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 people in Philosophy,
#551
Emanuele Severino
#11074
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Emanuele Severino was an Italian philosopher. Biography Severino studied at the University of Brescia and graduated at the University of Pavia under Gustavo Bontadini with the first Italian dissertation on Martin Heidegger and the Metaphysics. Subsequently, Severino broke publicly from Bontadini in 1970 while both were members of faculty of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. A student of his as a young man at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore was Cardinal Angelo Scola, who later served as Archbishop of Milan.
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Alphonso Lingis
#11621
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Alphonso Lingis is an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complements the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography.
Go to Profile#553
Frithjof Bergmann
#10743
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Frithjof Harold Bergmann was a German professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses on existentialism, continental philosophy, Hegel, and Marx. He was known for the concept of New Work.
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Stewart Shapiro
#9860
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stewart Shapiro is O'Donnell Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Connecticut. He is a leading figure in the philosophy of mathematics where he defends the abstract variety of structuralism.
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Jerrold Levinson
#12534
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jerrold Levinson is distinguished university professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is particularly noted for his work on defining art, the aesthetics of music, ontology of art, philosophy of film, interpretation, aesthetics experience, and humour.
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Per Martin-Löf
#2937
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Per Erik Rutger Martin-Löf is a Swedish logician, philosopher, and mathematical statistician. He is internationally renowned for his work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic, and computer science. Since the late 1970s, Martin-Löf's publications have been mainly in logic. In philosophical logic, Martin-Löf has wrestled with the philosophy of logical consequence and judgment, partly inspired by the work of Brentano, Frege, and Husserl. In mathematical logic, Martin-Löf has been active in developing intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathema...
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Per Lindström
#12131
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Per "Pelle" Lindström was a Swedish logician, after whom Lindström's theorem and the Lindström quantifier are named. He was one of the key followers of Lars Svenonius. Lindström was awarded a PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 1966. His thesis was titled Some Results in the Theory of Models of First Order Languages. A festschrift for Lindström was published in 1986.
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André Glucksmann
#4273
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
André Glucksmann was a French philosopher, activist and writer. He was a leading figure of the new philosophers. Glucksmann began his career as a Marxist, but went on to reject communism in the popular book La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d'Hommes , and later became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. He was a strong supporter of human rights. In later years he opposed the claim that Islamic terrorism is the product of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.
Go to Profile#559
John Penn Mayberry
#6344
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
John Penn Mayberry was an American mathematical philosopher and creator of a distinctive Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics to which he gave expression in his book The Foundations of Mathematics in the Theory of Sets. Following completion of a Ph.D. at Illinois under the supervision of Gaisi Takeuti, he took up, in 1966, a position in the mathematics department of the University of Bristol. He remained there until his retirement in 2004 as a Reader in Mathematics.
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Richard Kearney
#6009
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard Kearney is an Irish philosopher and public intellectual specializing in contemporary continental philosophy. He is the Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy at Boston College and has taught at University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, the University of Nice, and the Australian Catholic University. He is the author of 23 books on European philosophy and literature and has edited or co-edited over 20 more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. He is also a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
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Hans Köchler
#1068
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans Köchler is a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and president of the International Progress Organization, a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations. In his general philosophical outlook he is influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, his legal thinking has been shaped by the approach of Kelsen. Köchler has made contributions to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology and has developed a hermeneutics of trans-cultural understanding that has influenced the discourse on the relations between Islam and the West.
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Luc Bovens
#8331
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Luc Bovens is a Belgian professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bovens is a former editor of Economics and Philosophy. His main areas of research are moral and political philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of public policy, Bayesian epistemology, rational choice theory, and voting theory. He has also published work, of some controversy to the anti-abortion movement, on issues regarding abortion and natural family planning methods of contraception.
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Bimal Krishna Matilal
#13606
Overall Influence
1935 - 1991 (56 years)
Bimal Krishna Matilal was an eminent philosopher whose writings presented the Indian philosophical tradition as a comprehensive system of logic incorporating most issues addressed by themes in Western philosophy. Born in Calcutta, he lived and worked in Calcutta, Harvard, Toronto and Oxford, where, from 1977 to 1991, he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford.
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Rosi Braidotti
#3674
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. Born in Italy, she studied in Australia and France and works in the Netherlands. Biography Career Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and moved to Australia when she was 16, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at th...
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Akira Yamada
#11969
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Akira Yamada was a Japanese scholar and philosopher of the West European Medieval philosophy. Member of the Japan Academy since 1998. Yamada graduated from the Kyoto Imperial University, Philosophy section of the Department of Literature in 1944.1951, Instructor of the Osaka City University, Department of Literature1955, Assistant professor of the Osaka City University1965, Assistant professor of the Kyoto University, Department of Literature1968, Professor of the Kyoto University1976, Director of Department of Literature in the Kyoto University1985, Professor emeritus of the Kyoto University1...
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Denis Dutton
#6151
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Denis Laurence Dutton was an American philosopher of art, web entrepreneur, and media activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was also a co-founder and co-editor of the websites Arts & Letters Daily, ClimateDebateDaily.com, and cybereditions.com.
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Kit Fine
#6859
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kit Fine is a British philosopher, currently university professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. Prior to joining the philosophy department of NYU in 1997, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan and UCLA. The author of several books and dozens of articles in international academic journals, he has made notable contributions to the fields of philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language and also has written on ancient philosophy, in particular on Aristotle's account of log...
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John Vattanky
#16917
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Rev. John Vattanky SJ was a Jesuit priest, belonging to Kerala province, in India. An Indian philosopher, specializing in Gangesa's Navya-Nyāya, he resided at De Nobili College, Pune. Vattanky was a Professor Emeritus of Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India. He has contributed significantly to the growth of Indian philosophy and Indian Christian Theology.
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Friedrich Kittler
#6176
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Friedrich A. Kittler was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military. Biography Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony. His family fled with him to West Germany in 1958, where from 1958 to 1963 he went to a natural sciences and modern languages Gymnasium in Lahr in the Black Forest, and thereafter, until 1972, he studied German studies, Romance philology and philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau.
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Avrum Stroll
#15173
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Avrum Stroll was a research professor at the University of California, San Diego. Born in Oakland, California, he was a distinguished philosopher and a noted scholar in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of language, and twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
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Tu Weiming
#5334
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Tu Weiming is a Chinese-born American philosopher. He is Chair Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. He is also Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University.
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Alfred Schmidt
#7048
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Alfred Schmidt was a German philosopher. Biography Schmidt studied history and English as well as classical philology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and later philosophy and sociology. He was a student of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer and gained his doctorate with his The Concept of Nature in Marx.
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David Bordwell
#2848
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Jay Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the History of Film Style .
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Max Bill
#1160
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer. Early life and education Bill was born in Winterthur. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith during 1924–1927, Bill took up studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau under many teachers including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer from 1927 to 1929, after which he moved to Zurich.
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Oskar Negt
#3261
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Oskar Reinhard Negt is a philosopher and critical social theorist. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at Leibniz University Hannover, and one of Germany's most prominent social scientists. Little of his work has been translated into English.
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Israel Scheffler
#4935
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Israel Scheffler was an American philosopher of science and of education. Career Scheffler held B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology from Brooklyn College, an M.H.L. and a D.H.L. from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He defended his doctoral thesis, On Quotation, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952, where he studied with Nelson Goodman and began teaching that year at Harvard University, where he spent his career. He retired in 1992. His main interests lay in the philosophical interpretation of language, symbolism, science and education. He was a Fellow of the American Academy ...
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Odo Marquard
#7381
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Odo Marquard was a German philosopher. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Giessen from 1965 to 1993. In 1984 he received the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose. Early life and education Odo Marquard was born in Stolp, Farther Pomerania. He studied philosophy, German literature and theology, obtaining his doctorate at the University of Münster and his habilitation at the University of Freiburg. In Münster he studied under Joachim Ritter, whose Ritter School he sometimes is considered a member of. An even greater influence was Max Müller, whom Marquard studied under in ...
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Brian David Ellis
#7397
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Brian Ellis is an Australian philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor in the philosophy department at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and Professional Fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He was the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for twelve years. He is one of the major proponents of the New Essentialist school of philosophy of science. In later years he has brought his understanding of scientific realism to the Social Sciences, developing the philosophy of Social Humanism.
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Isabelle Stengers
#2255
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour among others, and has written widely on the history of science as well as philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres.
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Régis Debray
#1817
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jules Régis Debray is a French philosopher, journalist, former government official and academic. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society, and for associating with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and advancing Salvador Allende's presidency in Chile in the early 1970s. He returned to France in 1973 and later held various official posts in the French government.
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Sydney Shoemaker
#8903
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker was an American philosopher. He was the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and is well known for his contributions to philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
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Pavel Tichý
#16501
Overall Influence
1936 - 1994 (58 years)
Pavel Tichý was a Czech logician, philosopher and mathematician. He worked in the field of intensional logic and founded transparent intensional logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a book The Foundations of Frege's Logic, published by Walter de Gruyter in 1988.
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Alenka Zupančič
#9848
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher who along with Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek have in large measure been responsible for the popularity in North America of a politically infused Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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Gilbert Durand
#4383
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Gilbert Durand was a French academic known for his work on the imaginary, symbolic anthropology and mythology. According to Durand, Imagination and Reason can be complementary. He defended the status of the image, traditionally devalued in Western thought, particularly in French philosophy. He advocated a multidisciplinary approach.
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Albert Sabin
#1262
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Albert Bruce Sabin was a Polish-American medical researcher, best known for developing the oral polio vaccine, which has played a key role in nearly eradicating the disease. In 1969–72, he served as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
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Jeremy Waldron
#2648
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#587
Coretta Scott King
#145
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
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Jacques Bouveresse
#8442
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Jacques Bouveresse was a French philosopher who wrote on subjects including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics and analytical philosophy. Bouveresse was called "an avis rara among the better known French philosophers in his championing of critical standards of thought."
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George I. Mavrodes
#16614
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
George I. Mavrodes was an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Biography Mavrodes received his B.S. degree from Oregon State College, his B.D. degree from Western Baptist Theological Seminary, and his M.A. and PhD degrees in philosophy from the University of Michigan. He retired on March 31, 1995, being named professor emeritus of philosophy after thirty three years at the University of Michigan.
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John Rajchman
#10707
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Rajchman is a philosopher working in the areas of art history, architecture, and continental philosophy. Son of Jan A. Rajchman, a Polish-American computer scientist. John Rajchman is an Adjunct Professor and Director of Modern Art M.A. Programs in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and The Cooper Union, among others.
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Linda Zagzebski
#14337
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.
Go to Profile#592
Bogusław Wolniewicz
#11357
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Bogusław Wolniewicz was a Polish philosopher. He was a professor at University of Warsaw from 1963 to 1998. In scholarly circles, he is known as a translator and commentator of Ludwig Wittgenstein. From the 1990s, he became a publicist mostly affiliated with the Radio Maryja community. His controversial views were often regarded as anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.
Go to Profile#593
Héctor-Neri Castañeda
#14709
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Héctor-Neri Castañeda was a Guatemalan-American philosopher and founder of the journal Noûs. Biography Born in San Vicente, Zacapa, Guatemala, he emigrated to the United States in 1948 and studied under Wilfrid Sellars at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a B.A. in 1950 and M.A. in 1952. Castañeda received his Ph.D. in June 1954 from the University of Minnesota for his dissertation The Logical Structure of Moral Reasoning. Sellars served as his doctoral advisor. He studied at Oxford University from 1955–1956, after which he once again returned to the U.S. to take a sabbatical-replacement position in philosophy at Duke University.
Go to Profile#594
Mother Teresa
#172
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu MC , better known as Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun and the founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, at the age of 18 she moved to Ireland and later to India, where she lived most of her life. On 4 September 2016, she was canonised by the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The anniversary of her death, 5 September, is her feast day.
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J. P. Moreland
#5428
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Porter Moreland , better known as J. P. Moreland, is an American philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
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Mike Alder
#7276
Overall Influence
Michael D. Alder is an Australian mathematician, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. Alder is known for his popular writing, such as sardonic articles about the lack of basic arithmetic skills in young adults.
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Errol Harris
#12259
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Errol Eustace Harris , sometimes cited as E. E. Harris, was a South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.
Go to Profile#598
James Hughes
#4338
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
James J. Hughes is an American sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at UMass Boston. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future and is currently writing a book about moral bioenhancement tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnology to Become Better People.
Go to Profile#599
Paola Cavalieri
#7546
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paola Cavalieri is an Italian philosopher, most known for her work arguing for extension of human rights to the other great apes and more broadly, "to mammals and birds, and probably vertebrates in general". In addition to her books, she was the editor of Etica & Animali, a quarterly international philosophy journal that published nine volumes from 1988 to 1998.
Go to Profile#600
Robert B. Pippin
#10578
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Buford Pippin is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.
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