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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#6101

Neil R. Powe

#90352

Overall Influence

Neil R. Powe is an American professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and the chief of medicine at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Previously he was professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research has mainly related to kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and health disparities.

#6102

Johann Philipp Siebenkees

1759 - 1796 (37 years)

Johann Philipp Siebenkees was a German philosopher. Siebenkees studied theology, philosophy, and philology at the Protestant University of Altdorf. In 1791 he became associate professor of philosophy there, and a full professor of languages in 1795. He also taught archaeology. It has been suggested that he was responsible for the invention of the iron maiden during this period. However, the oldest citation for it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Johann Georg Keyssler's Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain - 1st edition, 1756–1757. The quote is v...

#6103

Correa Moylan Walsh

1862 - 1936 (74 years)

Correa Moylan Walsh was an American author. He was an early expert in the field of index numbers. A polymath, he wrote on a wide range of topics: from mathematics, economics, and statistics, on the one hand to philosophy, political science, literature, and philosophy of history, on the other .

#6104

Rudi Schmid

#54827

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Rudi Schmid was a Swiss-born American medical researcher specializing in hepatology. Among his contributions to biomedical science, Schmid led a team to discover heme oxygenase. Schmid was born on 2 May 1922 to physician parents. He was born and raised in Glarus, which inspired his interest in mountain climbing. Schmid became a skilled alpinist and skier. Schmid was a member of the Swiss national ski team from 1941 to 1945, and led the Academic Alpine Club while studying at the University of Zurich. In 1946, while still at university, Schmid became one of the first climbers to ascend Mont Bla...

#6105

Sonja Smets

#56961

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sonja Smets is a Belgian and Dutch logician and epistemologist known for her work in belief revision and quantum logic. She is Professor of Logic and Epistemology at the University of Amsterdam, where she was the director of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and is affiliated with both the Faculty of Science and the Department of Philosophy. She also holds a visiting professor position at the University of Bergen in Norway.

#6106

Mario Rizzetto

#76825

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Mario Rizzetto is an Italian virologist who in 1977 first reported the Hepatitis D virus as a nuclear antigen in patients infected with HBV who had severe liver disease. He graduated in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Padua in 1969. He was awarded the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine in 1985, the Robert Koch Prize in 1987, the William Beaumont Prize of the American Gastroenterological Association in 1988, and the Hans Popper Award in 1992.

#6107

Joseph Erlanger

Joseph Erlanger

1874 - 1965 (91 years)

Joseph Erlanger was an American physiologist who is best known for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber and established the relationship between action potential velocity and fiber diameter. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these achievements.

#6108

Barbara Noske

#68106

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Barbara Miriam Noske is a Dutch cultural anthropologist and philosopher. She introduced the concept animal–industrial complex in her 1989 book Humans and Other Animals. Academic career Noske holds a MA in socio-cultural anthropology and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. In the 1990s, Noske taught environmental ethics, ecology and ecofeminism at York University in Toronto while a research fellow in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. She then worked as a research fellow at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney.

#6109

L. P. Jacks

1860 - 1955 (95 years)

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks , abbreviated L. P. Jacks, was an English educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister who rose to prominence in the period from World War I to World War II. Early life Jacks was born on 9 October 1860 in Nottingham. In 1882, he enrolled in Manchester New College . After graduating with a M.A. in 1886, he spent a year at Harvard University, where he studied with the philosopher Josiah Royce. In 1887, he became assistant minister to Stopford Brooke in his chapel in Bloomsbury, London. He served as assistant minister for a year, and then accepted a position as Unitarian...

#6110

John Forrest Goodwin

#99162

Overall Influence

#6111

Aman U. Buzdar

#99171

Overall Influence

#6112

Leonhart Fuchs

1501 - 1566 (65 years)

Leonhart Fuchs , sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs and cited in Latin as Leonhartus Fuchsius, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings had been used in other herbal books, Fuchs' book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plan...

#6113

Thomas A. Jr Medsger

#99188

Overall Influence

#6114

Nathan Birnbaum

Nathan Birnbaum

1864 - 1937 (73 years)

Nathan Birnbaum was an Austrian writer and journalist, Jewish thinker and nationalist. His life had three main phases, representing a progression in his thinking: a Zionist phase ; a Jewish cultural autonomy phase which included the promotion of the Yiddish language; and religious phase when he turned to Orthodox Judaism and became staunchly anti-Zionist.

#6115

Sébastien Basson

1573 - Present (453 years)

Sébastien Basson, Latinized as Sebastianus Basso, was a French physician and natural philosopher of the beginning of the seventeenth century. He was an early theorist of a matter theory based on both atoms and compounds. His natural philosophy draws on several currents of thought, including Italian Renaissance naturalism, alchemy and Calvinist theology. Basson was an atomist, who, independently from Isaac Beeckman, formed the concept of "molecule".

#6116

Hallvard Lillehammer

#84738

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Hallvard Lillehammer is a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research relates to "the interpretation and criticism of basic ideas in contemporary moral and political thought, including reason, objectivity, impartiality, autonomy, and detachment." He formerly taught at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of King's College from 2000 to 2009 and a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College from 2010 to 2013. He was educated at University College London and Peterhouse, Cambridge. Of Norwegian, German and Swedish descent, Li...

#6117

Roland Pattillo

#39019

Overall Influence

Roland A. Pattillo was an American medical doctor and researcher, who was noted for his involvement with the HeLa line of cells and his connection to the family of Henrietta Lacks, from whom the cells were cultured.

#6118

David J. Burke

#99206

Overall Influence

#6119

Heather Douglas

#87363

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Heather Douglas is a philosopher of science best known for her work on the role of values in science, science policy, the importance of science for policymaking, and the history of philosophy of science. Douglas is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She formerly held the Waterloo Chair in Science and Society at the University of Waterloo, and taught at University of Pittsburgh, University of Tennessee, and University of Puget Sound. She is the author of Science, Policy, and the Value Free Ideal, an influential book on the way that values do and s...

#6120

Giora G. Z. Feuerstein

#99227

Overall Influence

#6121

Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Takiyettin Mengusoglu was a Turkish philosopher. Mengusoglu was born in Malatya, Turkey. After finishing high school, he went to Germany and became a student of Nicolai Hartmann. He was known as Takiyettin Temuralp at that time and published Über die grenzen der erkennbarkeit bei Husserl und Scheler in German. He is the author of the university level textbook Felsefeye Giriş .

#6122

Bruce Wilshire

#88354

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Bruce W. Wilshire was an American philosopher who taught in the philosophy department at Rutgers University, from which he retired as Professor Emeritus in 2009. Beginning as a specialist in William James, he became known for his work on philosophy and theater, his criticisms of analytic philosophy, and his interest in Native American philosophy.

#6123

Alan Thomas

#74184

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Alan Thomas is a British philosopher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. He is best known for his works on ethics and political philosophy. Career Thomas was educated at the Graig Comprehensive School, Llanelli, before undergraduate study at King's College, Cambridge. Following a year at Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar, Thomas returned to Oxford University to complete his doctorate under the supervision of Bernard Williams. Thomas began his career at King's College, London before taking up a lectureship at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Thomas became a pr...

#6124

David Favrholdt

#63652

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

David Favrholdt was a Danish philosopher, educated with M.A.ss in psychology and philosophy and later Dr. Phil. from Copenhagen University. He is one of few Danes to be included in the International Who's Who.

#6125

Tito Fojo

#99297

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

#6126

J. Peter Burgess

J. Peter Burgess

#49193

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

J. Peter Burgess is a philosopher and political scientist. He is Professor and Director of the Chair of Geopolitics of Risk at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. He is series editor of the Routledge New Security Studies collection. His research and writing concern the meeting place between science, culture and politics in particular in Europe, focusing most recently on value theory and digital technologies. He has published 18 books and over 100 articles in the fields of philosophy, political science, gender studies, cultural history, security studies and cultural theory. He has contributed to research and educational policy in Norway, France, Poland and the European Commission.

#6127

Claude J. M. Lenfant

#99309

Overall Influence

#6128

Donald Watson Goodwin

#99319

Overall Influence

#6129

Robert Hariman

#36570

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Hariman is an American scholar of rhetoric and public culture. He received his BA from Macalester College in 1973, and received his MA in 1975 and PhD in 1979 from the University of Minnesota. He was a member of the faculty at Drake University from 1979 to 2004, and since then has been a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He also served as department chair at both institutions.

#6130

Peter Mark Roget

Peter Mark Roget

1779 - 1869 (90 years)

Peter Mark Roget was a British physician, natural theologian, lexicographer, and founding secretary of The Portico Library. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a classified collection of related words. He also read a paper to the Royal Society about a peculiar optical illusion in 1824, which is often regarded as the origin of the persistence of vision theory that was later commonly used to explain apparent motion in film and animation.

#6131

Erin Manning

#82005

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Erin Manning is a Canadian cultural theorist and political philosopher as well as a practicing artist in the areas of dance, fabric design, and interactive installation. Manning's research spans the fields of art, political theory, and philosophy. She received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from University of Hawaii in 2000. She currently teaches in the Concordia University Fine Arts Faculty.

#6132

Douglas K. Owens

#99374

Overall Influence

#6133

Peter J. Ratcliffe

Peter J. Ratcliffe

#12028

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Sir Peter John Ratcliffe, FRS, FMedSci is a British Nobel Laureate physician-scientist who is trained as a nephrologist. He was a practising clinician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2016. He has been a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford since 2004. In 2016 he became Clinical Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute, retaining a position at Oxford as a member of the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research and director of the Target Discovery ...

#6134

Phillip Anson Low

#99389

Overall Influence

#6135

Melville Y. Stewart

#87430

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Melville Y. Stewart was an American Philosopher and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Bethel University, Minnesota. Bibliography The Greater-Good Defence, An Essay on the Rationality of Faith, author, London:Macmillan//New York: St. Martin's, 1993. .Проблемы Христианской Философии , co-editor with Dan Clendenin, Moscow: Progress Academy Press, 1994. .Philosophy of Religion, An Anthology of Contemporary Views, editor, in the Jones and Bartlett Series in Philosophy, second printing, Wadsworth Press, 1996. .《当代西方宗教哲学》, , Melville Y. Stewart, editor, Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005, .《东西方宗教伦理及其他》, co-editor with Zhang Zhigang, Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, 1997.

#6136

Thomé H. Fang

1899 - 1977 (78 years)

Thomé H. Fang was a Chinese philosopher. He was described by Charles A. Moore as the "greatest philosopher of China" and by Vincent Shen as "one of the most creative contemporary Chinese philosophers."

#6137

Philip Clayton

#33188

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Philip Clayton is an American philosopher of religion and philosopher of science. His work focuses on the intersection of science, ethics, and society. He currently holds the Ingraham Chair at Claremont School of Theology and serves as an affiliated faculty member at Claremont Graduate University. Clayton specializes in the philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of religion, as well as in comparative theology.

#6138

John David

#99462

Overall Influence

John David is an American physician that is currently the Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Tropical Public Health, Emeritus at Harvard School of Public Health. David earned his medical degree at the University of Chicago.

#6139

Joseph Milic‐emili

#99468

Overall Influence

#6140

Richard W. Light

#99490

Overall Influence

#6141

Willy Ley

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Willy Otto Oskar Ley was a German and American science writer and proponent of cryptozoology. The crater Ley on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor. Early life and Berlin years Willy Otto Oskar Ley was the son of Julius Otto Ley, a traveling merchant, and Frida May, the daughter of a Lutheran sexton. Ley grew up in his native Berlin during the First World War under the supervision of two aunts. When war erupted his father was in Great Britain. Consequently, he spent the remainder of the war at a detention camp on the Isle of Man. Meanwhile, his mother worked as milliner in a di...

#6142

Desmond Clarke

#71260

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Desmond M. Clarke was an Irish author and professor of philosophy at University College Cork . His research interests include history of philosophy and theories of science, with a specific interest in the writings of René Descartes, as well as contemporary church/state relations, human rights, and nationalism.

#6143

Patrick Francis Healy

Patrick Francis Healy

1834 - 1910 (76 years)

Patrick Francis Healy was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was an influential president of Georgetown University, becoming known as its "second founder". The university's flagship building, Healy Hall, bears his name. Though he considered himself and was largely accepted as White, Healy was posthumously recognized as the first Black American to become a Jesuit, to earn a PhD, and to become the president of a predominantly White university.

#6144

David M. Levy

#37150

Overall Influence

David Levy is an American computer scientist and professor at University of Washington Information School. He is known for his research, writing, and teaching on the prevention of information overload.

#6145

David Baumgardt

1890 - 1963 (73 years)

David Baumgardt was an early 20th-century German Jewish philosopher in the field of philosophical history. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Early life and education Baumgardt was born in Erfurt, German Empire. As a young man he studied at the universities of Freiburg, Vienna, Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin, and served in the military during World War I.

#6146

Erik Ahlman

1892 - 1952 (60 years)

Erik Gustav Ahlman was a Finnish philosopher and linguist. Ahlman initiated his academic career as a classical philologist. Ahlman was born in Turku. He worked as a theoretical science education professor at the Jyväskylä College of Education from 1935 to 1948 and then Professor of Moral Philosophy of the University of Helsinki from 1948–1952. His most important works are Arvojen ja välineiden maailma , Kulttuurin perustekijöitä and Ihmisen probleemi .

#6147

Joel D. Cooper

#15560

Overall Influence

Joel D. Cooper, F.A.C.S., a thoracic surgeon, is known for having completed the first successful lung transplant and the first successful double lung transplant. Career Cooper graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1964, completed his fellowship, and then obtained his first faculty appointment in 1972 at the University of Toronto. He performed the world's first successful lung transplant on pulmonary fibrosis patient Tom Hall on November 7, 1983 at Toronto General Hospital. He performed the world's first successful double lung transplant on emphysema patient Ann Harrison in 1986 at the same hospital.

#6148

Peter A. McCullough

#10476

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Peter Andrew McCullough is an American cardiologist. He was vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center and a professor at Texas A&M University. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McCullough has promoted misinformation about COVID-19, its treatments, and mRNA vaccines.

#6149

Abdennour Bidar

Abdennour Bidar

#45807

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Abdennour Bidar is a French writer and philosopher of Islamic culture. Author of several books and many articles, he came to public attention in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, when he wrote an "Open Letter to the Muslim World".

#6150

Ken Caldeira

#18144

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Kenneth Caldeira is an American atmospheric scientist. His areas of research include ocean acidification, climate effects of trees, intentional climate modification, interactions in the global carbon cycle/climate system, and sustainable energy.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions