Aristotle ranks #13 and needed a lot of explaining.
Michael H. Hart files Aristotle one place below Galileo. The surviving medieval paperwork tells a stranger story: copying Aristotle boomed in the 1200s, and explaining Aristotle turned into a stack of manuscripts all of its own.
Why it matters now: the man is still pulling more than 94,000 English Wikipedia views every single month. That is a lot of visits to check what he meant.
Sixty-two years, every one of them approximate.
Born at Stagira around 384 BCE, died at Chalcis in 322 BCE. The dates wear a "c." because the ancient evidence supports a rough chronology, not a diary. Wikidata offers a precise death day of 2 March 322 BCE. We looked for who signed off on that. We couldn't find anyone, so it stays off the page.
Aristotle's life, years BCE (dates approximate)
Sources: Christopher Shields, "Aristotle", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Justin Humphreys, "Aristotle", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Hart, The 100, p. 71. Tutoring start year disputed: 343 BCE (Shields) or 342 BCE (Hart).
Hart files him at #13, wedged between Galileo and Euclid. Nobody asked Euclid.
In The 100 (revised edition, Citadel Press, 1992), Michael H. Hart ranks people by how much they changed the course of history. Aristotle lands at #13, with Galileo Galilei at #12 and Euclid at #14.
Hart's case, paraphrased: Aristotle organised an enormous range of questions and insisted on settling them by reasoning and observation, and his authority ran far beyond his own school (pp. 70, 73 to 74). Hart even admits that later reverence for Aristotle could get in the way of inquiry, which is a brave thing to put in the chapter praising him. He says he would have ranked him higher, if not for his view of the twelve people already in front.
The book is documented. The order is Hart's opinion: an editorial judgment about influence, not a measurement of anything. So the rest of this page tests it.
The neighbourhood, as Hart zoned it
Source: Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (Citadel Press, 1992), contents, pp. vii to viii.
Hart's thirteenth most influential person in history did remarkably little commuting.
Stagira, in northern Greece, to Athens at about seventeen, around 367 BCE, for roughly twenty years at Plato's Academy. Out around Plato's death in 348/347 BCE, to Asia Minor, then research on Lesbos with Theophrastus. Then Macedon, to tutor the young Alexander. Back to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum, in 335 BCE. Out again in 323 BCE, to Chalcis on Euboea, where he died the following year.
Contested: when the tutoring started (343 BCE in Shields, 342 BCE in Hart). Also, no: teaching Alexander does not make Aristotle responsible for Alexander's conquests. The record does not tell us what the lessons did to the student.
Six places, one sea, in the order he moved
Pins sit at approximate modern positions for orientation only: ancient site coordinates were not independently verified. The thread shows the order of moves, not a route he travelled. Sources: Shields; Humphreys.
Then the 1200s happened: 231 surviving Latin copies, about fifteen times the century before.
One study counts surviving manuscript units of Latin Aristotle now held in French libraries, by the century they were made. The 10th, 11th and 12th centuries leave 8, 14 and 15. The 13th leaves 231. Then 98, then 11 in the 15th century.
Why the fall? The study doesn't say, so neither will we, however hard the printing press is waving from the next scene. What we can say: a surviving medieval Aristotle volume at Durham is catalogued as a university textbook. Reach, it turns out, travelled by syllabus.
Fine print: these are copies that survived and sit in French libraries today, not everything ever written. The table's rows add up to 377 while the study's prose says 381. We aren't picking a winner, so there are no whole-sample percentages here, only the ratio 231 ÷ 15.
The century copying Aristotle became a job
Manuscript units by century of production, French-library sample. Source: Jaakko Tahkokallio, Counting Scribes, Table 11. Six centuries is all the study reports; we did not invent the rest.
Meanwhile, the explaining kept growing: 69, then 86, then 136 commentaries.
The same study counts a second, separate pile: manuscripts of commentaries on Aristotle now in Oxford libraries. Sixty-nine from the 13th century, 86 from the 14th, 136 from the 15th. These are not copies of Aristotle. They are copies of other people telling you what Aristotle meant.
That is the finding we would stick on the fridge. Aristotle's measurable legacy includes the labour of copying and explaining him: the surviving record holds a distinct population of manuscripts devoted to commentary, alongside the copies of his own texts. Never mind a fan club: he got a study-guide industry.
Different libraries and different selection rules (the commentary sample leaves out material unsuited to the study's scribal analysis), so this series is never stitched onto the French one. Comparing them would be comparing two piles of homework from two different schools.
Commentaries on Aristotle in an Oxford sample, by century
Manuscript units. Source: Tahkokallio, Counting Scribes, Table 12 (Oxford-library commentary sample, 291 units). Not comparable with the French text sample.
The filing cabinet spans a continent: about 2,200 catalogued Latin manuscripts.
The Aristoteles Latinus project, which catalogues the medieval Latin Aristotle, describes roughly 2,200 manuscripts in its printed catalogues. Count the numbered slots in its index by country group and the biggest piles are:
- 403 Italy
- 385 France
- 333 Germany
- 190 Vatican
- 177 United Kingdom
Before anyone launches a "Most Aristotelian Nation" league table: these are groupings in a catalogue's index, not where readers lived then or live now. Regional reach today is simply not established.
Slots counted as last ID minus first ID plus one, supplements excluded. The Vatican gets a row of its own, which it would like you to know.
Where the catalogue files them, slots by country group
Numbered catalogue slots per country group, not holdings today and not audiences. Discs placed near each country's middle for display. Source: Aristoteles Latinus, DALE index.
1495: Aldus prints Aristotle in Greek, in 5 volumes, minus the books on persuasion and poetry.
Aldus Manutius issued the Greek Aristotle in five volumes between 1495 and 1498. The Rhetoric and the Poetics were not in the set, so the first big printed Aristotle shipped without his books on persuasion and on poetry. Bold choice, for a launch.
How many copies did it sell? No print-run figure survives in our sources. So this is a milestone, not a sales chart, and anyone quoting you a number is selling something too.
Sources: the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and Bridwell Library descriptions of the edition.
The print edition, opened
Page spread from Aristotle's Opera, printed by Aldus Manutius, about 1495 to 1498; copy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Dead about 2,350 years, still drawing at least 94,000 English Wikipedia views a month.
From November 2025 to September 2026, the English Wikipedia article on Aristotle took 1,279,210 views from human readers. The quietest month was June 2026, at 94,664. The busiest was September 2026, at 164,937.
Why September? We did not test it, so we will not guess in print. October is left off the chart because its count is still far below every other month: an incomplete tally, not a sudden collapse of philosophy.
Page views are not people, not readers who finished, and definitely not converts.
A quiet summer, then September showed up
Views per month, user agents, all access. Source: Wikimedia Pageviews API (CC0), read 3 November 2026.
Ranked below Galileo, he holds the bigger passport: 234 Wikipedia editions to 210.
Wikidata lists an article on Aristotle in 234 Wikipedia language editions, on Galileo Galilei (#12) in 210, and on Euclid (#14) in 170. By this one crude measure of how many languages bothered to write him up, #13 beats #12.
Does that mean Hart got the order wrong? No. It means encyclopedias are generous to a man whose questions ran from logic to ethics to politics to living things. Availability is not influence; it is just easier to count.
Contested and corrected: the assignment sheet said 320 editions. That number counts every Wikimedia project linked to his Wikidata entry. Wikipedia editions alone come to 234.
Too high? A lot of that reach was other people doing the carrying.
Aristotle's later reach ran through translators, commentators and schools in Greek, Arabic, Jewish and Latin traditions, who interpreted him rather than forwarding him unchanged. Credit all of that to one man and you are paying the author royalties on the study guides. Hart ranks individuals; this was a relay. The runners are the people the list leaves out.
Too low? If influence means shaping how people are taught to think, the textbook and manuscript evidence points to a long, steady presence in the classroom. What the record does not supply is a common unit that settles whether that beats Galileo or Euclid. Hence the level scale.
And the content matters. In the Politics, Aristotle defends natural slavery and men's authority over women. Those passages are in the text. This research does not measure how many later people were harmed because of them, and we will not pretend to.
Both arguments are interpretations of the transmission record, not a measured alternative ranking.
Weighing #13, with no common unit
Sources: SEP, "Aristotle's text"; IEP, "Aristotle"; Aristotle, Politics I.5 and I.13, trans. Benjamin Jowett.
Reach in numbers, kept in separate jars because they are different units.
Hart's ranking. One behind Galileo, one ahead of Euclid, who was not consulted.
Hart, 1992surviving 13th-century Latin copies in one French-library sample. A boom, in parchment.
Tahkokallio, Table 11the jump from the 12th century (15) to the 13th (231) in that sample. Then the music stopped.
231 ÷ 1515th-century commentaries in an Oxford sample. The explainers were not running out of work.
Tahkokallio, Table 12English Wikipedia views in eleven months. None of them counted as agreement.
Wikimedia, Nov 2025 to Sep 2026Wikipedia editions with an article. Galileo: 210. Euclid: 170.
Wikidata, 3 Nov 2026Never add these together: manuscript units, catalogue slots, page views and sitelinks measure different things. The manuscript counts are samples of survivors, not totals of anything.
Copied, then explained, then looked up.
Reach in numbers, for a man who died in 322 BCE, means counting paper. The best series here is surviving Latin copies, and it spikes in the 1200s; a surviving volume from that world is catalogued as a university textbook. Beside it sits a separate pile: commentaries, still growing through the 1400s in an Oxford sample. That is reach by delegation. Today the traces are attention, at least 94,000 English Wikipedia views a month, and availability, articles in 234 Wikipedia editions. None of this converts into "followers", and none of it adds up: parchment, page views and sitelinks stay in their own jars. The honest headline is not a total. It is a shape.