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,
#4501
Hermann Heller
1891 - 1933 (42 years)
Hermann Heller was a German legal scholar and philosopher of Jewish descent. He was active in the non-Marxist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic. He attempted to formulate the theoretical foundations of the social-democratic relations to the state, and nationalism. He was politically active in the relatively conservative Hofgeismarer Kreis of the SPD and is believed to have authored the group's statement of principles.
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Antonio Banfi
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Antonio Banfi was an Italian philosopher and senator. He is also noted for founding the Italian philosophical school called critical rationalism. Although influenced by the Marburg neo-Kantians and Edmund Husserl, whom he knew personally, Banfi moved away from Idealism and instead focused on Marxism, in particular, historical materialism.
Go to Profile#4503
Zechariah Chafee
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
Go to Profile#4504
Alfred Schutz
#78435
Overall Influence
#4505
Hermann Stieve
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
Hermann Philipp Rudolf Stieve was a German physician, anatomist and histologist. Following his medical studies, he served in the German Army during First World War and became interested in the effect of stress and other environmental factors on the female reproductive system, the subject of his later research. In 1921, he became the youngest doctor to chair the medical department of a German university. He taught medicine at the University of Berlin, and was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy at the Charité teaching hospital in the later years of his life.
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Srećko Horvat
#28010
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Srećko Horvat is a Croatian philosopher, author and political activist. The German weekly Der Freitag called him "one of the most exciting voices of his generation" and he has been described as a "fiery voice of dissent in the Post-Yugoslav landscape". His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, Jacobin, Newsweek and The New York Times.
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Tinsley R. Harrison
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Tinsley Randolph Harrison was an American physician and editor of the first five editions of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. Harrison specialized in cardiology and the pathophysiology of heart disease.
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Stefan S. Zeuzem
#78476
Overall Influence
#4509
Wolfgang Kuhlmann
#69891
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Wolfgang Kuhlmann is a German philosopher and representative of the discourse ethics. Academic career Born in Kiel, Kuhlmann, who received his doctorate in 1974, and habilitated in 1983, is a student of Karl-Otto Apel and a colleague of Peter Rohs. He then worked as a private lecturer in philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and from 1985 to 1992 as managing director and editor of the publication series in the Forum für Philosophie in Bad Homburg. In the context of this activity there was from 1987 to 1991 a co-operation with . In 1989 Kuhlmann became full professor at the University of Frankfurt and in 1992 a professor at the University of Erfurt.
Go to Profile#4510
Robert D. Rupert
#50288
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert D. Rupert is an American philosopher. His primary academic appointment is at the University of Colorado at Boulder , where he is Professor of Philosophy, a fellow of UCB's Institute of Cognitive Science, and a member of UCB's Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science. He is Regular Visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre and is the co-editor in chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
Go to Profile#4511
Izak Benbasat
#27326
Overall Influence
Izak Benbasat is a Turkish–Canadian professor and scientist, currently the Sauder Distinguished Professor of Information Systems and professor of information-system management at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business. He is also a published author, being largely cited as a researcher.
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Colin Terence Dollery
#78513
Overall Influence
#4513
Timothy David Noakes
#78540
Overall Influence
#4514
Riffat Hassan
#9206
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Riffat Hassan is a Pakistani-American theologian and a leading Islamic feminist scholar of the Qur'an. Early life and career Hassan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to an upper-class Sayid Muslim family. Hassan's maternal grandfather was Hakim Ahmad Shuja, a Pakistani poet, writer and playwright. She lived a comfortable childhood, but was affected by the conflict between her father's traditional views and her mother's nonconformism. For most of her life, she hated her father's traditionalism because of his views of sex roles, but she later came to appreciate it because of his kindness and compassion.
Go to Profile#4515
John Najarian
#42196
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
John Sarkis Najarian was an American transplant surgeon and clinical professor of transplant surgery at the University of Minnesota. Najarian was a pioneer in thoracic transplant surgery. Early life Najarian was born in Oakland, California to Armenian immigrants. He studied medicine at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also an offensive tackle for the college's football team, and played in the 1949 Rose Bowl.
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Matthias Schirn
#63087
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Matthias Schirn is a German philosopher and logician. Education and academic career Schirn completed his doctoral degree at the University of Freiburg in 1974 with a thesis on identity and synonymy in logic and semantics and subsequently taught at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and Michigan State University. Schirn’s research during this time focused on theories of meaning for natural languages and intensional semantics, and he continued working in this area at the University of California at Berkeley, St. John’s College , Harvard University and at Wolfson College . In 1985, Sc...
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Stefan Pawlicki
1839 - 1916 (77 years)
Stefan Zachariasz Pawlicki was a Polish Catholic priest, philosopher, historian of philosophy, professor and rector of Kraków's Jagiellonian University. Life Stefan Pawlicki came from a merchant family. He began his education in Danzig ; after his family moved to Greater Poland, he continued it in Pleschen . At age thirteen, he lost his parents during an epidemic. He completed progimnazjum thanks to help from a local parish priest, Father Basiński. He continued his education in 1853–58 at a liceum in Ostrów Wielkopolski, where he was one of the best pupils, thanks to a scholarship from Jan K...
Go to Profile#4518
Martin Heidegger
#78612
Overall Influence
#4519
William A. Earle
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
William A. Earle was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Earle was an important figure within the movements of existentialism and phenomenology. He had particular expertise in the thought of Karl Jaspers and Georg W. F. Hegel and was an authority on surrealism. His interests included cultural criticism, the history of ideas, aesthetics, film, filmmaking, and mysticism. Students and colleagues regarded him as a strikingly independent, richly provocative educator and thinker.
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Duane M. Ilstrup
#78660
Overall Influence
#4521
Rafael Calvo Serer
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Rafael Calvo Serer was a Professor of History of Spanish Philosophy, a writer, essayist. He was president of the Council of Administration of the newspaper Madrid, in which he published numerous articles on national and international politics. In 1949 he obtained the National Award for Literature for his work España sin problema.
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Richard Cartwright
#66318
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Richard Lee Cartwright was an American philosopher of language and emeritus professor of philosophy at MIT. Education and career Cartwright took his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1945, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1954 under Curt John Ducasse and Roderick Chisholm. He taught at the University of Michigan and then at Wayne State University. In 1967 he moved to MIT, where he was appointed to strengthen the new graduate philosophy program, and where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1996. Cartwright served twice as head of philosophy at MIT, and also as head of the humanities department.
Go to Profile#4523
Ali Asghar Mosleh
#63835
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ali Asghar Mosleh Fasaei is an Iranian philosopher and professor of philosophy at Allameh Tabataba'i University. He is known for his expertise on philosophy of culture. Mosleh holds the presidency of The Iranian Society of Intercultural Philosophy and Research Institute for Contemporary Culture at Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. He was the Dean of ATU's Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages , and Acting-Dean of ATU's Faculty of Theology and Islamic Knowledge . He is associate member of the Iranian Academy of Science.
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Gampopa
1079 - 1153 (74 years)
Gampopa Sönam Rinchen was the main student of Milarepa, and a Tibetan Buddhist master who codified his own master's ascetic teachings, which form the foundation of the Kagyu educational tradition. Gampopa was also a doctor and tantric master. He authored the first Lamrim text, Jewel Ornament of Liberation, and founded the Dagpo Kagyu school. He is also known as Dvagpopa, and by the titles Dakpo Lharjé "the physician from Dakpo" and Daö Zhönnu, "Candraprabhakumara" .
Go to Profile#4525
Luigi Ferri
1826 - 1895 (69 years)
Luigi Ferri was an Italian philosopher born in Bologna. His education was obtained mainly at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his father, a painter and architect, was engaged in the construction of the Théâtre Italien. From his twenty-fifth year he began to lecture in the colleges of Évreux, Dieppe, Blois and Toulouse. Later, he was lecturer at Annecy and Casal-Montferrat, and became head of the education department under Mamiani in 1860.
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Heather Widdows
#55833
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Heather Widdows is a British philosopher, specialising in applied ethics. She was at the University of Birmingham for 22 years, beginning as research fellow and finishing as Pro-Vice-Chancellor .She is currently a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research is in the areas of global ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of health and bioethics. In 2005, she was awarded a visiting fellowship at Harvard University.
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Walter Womacka
#20653
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Walter Womacka was a German Socialist Realist artist. His work was pioneering early German Democratic Republic aesthetics. Biography Walter Womacka was born on 22 December 1925 in Horní Jiřetín, Czechoslovakia. He lived in East Berlin for most of his life. During World War II he did military service. Between 1946 and 1951, he studied art in Braunschweig, Weimar, and Dresden in Germany.
Go to Profile#4528
Louis Groarke
#38206
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Louis Groarke is a Canadian philosopher, author, and a professor in the Philosophy Department at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. His work is characterized by his specialization in Western philosophy, especially the thought of Aristotle.
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Félix de Azúa
#35579
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Félix de Azúa Comella is a Spanish professor of aesthetics and philosophy, poet, novelist, essayist and translator, member of Real Academia Española. He taught Spanish literature at the University of Oxford from 1979 to 1981. He was director of the Institut Cervantes in Paris. With Eduardo Mendoza Garriga, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, José Angel Valente, Antonio Gamoneda, Pere Gimferrer, Julián Ríos and others, he is part of the generation of writers who revived democratic Spain.
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Mohsen Fayz Kashani
1598 - 1680 (82 years)
Mul·lā "al-Muḥsin" "al-Fayḍ" al-Kāshānī was an Iranian Twelver Shi'i Muslim, mystic, poet, philosopher, and muhaddith . Life Mohsen Fayz Kashani was born in Kashan to a scholarly family renowned for its learning, Fayz started his education with his father, Shah Morteza. His father owned a rich library which benefited Fayz. When he reached the age of twenty, he travelled to Isfahan for further study. However, after a year in Isfahan, he moved to Shiraz to study Hadith and Fiq under Majid Bahrani, one of the leading Shi'ite scholars of his time. Bahrani died a few months later, and Fayz r...
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Studs Terkel
#1313
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
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Wolfgang Schirmacher
#37420
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Wolfgang Schirmacher is a German philosopher, editor and educator in the field of philosophy, art and critical thought. He was the Founding Dean of the Media and Communications division at the European Graduate School, where he now is a full professor and holder of the Arthur Schopenhauer Chair of Philosophy. He has edited several journals and written books, as well as developed curricula in philosophical disciplines at major universities.
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Teoman Duralı
#32221
Overall Influence
1947 - 2021 (74 years)
Şaban Teoman Duralı was Turkish philosopher, thinker and academician, who was faculty at the Department of Philosophy, Ibn Haldun University. He wrote many articles and books and was widely published in areas such as history of philosophy, history of biology, linguistics, political philosophy and the philosophy of war.
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Winona LaDuke
#4425
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Winona LaDuke is an American economist, environmentalist, writer and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for Vice President of the United States as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She is the executive director and a co-founder of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
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Pierre A. Riffard
#46373
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Pierre A. Riffard is a French philosopher and specialist in esotericism. Born in Toulouse , he is a professor of pedagogy and philosophy at the University of the French West Indies and Guiana . Teaching in the French overseas departments and territories and elsewhere: Asia, Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, Guiana.
Go to Profile#4536
Emil. J. Freireich
#78961
Overall Influence
#4537
Alexander Broadie
#57043
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alexander Broadie , Scottish philosopher, emeritus professor of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow University. He writes on the Scottish philosophical tradition, chiefly the philosophy of the Pre-Reformation period, the 17th century, and the Enlightenment.
Go to Profile#4538
Maurizio Fava
#78984
Overall Influence
#4539
Arif Ahmed
#55115
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Arif Mohuiddin Ahmed is the Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom of the Office for Students, following his appointment in June 2023. Prior to this, Ahmed was a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 2015, university reader in philosophy in 2016, and Nicholas Sallnow-Smith College Lecturer in 2019. His research interests include decision theory and the philosophy of religion, from an atheist and libertarian point of view. Ahmed studied mathematics at the University of Oxford and philosophy at the University of Sussex...
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Enid Mumford
#7364
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Enid Mumford was a British social scientist, computer scientist and Professor Emerita of Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Manchester Business School, largely known for her work on human factors and socio-technical systems.
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H. J. McCloskey
#75803
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Henry John McCloskey was an Australian moral philosopher and writer. McCloskey was Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University in Melbourne. After graduating from the University of Melbourne, he had appointments at the University of Western Australia and the University of Melbourne before taking up a chair at La Trobe. He was president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy in 1978. McCloskey is known for his sheriff scenario, a thought experiment he used to criticize "extreme" utilitarianism, or what later came to be known as act utilitarianism.
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Arthur Zajonc
#13906
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Arthur Guy Zajonc is a physicist and the author of several books related to science, mind, and spirit; one of these is based on dialogues about quantum mechanics with the Dalai Lama. Zajonc, professor emeritus at Amherst College as of 2012, has been teaching there since 1978. He has served as the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America. From January 2012 to June 2015 he was president of the Mind and Life Institute.
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Jacques Pouysségur
#62213
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jacques Pouysségur is a French engineer and researcher. He was born on November 10, 1943, in Toulouse, Haute-Garonne. He is a research director emeritus of the CNRS. He has conducted research at the Institute for Research on Cancer and Aging, Nice , at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. From 2013 to 2021, he also worked in the Department of Medical Biology, Scientific Centre of Monaco . He has been the head of the Tumor Hypoxia and Metabolism Team and a visiting professor at Kyoto Medical University, Kyoto, Japan, since 2013.
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Scott Halstead
#56902
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Scott Halstead is an American physician-scientist, virologist and epidemiologist known for his work in the fields of tropical medicine and vaccine development. He is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on viruses transmitted by mosquitoes, including Dengue, Japanese encephalitis, chikungunya and Zika. He was one of the first researchers to identify the phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement , where the antibodies generated from a first dengue infection can sometimes worsen the symptoms from a second infection.
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Charles de Villers
1765 - 1815 (50 years)
Charles François Dominique de Villers was a French philosopher. He was mainly responsible for translating the philosophy of Immanuel Kant into the French language. Life Villers was born in Boulay-Moselle, France. He studied at the Benedictine College in Metz, and then became a student of the School of Applied Artillery of Metz. He attained the rank of captain. Like other officers of that era, such as the artillery colonel Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet of Puysegur, he became interested in animal magnetism.
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Bong-Ho Son
#22287
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Bong-Ho Son is a South Korean Christian ethics scholar and social activist. Son was born in Korea, and graduated from and Seoul National University. He then studied theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in the United States, and received his Ph.D from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He has taught at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and Seoul National University, and has served as president of Hansung University and of Dongduk Women's University. In 2011, he established the Sharing National Movement Headquarters, where he is in charge of representation. He is w...
Go to Profile#4547
Anton Raphael Mengs
1728 - 1779 (51 years)
Anton Raphael Mengs was a German painter, active in Dresden, Rome, and Madrid, who while painting in the Rococo period of the mid-18th century became one of the precursors to Neoclassical painting, which replaced Rococo as the dominant painting style in Europe.
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Gopinath Kaviraj
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Gopinath Kaviraj was an Indian Sanskrit scholar, Indologist and philosopher. First appointed in 1914 a librarian, he was the Principal of Government Sanskrit College, Varanasi from 1923 to 1937. He was also the editor of the Sarasvati Bhavana Granthamala during that period.
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Eugene Lindsay Opie
1873 - 1971 (98 years)
Eugene Lindsay Opie was an American physician and pathologist who conducted research on the causes, transmission, and diagnosis of tuberculosis and on immunization against the disease. He served as professor of pathology at several U.S. medical schools and as Dean of the Washington University School of Medicine .
Go to Profile#4550
Richard Lints
#48868
Overall Influence
Richard Lints is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Hamilton Campus. He is also the Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell and is an author. Lints has been with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary since 1986.
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