Most Influential Philosophers of the 20th Century
The Top Ten
Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India.

Herbert Marcuse
Judith Butler

Karl Popper

Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Simone de Beauvoir

Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870–21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration,... read more

Giovanni Gentile

The Newcomers
? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

? Bayard Rustin

The Contenders
Alice Miller
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic.

Julius Evola

Rajneesh

Swami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda (12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902), born Narendranath Datta, was an Indian Hindu monk, a chief disciple of the 19th-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna... read more

Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Hannah Arendt

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an African American minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King is best known for advancing civil rights through... read more

Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.

Carl Jung

Michel Foucault

Martin Heidegger
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing was a pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist.

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