Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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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,

#501

Guy Sircello

#12990

Overall Influence

1936 - 1992 (56 years)

Guy Sircello was an American philosopher best known for his analytic approach to philosophical aesthetics. Biography Guy Sircello was born in Tacoma, Washington, and attended Lincoln High School. His parents were Pete and Teresa Sircello, and he had a younger sister, Teresa. Upon high school graduation, he was awarded the prestigious George Baker full four-year scholarship to Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and graduated in 1958 with a double major in philosophy and history. In 1960, he married Sharon Chapin, a fellow Reed graduate, and shortly after, they left New York for Hamburg, where ...

#502

Edzard Ernst

#470

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Edzard Ernst is a retired British-German academic physician and researcher specializing in the study of complementary and alternative medicine. He was Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, the world's first such academic position in complementary and alternative medicine.

#503

Kwasi Wiredu

#8772

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Kwasi Wiredu was a Ghanaian philosopher. Often called the greatest African philosopher of his generation, his work contributed to the conceptual decolonisation of African thought. Life and career Wiredu was born in Kumasi, Gold Coast , in 1931, and attended Adisadel College from 1948 to 1952. It was during this period that he discovered philosophy, through Plato and Bertrand Russell. He gained a place at the University of Ghana, Legon. After graduating in 1958, he went to University College, Oxford to read for the B.Phil.

#504

Sharon Street

#7508

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 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.

#505

Edward Nelson

#2946

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Edward Nelson was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical logic, he was noted especially for his internal set theory, and views on ultrafinitism and the consistency of arithmetic. In philosophy of mathematics he advocated the view of formalism rather than platonism or intuitionism. He also wrote on the relationship between religion and mathematics.

#506

Jason Stanley

#5817

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jason Stanley is an American philosopher who is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is best known for his contributions to philosophy of language and epistemology, which often draw upon and influence other fields, including linguistics and cognitive science. He has written for a popular audience on the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. In his more recent work, Stanley has brought tools from philosophy of language and epistemology to bear on questions of political philosophy, especially in his 2015 book How Propaganda Works.

#507

Hans Albert

#4815

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (103 years)

Hans Albert was a German philosopher. He was professor of social sciences at the University of Mannheim from 1963, and remained at the university until 1989. His fields of research were social sciences and general studies of methods. He was a critical rationalist, paying special attention to rational heuristics. Albert was a strong critic of the continental hermeneutic tradition coming from Heidegger and Gadamer.

#508

Douglas Den Uyl

Douglas Den Uyl

#10015

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Douglas J. Den Uyl is vice president of educational programs at Liberty Fund. Biography Den Uyl earned his B.A. from Kalamazoo College, his MA from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from Marquette University. Den Uyl's areas of scholarly interest include the history of ideas, moral and political theory, and has published essays or books on Spinoza, Smith, Shaftesbury, Mandeville and others. He taught philosophy and was department chair and full professor at Bellarmine College before coming to Liberty Fund. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Den Uyl has contributed articles to...

#509

Don Ihde

#6465

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Don Ihde is an American philosopher of science and technology. In 1979 he wrote what is often identified as the first North American work on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis. Before his retirement, Ihde was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 2013 Ihde received the Golden Eurydice Award.

#510

Trenton Merricks

#14209

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Trenton Merricks is an American philosopher and the Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. While Merricks' primary field of study is metaphysics, he has also published scholarship in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion.

#511

Richard Kirkham

#11803

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Richard Ladd Kirkham is an American philosopher. Among his published works are Theories of Truth , "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" Mind , and "On Paradoxes and a Surprise Exam" Philosophia .

#512

Andrew Feenberg

Andrew Feenberg

#5186

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Andrew Feenberg is an American philosopher. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His main interests are philosophy of technology, continental philosophy, critique of technology and science and technology studies.

#513

Ivan Illich

#757

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Ivan Dominic Illich was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.

#514

Jim Holt

#6412

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jim Holt is an American journalist, popular-science author, and essayist. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Slate. In 1997 he was editor of The New Leader, a political magazine. His book Why Does the World Exist? was a 2013 New York Times bestseller.

#515

Brian Skyrms

#3717

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Brian Skyrms is an American philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He has worked on problems in the philosophy of science, causation, decision theory, game theory, and the foundations of probability.

#516

John L. Pollock

#8543

Overall Influence

1940 - 2009 (69 years)

John L. Pollock was an American philosopher known for influential work in epistemology, philosophical logic, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Life and career Born John Leslie Pollock in Atchison, Kansas, on January 28, 1940, Pollock earned a triple-major physics, mathematics, and philosophy degree at the University of Minnesota in 1961. In 1965, his doctoral dissertation Analyticity and Implication at the University of California, Berkeley was advised by Ernest Adams . This dissertation contained an appendix on defeasible reasoning that would eventually blossom into his main ...

#517

Albert Borgmann

#7252

Overall Influence

1937 - 2023 (86 years)

Albert Borgmann was a German-born American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. In 2013 Borgmann received the Golden Eurydice Award for his contributions to philosophy. Borgmann died in Missoula, Montana on May 7, 2023, at the age of 85.

#518

Ernst Tugendhat

#10782

Overall Influence

1930 - 2023 (93 years)

Ernst Tugendhat was a Czechoslovakian-born German philosopher. He was a scion of the wealthy and influential Jewish Tugendhat family. They lived in Venezuela during the Nazi regime, and he studied first in Stanford University, then in Freiburg. He taught internationally in Europa and South America, with a focus on language analysis.

#519

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.

#520

Mark Lilla

#3835

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas, journalist, and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. A self-described liberal, he frequently, though not always, presents views from that perspective.

#521

Alva Noë

#7607

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Alva Noë is an American philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in analytic phenomenology, the theory of art, Ludwig Wittgenstein, enactivism, and the origins of analytic philosophy.

#522

David Wood

#7742

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

David Wood was Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, at Vanderbilt University. Wood has taught philosophy in Europe and the United States for over thirty years, and is the author of 16 books. In addition to teaching at Vanderbilt University, he also co-directed a research programme in ecology and spirituality for the Centre for the Study of Religion and Culture.

#523

Henry E. Allison

#12055

Overall Influence

1937 - 2023 (86 years)

Henry Edward Allison was an American scholar of Immanuel Kant, widely considered to be one of the most eminent English-language Kant scholars of the postwar era. He was a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego and a professor at Boston University.

#524

Kathleen Higgins

Kathleen Higgins

#11265

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kathleen Marie Higgins is an American Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where she has been teaching for over thirty years. She specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of music, nineteenth and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion.

#525

Gareth Matthews

#12310

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Gareth B. Matthews was an American philosopher who specialized in ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, philosophy of childhood and philosophy for children. Biography Gareth Matthews was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on July 8, 1929. He grew up near Memphis, Tennessee. As a Boy Scout, he earned the rank of Eagle Scout. Matthews moved with his family to Franklin, Indiana, in 1945. He was valedictorian of the Class of 1947, at Franklin High School. He went on to earn his A.B. at Franklin College , where his father was a professor. Matthews began his graduate work at Harvard University, where he earned an A.M.

#526

Bernard Gert

#14647

Overall Influence

1934 - 2011 (77 years)

Bernard Gert was a moral philosopher known primarily for his work in normative ethics, as well as in medical ethics, especially pertaining to psychology. His work has been called "among the clearest and most comprehensive on the contemporary scene", "far more detailed and more concretely worked out" and "systematic" than competing comprehensive ethical theories. Because it avoids pitfalls associated with other dominant ethical theoretical approaches , Gert's moral theory "provides what many people are looking for".

#527

Markus Gabriel

#14389

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and author at the University of Bonn. In addition to his more specialized work, he has also written popular books about philosophical issues. Career Gabriel was educated in philosophy and Ancient Greek in Germany. After completing his doctorate and habilitation at Heidelberg University, he held a faculty position at New School for Social Research. He then came to the University of Bonn, where he holds the chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and is Director of the International Centre for Philosophy. Gabriel has also been a visiting...

#528

Penelope Maddy

#6554

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Penelope Maddy is UCI Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Maddy specializes and is known for her influential work in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical realism. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979. Maddy’s early work was largely a defense of the position known as mathematical realism or Platonism, in which mathematical objects (like, say, numbers) are real objects in the universe (though abstract). This position resembles that of famous mathematical realists like the great logician Kurt Gödel, though importantly Maddy also considers sets of objects real, as well.

#529

George Dickie

#9212

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

George Thomas Dickie was an American philosopher. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Illinois at Chicago. His specialities included aesthetics, philosophy of art, and Eighteenth Century theories of taste.

#530

Amie Thomasson

#14154

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Amie Lynn Thomasson is an American philosopher, currently Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. Thomasson specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the philosophy of art. She is the author of Fiction and Metaphysics , Ordinary Objects , Ontology Made Easy , and Norms and Necessity .

#531

Dieter Henrich

#9965

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Dieter Henrich was a German philosopher. A contemporary thinker in the tradition of German idealism, Henrich is considered "one of the most respected and frequently cited philosophers in Germany today", whose "extensive and highly innovative studies of German Idealism and his systematic analyses of subjectivity have significantly impacted on advanced German philosophical and theological debates."

#532

Otto Friedrich Bollnow

#6329

Overall Influence

1903 - 1991 (88 years)

Otto Friedrich Bollnow was a German philosopher and teacher. Biography He was born the son of a rector in Stettin in what was then northwest Germany and went to school in the town of Anklam. After gaining his Abitur he studied mathematics and physics at Göttingen University, where he was influenced by the philosopher Herman Nohl. Bollnow received a doctorate in physics in 1925 and successfully completed his habilitation with Georg Misch at Göttingen in 1931. He taught at Göttingen for some years without being appointed to the faculty. Bollnow was a member of the Militant League for German C...

#533

Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young

#3336

Overall Influence

1949 - 2006 (57 years)

Iris Marion Young was an American political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference. She served as Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and was affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and the Human Rights program there. Her research covered contemporary political theory, feminist social theory, and normative analysis of public policy. She believed in the importance of political activism and encouraged her students to involve themselves in their communities.

#534

Priscilla Cohn

#14523

Overall Influence

2000 - 2019 (19 years)

Priscilla T. Neuman Cohn Ferrater Mora was an American philosopher and animal rights activist. She was Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, associate director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and co-editor of the centre's Journal of Animal Ethics.

#535

Julian Savulescu

Julian Savulescu

#7725

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins. He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore. He was previously Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017.

#536

Lawrence C. Becker

#13877

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Lawrence C. Becker was an American philosopher working mainly in the areas of ethics and social, political, and legal philosophy. Work Becker is the author of books and journal articles on justice, Stoicism and Modern Stoicism, reciprocity, property rights, and metaethics. He was an associate editor of the journal Ethics from 1985–2000, and the editor, with the librarian Charlotte B. Becker, of two editions of the Encyclopedia of Ethics.

#537

John Dupré

#5667

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Dupré, together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison, are often grouped together as the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

#538

Žarko Puhovski

#8911

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Žarko Puhovski is a Croatian professor, political analyst, philosopher and intellectual, former president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee. Biography Puhovski was born in Zagreb on 15 December 1946. He was born to a Jewish mother although he has never been an active Jew. Puhovski became well-known public figure at a very early age, for almost a trivial reason: When he became the president of his gymnasium committee of the Alliance of Socialist Youth a directive arrived to revitalise the political work with more vivacious subjects. Having discovered an article on contraception in the magazin...

#539

Marilyn McCord Adams

Marilyn McCord Adams

#11063

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Marilyn McCord Adams was an American philosopher and Episcopal priest. She specialized in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and medieval philosophy. She was Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale Divinity School from 1998 to 2003 and Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009.

#540

Yirmiyahu Yovel

Yirmiyahu Yovel

#11329

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Yirmiyahu Yovel was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual. He was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Yovel had also been a political columnist in Israel, cultural and political critic and a frequent presence in the media. Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme académique. His books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. Yovel was married to Shoshana Yovel, novelist an...

#541

William Chittick

William Chittick

#3661

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

William Clark Chittick is an American philosopher, writer, translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his work on Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.

#542

Boris Groys

#7585

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Boris Efimovich Groys is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a global distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of aesthetics, art history, and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern ...

#543

Giovanni Reale

#9811

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Giovanni Reale was an Italian historian of philosophy. Biography Reale was born in Candia Lomellina, Pavia. He attended the Gymnasium and the Liceo classico of Casale Monferrato, and was then educated at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan, where he graduated. He later continued his studies in Marburg an der Lahn and Munich.

#544

Marshall Berman

Marshall Berman

#4370

Overall Influence

1940 - 2013 (73 years)

Marshall Howard Berman was an American philosopher and Marxist humanist writer. He was a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching political philosophy and urbanism.

#545

John Deely

#5732

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

John Deely was an American philosopher and semiotician. He was a professor of philosophy at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas .

#546

Cicely Saunders

Cicely Saunders

#1132

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, physician and writer. She is noted for her work in terminal care research and her role in the birth of the hospice movement, emphasising the importance of palliative care in modern medicine, and opposing the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia.

#547

Chung-ying Cheng

#11318

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Chung-Ying Cheng is a distinguished scholar of Chinese philosophy and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is considered one of the pioneers who formalized the field of Chinese philosophy in the United States in the 1960s.

#548

Sahotra Sarkar

#6030

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sahotra Sarkar is an Indian-American professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the philosophy of biology. Education and career Sarkar is originally from India where he lived in Darjeeling until 1975. He earned a BA from Columbia University, where he won a Van Amringe Mathematical Prize, and a MA and PhD from the University of Chicago where he worked with William_C._Wimsatt. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology , and the Edelstein Centre for the Philosophy of Science . He was a visiting schol...

#549

Max Jammer

#2470

Overall Influence

1915 - 2010 (95 years)

Max Jammer , was an Israeli physicist and philosopher of physics. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He was Rector and Acting President at Bar-Ilan University from 1967 to 1977. Biography Jammer studied physics, philosophy and history of science, first at the University of Vienna, and then from 1935 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a PhD in experimental physics in 1942. He served in the British Army for the rest of the war.

#550

Germain Grisez

#5962

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Germain Gabriel Grisez was a French-American philosopher. Grisez's development of ideas from Thomas Aquinas has redirected Catholic thought and changed the way it has engaged with secular moral philosophy. In 'The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 94, A. 2' Grisez attacked the neo-scholastic interpretation of Aquinas as holding that moral norms are derived from methodologically antecedent knowledge of human nature. Grisez defended the idea of metaphysical free choice, and proposed a natural law theory of practical reasoning and moral judgeme...

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