctrine to reform Christianity. According to The Heavenly Doctrine, the...
Go to Profile#459
Alexander Rosenberg
#1655
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher and novelist. He is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, well known for contributions to philosophy of biology and philosophy of economics.
Go to Profile#460
Mikhail Bakhtin
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1...
Go to Profile#461
John Scotus Eriugena
810 - 877 (67 years)
John Scotus Eriugena, also known as Johannes Scotus Erigena, John the Scot, or John the Irish-born was an Irish Neoplatonist philosopher, theologian and poet of the Early Middle Ages. Bertrand Russell dubbed him "the most astonishing person of the ninth century". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that he "is the most significant Irish intellectual of the early monastic period. He is generally recognized to be both the outstanding philosopher of the Carolingian era and of the whole period of Latin philosophy stretching from Boethius to Anselm".
Go to Profile#462
J. Barkley Rosser
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
John Barkley Rosser Sr. was an American logician, a student of Alonzo Church, and known for his part in the Church–Rosser theorem in lambda calculus. He also developed what is now called the "Rosser sieve" in number theory. He was part of the mathematics department at Cornell University from 1936 to 1963, chairing it several times. He was later director of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the first director of the Communications Research Division of IDA. Rosser also authored mathematical textbooks.
Go to Profile#463
Hans Vaihinger
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Hans Vaihinger was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his Die Philosophie des Als Ob , published in 1911 although its statement of basic principles had been written more than thirty years earlier.
Go to Profile#464
Walter Kaufmann
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#465
Wang Yangming
1472 - 1529 (57 years)
Wang Shouren , courtesy name Bo'an , art name Yangmingzi , usually referred to as Wang Yangming , was a Chinese calligrapher, general, philosopher, politician, and writer during the Ming dynasty. After Zhu Xi, he is commonly regarded as the most important Neo-Confucian thinker, for his interpretations of Confucianism that denied the rationalist dualism of the orthodox philosophy of Zhu Xi. Wang and Lu Xiangshan are regarded as the founders as the Lu–Wang school, or the School of the Mind.
Go to Profile#466
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
500 - 600 (100 years)
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was a Greek author, Christian theologian and Neoplatonic philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century, who wrote a set of works known as the Corpus Areopagiticum or Corpus Dionysiacum.
Go to Profile#467
Wang Bi
226 - 249 (23 years)
Wang Bi , courtesy name Fusi , was a Chinese philosopher and politician. During his brief career he produced commentaries on the Tao Te Ching and I Ching which were highly influential in Chinese philosophy.
Go to Profile#468
Edward Feser
#3118
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Edward Charles Feser is an American Catholic philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. Education Feser holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton. His thesis is titled "Russell, Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem". He also went to Crespi High School in California.
Go to Profile#469
Eugene Thacker
#1959
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Eugene Thacker is an American theorist, poet, and author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His writing is often associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation.
Go to Profile#470
John Hospers
#3144
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
John Hospers was an American philosopher and political activist. Hospers was interested in Objectivism, and was once a friend of the philosopher Ayn Rand, though she later broke with him. In 1972, Hospers became the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, and was the only minor party candidate to receive an electoral vote in that year's U.S. presidential election.
Go to Profile#471
George Boolos
#3086
Overall Influence
1940 - 1996 (56 years)
George Stephen Boolos was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Life Boolos was of Greek-Jewish descent. He graduated with an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University after completing a senior thesis, titled "A simple proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem", under the supervision of Raymond Smullyan. Oxford University awarded him the B.Phil. in 1963. In 1966, he obtained the first PhD in philosophy ever awarded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the direction of Hilary Putnam. After teaching th...
Go to Profile#472
Hans Driesch
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy. He has also been credited with performing the first artificial 'cloning' of an animal in the 1880s, although this claim is dependent on how one defines cloning.
Go to Profile#473
Anatoly Lunacharsky
1875 - 1933 (58 years)
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People's Commissar responsible for the Ministry of Education as well as an active playwright, critic, essayist and journalist throughout his career.
Go to Profile#474
Peter Kivy
#3969
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Peter Kivy was professor emeritus of musicology and philosophy at Rutgers University. He studied particularly the philosophy of music. Biography Kivy received a B.A. summa cum laude at the University of Michigan in 1956, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned an M.A. in philosophy in 1958 also from the University of Michigan, an A.M. in musicology at Yale University in 1960, and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966. He first taught at Brooklyn College from 1966–67, He then joined the faculty at Rutgers, first at the Newark campus, where he became full professor in 1976, and then in 1978 moved to the university's main campus, in New Brunswick.
Go to Profile#475
Hartry Field
#2483
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Hartry H. Field is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University; he is a notable contributor to philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.
Go to Profile#476
Galen Strawson
#1958
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics , John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City Un...
Go to Profile#477
J. L. Mackie
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong , opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered. His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy.
Go to Profile#478
Victor Cousin
1792 - 1867 (75 years)
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was the founder of "eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism. As the administrator of public instruction for over a decade, Cousin also had an important influence on French educational policy.
Go to Profile#479
Helena Blavatsky
1831 - 1891 (60 years)
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian and American mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy.
Go to Profile#480
Richard Wollheim
#1716
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.
Go to Profile#481
Shelly Kagan
#3315
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. He is best known for his writings about moral philosophy and normative ethics. In 2007, Kagan's course about death was offered for free online, and was very popular. This led to him publishing a book on the subject in 2012. Kagan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Go to Profile#482
Günther Anders
#1836
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Günther Anders was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist. Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier. At that time, he changed his name Stern to Anders. He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States. Back to Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Humankind, in 1956.
Go to Profile#483
Adolf Lindenbaum
1904 - 1941 (37 years)
Adolf Lindenbaum was a Polish-Jewish logician and mathematician best known for Lindenbaum's lemma and Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras. He was born and brought up in Warsaw. He earned a Ph.D. in 1928 under Wacław Sierpiński and habilitated at the University of Warsaw in 1934. He published works on mathematical logic, set theory, cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, the axiom of choice, the continuum hypothesis, theory of functions, measure theory, point-set topology, geometry and real analysis. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw from 1935 until the outbreak of war in September 1939.
Go to Profile#484
Jean Wahl
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Jean André Wahl was a French philosopher. Early career Wahl was educated at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, broken by World War II. He was in the U.S. from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a Jew at the Drancy internment camp and then escaped.
Go to Profile#485
Victor Kraft
1880 - 1975 (95 years)
Victor Kraft was an Austrian philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle. Early life and education Kraft studied philosophy, geography and history at the University of Vienna. He participated in the events of the university's Philosophical Society, as well as with private circles . He received in 1903 his Ph.D. with a dissertation on "The Knowledge of the External World". Then he moved to Berlin to continue his studies under Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey and Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin. Kraft started working in 1912 at the university's library, where he was a scientific civil servant until 1939.
Go to Profile#486
Jules Vuillemin
#2092
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Jules Vuillemin was a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge at the prestigious Collège de France, in Paris, from 1962 to 1990, succeeding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Professor emeritus from 1991 to 2001. He was an Invited Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey .
Go to Profile#487
Joseph Butler
1692 - 1752 (60 years)
Joseph Butler was an English Anglican bishop, theologian, apologist, and philosopher, born in Wantage in the English county of Berkshire . He is known for critiques of Deism, Thomas Hobbes's egoism, and John Locke's theory of personal identity. The many philosophers and religious thinkers Butler influenced included David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Henry Sidgwick, John Henry Newman, and C. D. Broad, and is widely seen as "one of the pre-eminent English moralists." He played a major, if underestimated role in developing 18th-century economic discourse, influencing the Dean of Gloucester and...
Go to Profile#488
Eugen Fink
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Eugen Fink was a German philosopher. Biography Fink was born in 1905 as the son of a government official in Germany. He spent his first school years with an uncle who was a Catholic priest. Fink attended a grammar school in Konstanz where he succeeded with his extraordinary memory. After his graduation exam in 1925, he studied philosophy, history, German language and economics, initially at Münster and Berlin and then in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl.
Go to Profile#489
Max Ernst
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages.
Go to Profile#490
Zhu Xi
1130 - 1200 (70 years)
Zhu Xi , formerly romanized Chu Hsi, was a Chinese calligrapher, historian, philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty. Zhu was influential in the development of Neo-Confucianism. He contributed greatly to Chinese philosophy and fundamentally reshaped the Chinese worldview. His works include his editing of and commentaries to the Four Books , his writings on the process of the "investigation of things" , and his development of meditation as a method for self-cultivation.
Go to Profile#491
Alexandre Koyré
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Alexandre Koyré , also anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science. Life Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog, Russia on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyra . In Imperial Russia he studied in Tiflis, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.
Go to Profile#492
Celsus
200 - Present (1824 years)
Celsus was a 2nd-century Greek philosopher and opponent of early Christianity. His literary work, The True Word , survives exclusively in quotations from it in Contra Celsum, a refutation written in 248 by Origen of Alexandria. The True Word is the earliest known comprehensive criticism of Christianity.
Go to Profile#493
Rudolf Otto
1869 - 1937 (68 years)
Rudolf Otto was an eminent German Lutheran theologian, philosopher, and comparative religionist. He is regarded as one of the most influential scholars of religion in the early twentieth century and is best known for his concept of the numinous, a profound emotional experience he argued was at the heart of the world's religions. While his work started in the domain of liberal Christian theology, its main thrust was always apologetical, seeking to defend religion against naturalist critiques. Otto eventually came to conceive of his work as part of a science of religion, which was divided into ...
Go to Profile#494
Kazimierz Twardowski
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Kazimierz Jerzy Skrzypna-Twardowski was a Polish philosopher, psychologist, logician, and rector of the Lwów University. He was initially affiliated with Alexius Meinong's Graz School of object theory.
Go to Profile#495
Alcmaeon of Croton
Alcmaeon of Croton was an early Greek medical writer and philosopher-scientist. He has been described as one of the most eminent natural philosophers and medical theorists of antiquity and he has also been referred to as "a thinker of considerable originality and one of the greatest philosophers, naturalists, and neuroscientists of all time." His work in biology has been described as remarkable, and his originality made him likely a pioneer. Because of difficulties dating Alcmaeon's birth, his importance has been neglected.
Go to Profile#496
Asanga
300 - 301 (1 years)
Asaṅga was one of the most important spiritual figures of Mahayana Buddhism and the founder of the Yogachara school. Traditionally, he and his half-brother Vasubandhu are regarded as the major classical Indian Sanskrit exponents of Mahayana Abhidharma, Vijñanavada
Go to Profile#497
Johann Georg Hamann
1730 - 1788 (58 years)
Johann Georg Hamann was a German Lutheran philosopher from Königsberg known as "the Wizard of the North" who was one of the leading figures of post-Kantian philosophy. His work was used by his student J. G. Herder as the main support of the Sturm und Drang movement, and is associated with the Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Go to Profile#498
Charles Stevenson
1908 - 1979 (71 years)
Charles Leslie Stevenson was an American analytic philosopher best known for his work in ethics and aesthetics. Biography Stevenson was born on June 27, 1908, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was educated at Yale, receiving in 1930 a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature, at Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1933 he was awarded a BA degree in moral sciences , and at Harvard, getting his Doctor of Philosophy degree there in 1935. While at Cambridge he studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. He was an instructor at Yale University from 1939 to 1944, spending some of that time teaching mathematics to wartime naval recruits.
Go to Profile#499
Seyla Benhabib
#2392
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-born American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008.
Go to Profile#500
Rabindranath Tagore
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; where his elegant prose and magical poetry were widely popular in the Indian subcontinent. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Go to Profile