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 female people in Philosophy,
#1
Martha Nussbaum
#52
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
#2
Philippa Foot
#597
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her work was inspired by Aristotelian ethics. Along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, she is credited with inventing the trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.
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G. E. M. Anscombe
#473
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe , usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. She was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
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Susan Haack
#665
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Susan Haack is a distinguished professor in the humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
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Nel Noddings
#656
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Nel Noddings was an American feminist, educator, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. Biography Noddings received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State University in New Jersey, a master's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a PhD in education from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
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Julia Kristeva
#105
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend...
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Carol Gilligan
#560
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
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Sandra Harding
#1035
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science .
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Donna Haraway
#257
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
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Rosalind Hursthouse
#2552
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Rosalind Hursthouse is a British-born New Zealand moral philosopher noted for her work on virtue ethics. She is one of the leading exponents of contemporary virtue ethics, though she has also written extensively on philosophy of action, history of philosophy, moral psychology, and biomedical ethics. Hursthouse is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Auckland and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
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Mary Midgley
#1076
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man , when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter , Wickedness , The Ethical Primate , Evolution as a Religion , and Science as Salvation . She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.
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Christine Korsgaard
#2713
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Christine Marion Korsgaard, is an American philosopher who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University. Her main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general.
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Ruth Barcan Marcus
#2104
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Ruth Barcan Marcus was an American academic philosopher and logician best known for her work in modal and philosophical logic. She developed the first formal systems of quantified modal logic and in so doing introduced the schema or principle known as the Barcan formula. Marcus, who originally published as Ruth C. Barcan, was, as Don Garrett notes "one of the twentieth century's most important and influential philosopher-logicians". Timothy Williamson, in a 2008 celebration of Marcus' long career, states that many of her "main ideas are not just original, and clever, and beautiful, and fasci...
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Helga Kuhse
#2726
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist. Kuhse was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to Australia in 1962. From the 1970s, she was one of the first philosophers to address the ethical implications of the developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. With Peter Singer, she founded the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in 1980, one of the first research centres in the world devoted entirely to bioethics. She served as Director of the Centre until June 1999. Her ideas on the end of life, the right to die, and assisted death, have prompted controv...
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Angela Davis
#123
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American revolutionary Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
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Patricia Churchland
#1479
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
#17
Val Plumwood
#2827
Overall Influence
1939 - 2008 (69 years)
Val Plumwood was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist known for her work on anthropocentrism. From the 1970s she played a central role in the development of radical ecosophy. Working mostly as an independent scholar, she held positions at the University of Tasmania, North Carolina State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Sydney, and at the time of her death was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University. She is included in Routledge's Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment .
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Frances Kamm
#3497
Overall Influence
Frances Myrna Kamm is an American philosopher specializing in normative and applied ethics. Kamm is currently the Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is also the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy Emerita at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.
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Judith Jarvis Thomson
#3490
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Judith Jarvis Thomson was an American philosopher who studied and worked on ethics and metaphysics. Her work ranges across a variety of fields, but she is most known for her work regarding the thought experiment titled the trolley problem and her writings on abortion. She is credited with naming, developing, and initiating the extensive literature on the trolley problem first posed by Philippa Foot which has found a wide range use since. Thomson also published a paper titled "A Defense of Abortion", which makes the argument that the procedure is morally permissible even if it is assumed that a fetus is a person with a right to life.
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Avital Ronell
#1103
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
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Seyla Benhabib
#2392
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 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.
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Ágnes Heller
#2765
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ágnes Heller was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
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Onora O'Neill
#3081
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. Early life and education Onora Sylvia O'Neill was born on 23 August 1941 in Aughafatten. The daughter of Sir Con O'Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul's Girls' School, London, before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Somerville College, Oxford. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor.
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Ruth Millikan
#5197
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Ruth Garrett Millikan is a leading American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language. Millikan has spent most of her career at the University of Connecticut, where she is now Professor Emerita of Philosophy.
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Marcia Baron
#6216
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Marcia Baron is an American philosopher and the Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Her main research interests include moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophical issues in criminal law. Baron is an associate editor of Inquiry, a member of the editorial board of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, a series editor for New Directions in Ethics, and a member of the editorial board of the North American Kant Studies in Philosophy.
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Elizabeth S. Anderson
#3004
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.
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Cora Diamond
#5692
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.
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Miranda Fricker
#6414
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Miranda Fricker, FBA FAAS is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield. Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone "specifically in their capacity as a knower", and explored the concept in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice.
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Hazel Barnes
#4956
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hazel Estella Barnes was an American philosopher, author, and translator. Best known for her popularization of existentialism in America, Barnes translated the works of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as writing original works on the subject. After earning her Ph.D. in Classics from Yale in 1941, she spent much of her career at the University of Colorado. In 1979, Barnes became the first woman to be named Distinguished Professor at CU-Boulder. In recognition of her long tenure and service to the University, in 1991 CU established the Hazel Barnes Prize for faculty who best embody "the enriching int...
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Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
#1307
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor of the book series, Analecta Husserliana. She had a thirty-two-year friendship and occasional academic collaboration with Pope John Paul II.
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Pamela Sue Anderson
#8144
Overall Influence
1955 - 2017 (62 years)
Pamela Sue Anderson was an American philosopher who specialized in philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy and continental philosophy. In 2007 she was an Official Fellow, Tutor in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Dean, and Women's Advisor of Regent's Park College in the University of Oxford. Her former students include feminist philosopher Hanneke Canters.
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Mary Anne Warren
#9110
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Mary Anne Warren was an American writer and philosophy professor, noted for her writings on the issue of abortion and animal rights. Biography Warren was a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University for many years. Her essays have sometimes been required readings in academic courses dealing with the abortion debate and they are frequently cited in major publications like Peter Singer's The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature and Bernard Gert's Bioethics: A Systematic Approach. She was sometimes described as a feminist, largely due to her pro-choice writings.
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Julia Annas
#9265
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Julia Elizabeth Annas is a British philosopher who has taught in the United States for the last quarter-century. She is Regents Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Arizona. Education and career Annas graduated from Oxford University in 1968 with a B.A. and from Harvard University with an A.M. and a Ph.D. . She was a Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh's College, Oxford for fifteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1986, where she taught until her retirement, apart for one year as a professor at Columbia University.
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Catherine Malabou
#3218
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.
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Alice Crary
#7595
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K. .
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Nancy Cartwright
#4152
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire, is an American philosopher of science. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. Currently, she is the President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
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Silvia Federici
#4758
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.
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Sally Haslanger
#9576
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
#39
Alison Jaggar
#6274
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Alison Mary Jaggar is an American feminist philosopher born in England. She is College Professor of Distinction in the Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She was one of the first people to introduce feminist concerns in to philosophy.
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Linda Martín Alcoff
#6700
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
#41
Virginia Held
#9199
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Virginia Potter Held is an American moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and critiques of the traditional roles of women in society.
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Janet Radcliffe Richards
#11785
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist , Philosophical Problems of Equality , Human Nature after Darwin , and The Ethics of Transplants .
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Barbara Cassin
#5113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida. In 2006 she succeeded Jonathan Barnes to the directorship of the leading centre of excellence in Ancient philosophy, Centre Leon-Robin, at the Sorbonne.
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Jennifer Hornsby
#11296
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Jennifer Hornsby, FBA is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.
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Mary Daly
#1807
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Once a practicing Roman Catholic, she had disavowed Christianity by the early 1970s. Daly retired from Boston College in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes. She allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.
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Deborah Mayo
#6806
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Deborah G. Mayo is an American philosopher of science and author. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech and holds a visiting appointment at the Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics.
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Eleonore Stump
#10398
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Eleonore Stump is an American philosopher and the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. Biography Eleonore Stump received her first degree, a B.A. in classical languages from Grinnell College in 1969. She was class valedictorian and received the Archibald Prize for scholarship. She has an M.A. in biblical studies from Harvard University , and an M.A. and Ph.D. in medieval studies from Cornell University . Before coming to Saint Louis University, she taught at Oberlin College, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and University of Notre Dame.
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Susanne Bobzien
#10660
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Susanne Bobzien is a German-born philosopher whose research interests focus on philosophy of logic and language, determinism and freedom, and ancient philosophy. She currently is senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.
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Sharon Street
#7508
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Sharon Street is a professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. She specializes in metaethics, focusing in particular on how to reconcile our understanding of normativityativity with a scientific conception of the world.
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Sarah Kofman
#6715
Overall Influence
1934 - 1994 (60 years)
Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher . Biography Kofman began her teaching career in Toulouse in 1960 at the Lycée Saint-Sernin, and worked with both Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze. Her abandoned primary thesis for her State doctorate, later published as Nietzsche et la métaphore, was supervised by Deleuze. In 1969 Kofman met Jacques Derrida and began attending his seminars at the École Normale Supérieure.
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