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.

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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Person Name

School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#5301

Kim Allan Eagle

#89278

Overall Influence

#5302

Georg Kühlewind

#48648

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Georg Kühlewind, birth name György Székely was a Hungarian philosopher, writer, lecturer and meditation teacher, who worked from the tradition of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. Setting aside his early interest in music and psychology, he pursued a successful professional career as a physical chemist. Meanwhile, he continued to deepen his spiritual practice and insights. A prolific author , Kühlewind spent much time traveling the world, lecturing and leading workshops and seminars in meditation, psychology, epistemology, child development, anthroposophy, and esoteric Christianity. He was ...

#5303

Peter T. Scardino

#89294

Overall Influence

#5304

Y. Karunadasa

#35073

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Yakupitiyage Karunadasa is a Sri Lankan scholar in Buddhist Studies. His main areas of specialization are Early Buddhism and Theravada Abidhamma. Education and career Y. Karunadasa obtained a First Class Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Ceylon in 1958, a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1963, and was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Kelaniya in 2002. He is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Kelaniya, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and as the Director of its Postgraduate Institute of Pali and Buddhist Studies. He has also served as the...

#5305

Elsa Dorlin

#46432

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Elsa Dorlin is a French philosopher and professor in the department of political science at University of Paris 8 Vincennes/St. Dénis. Dorlin earned her PhD in philosophy in 2004 at University of Paris 4 – Sorbonne. Her dissertation, "Au chevet de la Nation : sexe, race et médecine : XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles" was supervised by Pierre-François Moreau.

#5306

Don Poldermans

#37784

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Don Poldermans is a Dutch former cardiovascular medicine researcher who was fired for scientific misconduct and ethics concerns over informed consent. He was employed by Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where he was the head of the perioperative cardiac care unit. In addition, he was a member of the European Society of Cardiology Committee for Practice Guidelines and he acted as the Chairperson of the Task Force for the European Society of Cardiology.

#5307

Raili Kauppi

#84084

Overall Influence

1920 - 1995 (75 years)

Raili Kauppi , professor of philosophy at the University of Tampere. She was an internationally recognized scholar of Leibniz and intensional logic. Main publications:Über die Leibnizsche Logik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Problems der Intension und Extension, Acta Philosophia Fennica, Fasc. XII, Helsinki, 1960.Einführung in die Theorie der Begriffsysteme, Acta Universitatis Tamperensis, Ser A, vol 15, Tampere, 1967.

#5308

Catherine Otto

#52398

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Catherine Mary Otto is an echocardiography specialist who serves as J. Ward Kennedy-Hamilton Endowed Chair in Cardiology at the University of Washington Medical Center. She has authored echocardiography textbooks. The major fields she works in are valvular heart disease, adult congenital heart disease, and echocardiography.

#5309

Daniel M. Albert

#5310

Ludwig Marcuse

1894 - 1971 (77 years)

Ludwig Marcuse was a German philosopher and writer of Jewish origin. From 1933 to 1940 Marcuse lived in France, settling with other German exiles in Sanary-sur-Mer. From 1940 to 1950 he lived in Los Angeles. He returned to Germany at the end of his life.

#5311

Michael H. Criqui

#89396

Overall Influence

#5312

Kikuo Chishima

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Kikuo Chishima was a Japanese medical researcher who promoted a variant of the Soviet medical biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya's pseudoscientific cellular theories, known as neo-Haematology, now largely discredited.

#5313

Gary Varner

#72513

Overall Influence

1957 - 2023 (66 years)

Gary Edward Varner was an American philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, philosophical questions related to animal rights and animal welfare, and R. M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor in the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University; he had been based at the university since 1990. He was educated at Arizona State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison; at Madison, where he was supervised by Jon Morline, he wrote one of the first doctoral theses on environmental ethics. Varner's first monograph was In Nature's Interests?, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998.

#5314

George Caruana

1831 - 1872 (41 years)

George Caruana was a Maltese minor philosopher mostly interested in epistemology. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta . Life Caruana was a diocesan priest. He was born in Victoria, Gozo in 1831, and dedicated his relatively short life to academic work. He studied at the bishop’s seminary in Gozo, and then at the Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, from where he graduated as Doctor of Ecclesiastical Studies. Back in the Maltese islands, in 1858 Caruana was appointed Rector at the bishop’s seminary of Malta. Here he taught philosophy and mathematics. A few months later, in 1859, he was appointed Professor of the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta.

#5315

Werner Seeger

#89454

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

#5316

Nikolai Bogduk

#89476

Overall Influence

#5317

Richard Rudolf Walzer

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

Richard Rudolf Walzer, FBA was a German-born British scholar of Greek philosophy and of Arabic philosophy. Education: Werner-Siemens-Realgymnasium, Berlin-Schöneberg; Frederick William University of Berlin.

#5318

Mervyn Singer

#89498

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

#5319

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin

#11879

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Sir Michael Craig-Martin is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is known for fostering and adopting the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree. He is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths. His memoir and advice for the aspiring artist, On Being An Artist, was published by London-based publisher Art / Books in April 2015.

#5320

Susan Mendus

#71345

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Susan Lesley "Sue" Mendus, , FLSW is a Welsh academic specialising in political philosophy. She is currently Professor Emerita of Political Philosophy at the University of York. She was Vice-President of the British Academy between 2008 and 2012.

#5321

Marcus Elieser Bloch

Marcus Elieser Bloch

1723 - 1799 (76 years)

Marcus Elieser Bloch was a German physician and naturalist who is best known for his contribution to ichthyology through his multi-volume catalog of plates illustrating the fishes of the world. Brought up in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family, he learned German and Latin and studied anatomy before settling in Berlin as a physician. He amassed a large natural history collection, particularly of fish specimens. He is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologistss of the 18th century, and wrote many papers on natural history, comparative anatomy, and physiology.

#5322

Ernest Fortin

#43828

Overall Influence

1923 - 2002 (79 years)

Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. was a professor of theology at Boston College. While engaged in graduate studies in France, he met Allan Bloom, who introduced him to the work of Leo Strauss. Father Fortin worked at the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem.

#5323

Fyodor Khaskhachikh

Fyodor Khaskhachikh

1907 - 1942 (35 years)

Fyodor Ignatyevich Khaskhachikh was a Soviet philosopher and dean of philosophy at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History from 1939 to 1941. He worked on the history of epistemology and problems of epistemology within the framework of dialectical materialism.

#5324

Jonathan E. Bennett

#89545

Overall Influence

#5325

Adnan Kastrati

#89565

Overall Influence

#5326

Mark Keane

#30713

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Mark T. Keane is a cognitive scientist and author of several books on human cognition and artificial intelligence, including Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook , Advances in the Psychology of Thinking , Novice Programming Environments , Advances in Case-Based Reasoning ., Case-Based Reasoning: Research & Development .

#5327

Neven Sesardić

#8828

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Neven Sesardić is a Croatian philosopher known for his writings on heritability and race who worked most of his career as a professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Life and career He grew up in communist Yugoslavia. From 1977 to 1983 he worked as a lecturer at the University of Zagreb, and, from then, until 1989 he was assistant professor at the same university. In the 1980s he was listed as an "internal enemy" of the Yugoslav regime.

#5328

Isaac Rülf

1831 - 1902 (71 years)

Isaac Rülf was a Jewish teacher, journalist and philosopher. He became widely known for his aid work and as a prominent early Zionist. Rülf was born in Rauischholzhausen, Hesse, Germany. He received a teaching certificate in 1849, became an assistant to the county rabbi and then taught in other small communities. He received his rabbinical certificate in 1854 from the University of Marburg and his Ph.D in 1865 at the University of Rostock. That year he became the rabbi of Memel, East Prussia.

#5329

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

#57770

Overall Influence

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a Puerto Rican philosopher and professor in Philosophy at University of Connecticut-Storrs. He received his PhD from Brown University in Religious Studies. His work has been influential in contributing to ideas about decoloniality decolonizing epistemology, and in critiquing Western liberalism and Eurocentrism. He is influenced by the works of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Enrique Dussel.

#5330

Emeran A Mayer

#89604

Overall Influence

#5331

Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi

Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi

787 - 886 (99 years)

Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi, Latinized as Albumasar , was an early Persian Muslim astrologer, thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium.

#5332

Yoshio Yazaki

#89649

Overall Influence

#5333

Erich von Hornbostel

1877 - 1935 (58 years)

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs.

#5334

John M. Goldman

#89664

Overall Influence

#5335

Alan Winfield

#32739

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Alan Winfield is a British engineer and educator. He is Professor of Robot Ethics at UWE Bristol, Honorary Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow in the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He chairs the advisory board of the Responsible Technology Institute, University of Oxford.

#5336

Norman Shumway

#4354

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Norman Edward Shumway was a pioneer of heart surgery at Stanford University. He was the 67th president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the first to perform an adult human to human heart transplantation in the United States.

#5337

Charles Norris Cochrane

1889 - 1945 (56 years)

Charles Norris Cochrane was a Canadian historian and philosopher who taught at the University of Toronto. He is known for his writings about the interaction between ancient Rome and emerging Christianity.

#5338

Ernst L. Wynder

#5339

Wallace Matson

#71256

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Wallace I. Matson was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his works on the existence of God. Biography Matson was Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Washington 1950–1955. Matson was an atheist. In 1978, he debated Thomas B. Warren on the existence of God.

#5340

Richard Holton

#72599

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Richard Holton is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Peterhouse. He is known for his works on moral psychology and action theory. Holton is a Fellow of the British Academy.

#5341

Koneru Ramakrishna Rao

#32141

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Koneru Ramakrishna Rao was an Indian philosopher who served as Chancellor of GITAM , and as Chairman of GITAM school of Gandhian Studies, psychologist, parapsychologist, educationist, teacher, researcher and administrator. The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2011.

#5342

Persaeus

306 BC - 243 BC (63 years)

Persaeus of Citium, son of Demetrius, was a Greek Stoic philosopher, and a friend and favourite student of Zeno of Citium. Life He lived in the same house as Zeno. Later writers wrote that Persaeus had been Zeno's slave, who had perhaps originally been an amanuensis sent to Zeno by King Antigonus II Gonatas; however, the source of this story seems to be due to a sarcastic remark made about Persaeus by Bion of Borysthenes who, upon seeing a statue of Persaeus inscribed: "Persaeus the pupil of Zeno", sneered that it ought to have been: "Persaeus the Servant of Zeno".

#5343

Austin Woodbury

1899 - 1979 (80 years)

Austin M. Woodbury was an Australian Catholic philosopher. Biography Austin Maloney Woodbury S.M. was born on 2 March 1899 at Lower Mangrove , New South Wales, Australia. He was the sixth child of Austin Herbert Woodbury and his wife Margaret, nee Maloney, who had eleven children. His family was devoutly Catholic. Four of his sisters joined religious orders. From an early age Woodbury showed great intellectual promise and a love of learning. He discerned a vocation to the religious life and entered the Society of Mary in 1918, completing his secondary studies at the juniorate in Sydney and Mittagong .

#5344

Peter Osborne

#68018

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Peter Osborne is a British philosophy teacher who is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Kingston University, London. He is a former editor of the journal Radical Philosophy.

#5345

Jay DeFeo

1929 - 1989 (60 years)

Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”

#5346

William Schweiker

#52246

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

William Schweiker is an American theological ethicist. He is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on globalization as an ethical problem, hermeneutic philosophy, theological humanism, the history of ethics, and comparative religious ethics.

#5347

Ary L. Goldberger

#69021

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ary Louis Goldberger is a physician-educator, whose collaborative research work is at the interface of biomedicine and complexity science . He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MD from Yale Medical School. He did his clinical training in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease at Yale–New Haven Hospital and at the University of California, San Diego, respectively. He currently serves as Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and was one of the Core Founding Faculty of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

#5348

Federico Ferrari

Federico Ferrari

#77999

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Federico Ferrari is an Italian philosopher and art critic. He teaches Philosophy of Art at Brera Academy, in Milan, Italy. Career Under the influence of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy he has published many essays on philosophy, as well as literature. He has written two books with Jean-Luc Nancy: the first on the subject of nude, the second on the iconography of the writer. More recently, he has focused on the ontological state of the image, the deconstruction of the museum in postmodernity, and the question of art and/or in time. In 2011 he theorized the aesthetics of "Arte Essenziale", which manifested itself in the show held at Collezione Maramotti and at Frankfurter Kunstverein .

#5349

Liu Gangji

#75287

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Liu Gangji was a Chinese aesthetician, calligrapher, historian, painter, and philosopher. He was considered a founder of the study of the history of Chinese aesthetics. He was a distinguished professor and Director of the Institute of Aesthetics of Wuhan University. He also served as Vice President of the China Aesthetics Society.

#5350

Walter Herzog

#89960

Overall Influence

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