Most Influential Philosophers of the 20th Century

The Top Ten
1 Houston Stewart Chamberlain
2 Mahatma Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India.
3 Herbert Marcuse
4 Judith Butler
5 Karl Popper
6 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.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein
8 Simone de Beauvoir
9 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
10 Giovanni Gentile
The Contenders
11 Alice Miller
12 Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic.
13 Julius Evola
14 Rajneesh
15 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
16 Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.
17 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.
18 Reinhold Niebuhr
19 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.
20 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
21 Hannah Arendt
22 Carl Jung
23 Michel Foucault
24 Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing was a pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist.
25 Martin Heidegger
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