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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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#601

Peter Barnes

#18535

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Sir Peter John Barnes, FRCP, FCCP, FMedSci, FRS is a British respiratory scientist and clinician, a specialist in the mechanisms and treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease . He was Margaret Turner-Warwick Professor of Thoracic Medicine at the National Heart & Lung Institute, previous head of respiratory medicine at Imperial College and honorary consultant physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital London. He is one of the most highly cited scientists in the world

#602

Karl Raimund Sir Popper

#19238

Overall Influence

#603

Stanisław Lem

#899

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Stanisław Herman Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.

#604

Charles W. Mills

Charles W. Mills

#7135

Overall Influence

1951 - 2021 (70 years)

#605

Kan'ichi Kuroda

#9981

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Kan'ichi Kuroda was a self-taught Japanese political philosopher and social theorist, associated with Trotskyism, who was deeply involved in far-left political movements. Nearly blind, Kuroda was affectionately nicknamed "The Blind Prophet" and "KuroKan" by his followers.

#606

Susan Neiman

#11521

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

#607

Joshua Knobe

#7712

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

#608

Justin Clemens

#8720

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet. Background Clemens studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining his PhD on "Institution, aesthetics, nihilism : the Romanticism of contemporary theory" in 1999.

#609

Costas Douzinas

#4213

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Costas Douzinas is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, the President of the Nikos Poulantzas Institute and a former politician.

#610

Michael Slote

#9462

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael A. Slote is a professor of ethics at the University of Miami and an author of a number of books. He was previously professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, and at Trinity College Dublin. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

#611

Samuel Weber

#6190

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Samuel M. Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, as well as a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Weber began PhD studies at Yale University. Partly through correspondence with Herbert Marcuse he became interested in emerging German and French theoretical debates. He later transferred to Cornell University where he wrote a dissertation under the tutelage of Paul de Man. Weber co-translated the first English-language collection of essays by German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Since that time he has held professorships ...

#612

T. K. Seung

#7896

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

T. K. Seung was a Korean American philosopher and literary critic. His academic interests cut across diverse philosophical and literary subjects, including ethics, political philosophy, Continental philosophy, cultural hermeneutics, and literary criticism.

#613

Benson Mates

#11668

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Benson Mates was an American philosopher, noted for his work in logic, the history of philosophy, and skepticism. Mates studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Oregon, Cornell University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Some of his teachers included J. Barkley Rosser, Harold Cherniss, and Alfred Tarski. From 1948 until his retirement in 1989, he was a professor of philosophy at Berkeley. He remained Professor Emeritus of philosophy at University of California at Berkeley until his death.

#614

James Fieser

#13040

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James Fieser is professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He received his B.A. from Berea College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Purdue University. He is founder and general editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is author, coauthor or editor of more than ten text books. Fieser is also known for being the guitarist in the hit band Oxford Street Band.

#615

Tim Maudlin

#7768

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Tim William Eric Maudlin is an American philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic. Education and career Maudlin graduated from Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C. Later he studied physics and philosophy at Yale University, and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986. He taught for more than two decades at Rutgers University before joining the Department of Philosophy at New York University in 2010.

#616

Paul Cliteur

#5649

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Paul Bernard Cliteur is a Dutch professor of jurisprudence at Leiden University, as well as a politician, philosopher, writer, publicist and columnist. He is known for his conservative perspective, his atheism, his republicanism, and his dislike of Islam. He is a member of De Vrije Gedachte. Since 2015, Cliteur is a member of the Dutch political party Forum voor Democratie, where he is chairman of the advisory board and the party's official think tank. In 2019 he was elected to be parliamentary group leader for Forum voor Democratie in the Dutch Senate.

#617

Stephan Hartmann

Stephan Hartmann

#13279

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Stephan Hartmann is a German philosopher and Professor of Philosophy of Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, known for his contributions to formal epistemology. Biography Hartmann received his PhD from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany in 1995. He started his academic career at the University of Washington and the University of Pittsburgh. Back in Germany in 2002 at the University of Konstanz he headed the research group Philosophy, Probability and Modelling together with Luc Bovens.

#618

Theodore Drange

Theodore Drange

#14087

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Theodore "Ted" Michael Drange is a philosopher of religion and Professor Emeritus at West Virginia University, where he taught philosophy from 1966 to 2001. Life After graduating from Fort Hamilton High School, he received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1955 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1963, where he moved to after one year of graduate school at Yale.

#619

Julia Driver

#14327

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Julia Driver is professor of philosophy and holder of the Darrell K. Royal Chair in Ethics and American Society at the University of Texas, Austin. She is a specialist in moral philosophy. Education and career She received her Ph.D. in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1990 under the supervision of Susan R. Wolf. She received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.

#620

John W. N. Watkins

John W. N. Watkins

#9956

Overall Influence

1924 - 1999 (75 years)

John William Nevill Watkins was an English philosopher, a professor at the London School of Economics from 1966 until his retirement in 1989 and a prominent proponent of critical rationalism. Life In 1952, Watkins married Micky Roe .

#621

Louis Pojman

#14145

Overall Influence

1935 - 2005 (70 years)

Louis Paul Pojman was an American philosopher and professor, whose name is most recognized as the author of dozens of philosophy texts and anthologies, which continue to be used widely for educational purposes, and more than one-hundred papers, which he read at some sixty universities around the world. Pojman was known for his work in applied ethics and philosophy of religion.

#622

Thomas V. Morris

#11644

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Thomas V. Morris , is an American philosopher. He is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is a founder of the Morris Institute for Human Values, and author of several books. He is also a business and motivational speaker, applying philosophical themes and concepts to business and professional life.

#623

Jesús Mosterín

#5869

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Jesús Mosterín was a leading Spanish philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy. Biography He was born in Bilbao in 1941. He studied in Spain, Germany, and the USA. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Barcelona since 1983, he founded there an active Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science. Since 1996, he has been Research Professor at the National Research Council of Spain . He is a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and a member of several international academies. He ...

#624

Johan van Benthem

Johan van Benthem

#10405

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Johannes Franciscus Abraham Karel van Benthem is a University Professor of logic at the University of Amsterdam at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and professor of philosophy at Stanford University . He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 1996 and elected a Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.

#625

Costanzo Preve

#13805

Overall Influence

1943 - 2013 (70 years)

Costanzo Preve was an Italian philosopher and a political theoretician. Preve is widely considered one of the most important anti-capitalist European thinkers and a renowned expert in the history of Marxism. His thought is based on the Ancient Greek and idealistic tradition philosophy under the influence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. He is author of many essays and volumes about philosophical interpretation, communitarianism and universalism.

#626

Brian Davies

#14037

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Brian Evan Anthony Davies is a British philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and friar. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University , and author of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, now in its fourth English edition, which has been translated into five languages.

#627

Gajo Petrović

#14378

Overall Influence

1927 - 1993 (66 years)

Gajo Petrović was one of the main theorists in the Marxist humanist Praxis School in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He was the only one among the editors of the Praxis journal to stay in this position throughout the journal's publication. He is credited by Milan Kangrga to be the mastermind behind the Korčula Summer School, which was a meeting place for Marxists and other philosophers from the East and the West in the 1960s and 1970s.

#628

Richard Stanley Peters

#6015

Overall Influence

1919 - 2011 (92 years)

Richard Stanley Peters was an English philosopher. His work belongs mainly to the areas of political theory, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of education. Earlier life Peters was born in 1919 in Mussoorie, India. He spent his childhood with his grandmother in England. He was a pupil at Sidcot School, Winscombe, Somerset, 1933–1938. As a young man, his private tutor was Eric Blair . As a conscientious objector in the Second World War, he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit and with the Friends Relief Service in 1940–1944.

#629

Hajime Nakamura

Hajime Nakamura

#6841

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Hajime Nakamura was a Japanese Orientalist, Indologist, philosopher and academic of Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. Biography Nakamura was born in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, Japan. In 1943 he graduated from the Department of Literature at Tokyo Imperial University on a study on "The History of Early Vedanta Philosophy" under the supervision of Prof. Hakuju Ui. In 1943 he succeeded Prof. Ui and was appointed Associate Professor of Tokyo Imperial University.

#630

Terence Irwin

#12782

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Terence Henry Irwin FBA , usually cited as T. H. Irwin, is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics . He was the Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, from 2007 until 2017.

#631

Kojin Karatani

#4522

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Kōjin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic. Biography Karatani entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, where he joined the radical Marxist Communist League, better known as "The Bund," and participated in the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which he would later come to view as a formative political experience.

#632

Dov Gabbay

#7477

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Dov M. Gabbay is an Israeli logician. He is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Group of Logic, Language and Computation, Department of Computer Science, King's College London. Work Gabbay has authored over four hundred and fifty research papers and over thirty research monographs. He is editor of several international journals, and of many reference works and handbooks of logic, including the Handbook of Philosophical Logic , the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science] , and the Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming .

#633

Leonard Lawlor

#8819

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Leonard "Len" Lawlor is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy. Career Lawlor received his doctorate from SUNY Stony Brook in 1988 and taught at the University of Memphis from 1989–2008, where he held the position of Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy from 2004 to 2008 before joining the faculty at Penn State, as Sparks Professor of Philosophy. He is known for his writings on phenomenology and on the figures Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Jean Hippolyte.

#634

Prabhākara

#14435

Overall Influence

Prabhākara was an Indian philosopher-grammarian in the Mīmāṃsā tradition of Kerala. Probable date Hariswamin's commentary on Shatapatha Brahmana which dates to 638 CE discusses the doctrine of Prabhākara's followers. Prabhākara in his book Bṛhati quotes only Bhartṛhari and Bharavi . Thus his probable time can be assigned to the latter half of the 6th century.

#635

Shaun Gallagher

Shaun Gallagher

#5672

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

#636

Vittorio Hösle

#8891

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Vittorio Hösle is an Italian-born German philosopher. He has authored works including Hegels System , Moral und Politik , and Der philosophische Dialog . He has been in the United States since 1999, at the University of Notre Dame where he is the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters . Since 2008, he has also served as the founding Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

#637

Fred Rosner

#6756

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Fred Rosner is a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the director of the Department of Medicine at Queens Hospital Center. He is also the chairman of the Medical Ethics Committee of the State of New York. He is, moreover, an expert on Jewish medical ethics and on the medical writings of Moses Maimonides.

#638

Tom Rockmore

#12562

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Tom Rockmore is an American philosopher. Although he denies the usual distinction between philosophy and the history of philosophy, he has strong interests throughout the history of philosophy and defends a constructivist view of epistemology. The philosophers whom he has studied extensively are Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, and Heidegger. He received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1974 and his Habilitation à diriger des recherches from the Université de Poitiers in 1994. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University, as well as Distinguished Humanities Chair Pro...

#639

Shannon Vallor

#12756

Overall Influence

Shannon Vallor is an American philosopher of technology. She is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She was at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California where she was the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor of Philosophy at SCU.

#640

Walter J. Ong

#1668

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Walter Jackson Ong was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association.

#641

Shizuteru Ueda

#11281

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Shizuteru Ueda was a Japanese philosopher specialized in philosophy of religion, especially in philosophy of Buddhism and Zen. He was a professor at Kyoto University and considered a third generation member of Kyoto School .

#642

Alexander Pruss

#13914

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Alexander Robert Pruss is a Canadian philosopher and mathematician. He is currently a professor of philosophy and the co-director of graduate studies in philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

#643

Ali Akbar Rashad

Ali Akbar Rashad

#11116

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Ali Akbar Rashad is an Iranian philosopher and Islamic scholar who pioneered the Ibtina Theory, a theory for explaining the process and mechanism of "religious knowledge" formation. He is currently a professor at the Islamic Research Institute for Culture and Thought as well as a member of the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council . He is also the founder and chair of Imam Reza Islamic seminary. The has presented articles and delivered speeches at conferences and scientific and philosophical conventions and conferences in different countries including Germany, the United States, the United Arab...

#644

François Regnault

#6236

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

François Regnault is a French philosopher, playwright and dramaturg. Also a university instructor and teacher, Regnault was maître de conférences at Paris VIII before his retirement. Among his various writings he is the author, with Jean-Claude Milner, of the seminal Dire le vers and of Conférences d'esthétique lacanienne.

#645

Howard Caygill

#12980

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Howard Caygill is a British philosopher. He has held the position of Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Kingston University since 2011. Previously he had taught at University of East Anglia and Goldsmiths College, University of London.

#646

Robert Crumb

#641

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Dennis Crumb is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.

#647

Rubem Alves

#4310

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Rubem Azevedo Alves was a Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, writer and psychoanalyst. Alves was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. Life Alves was born on 15 September 1933, in Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He obtained his Bachelor of Theology degree at the Presbyterian Seminary in Campinas, Brazil, in 1957. He went on to obtain a Master of Theology from the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, United States, in 1964. After completing this degree, Alves returned to Brazil amidst a US-sponsored military coup against the democratically elected Brazilian government.

#648

Larry Laudan

#3831

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Larry Laudan was an American philosopher of science and epistemologist. He strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he defended a view of science as a privileged and progressive institution against popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as an important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs".

#649

Carl Ginet

#12068

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Carl Ginet is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. His work is primarily in action theory, moral responsibility, free will, and epistemology. Ginet received his BA from Occidental College in 1954, and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1960 with a dissertation titled "Reasons, Causes, and Free Will". He joined the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell in 1971 and retired in 1999. Before Cornell, Ginet was a faculty member of various universities, including Ohio State University, University of Michigan, and University of Rochester.

#650

Tara Smith

#12079

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Tara A. Smith is an American philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy, the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism, and the Anthem Foundation Fellow for the Study of Objectivism at the University of Texas at Austin.

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