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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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#651

Jose Maria Sison

#1814

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Jose Maria Canlas Sison , also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer, poet and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy – which would be known as national democracy. He applied the theory of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to the history and current circumstances of the Philippines.

#652

Geoffrey Warnock

#10418

Overall Influence

1923 - 1995 (72 years)

Sir Geoffrey James Warnock was an English philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood , he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock. Life Warnock was born at Neville House, Chapel Allerton, Leeds, West Yorkshire, to James Warnock , OBE, a general practitioner from Northern Ireland who had been a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Kathleen . The Warnocks later lived at Grade II-listed Pull Croft, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire .

#653

Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Menachem Mendel Schneerson

#968

Overall Influence

1902 - 1994 (92 years)

Menachem Mendel Schneerson , known to adherents of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as the Lubavitcher Rebbe or simply the Rebbe, was an Orthodox rabbi and the most recent Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.

#654

John Wisdom

#13045

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom , usually cited as John Wisdom, was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician. He was influenced by G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work.

#655

Jean Bethke Elshtain

#4489

Overall Influence

1941 - 2013 (72 years)

Jean Paulette Bethke Elshtain was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School with a joint appointment in the department of political science.

#656

McKenzie Wark

#6239

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.

#657

Alastair Norcross

#14562

Overall Influence

Alastair Norcross is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy. He is a defender of utilitarianism.

#658

Michel Onfray

#5226

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Michel Onfray is a French writer and philosopher with a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist worldview. A highly-prolific author on philosophy, he has written over 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism. He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traité d'athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique , Politique du rebelle: traité de résistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzchéen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which...

#659

Judah Folkman

#4085

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Moses Judah Folkman was an American biologist and pediatric surgeon best known for his research on tumor angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor attracts blood vessels to nourish itself and sustain its existence. He founded the field of angiogenesis research, which has led to the discovery of a number of therapies based on inhibiting or stimulating neovascularization.

#660

David Sedley

#12183

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David Neil Sedley FBA is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University. Early life Sedley was educated at Trinity College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1969. He was awarded a PhD in 1974 by University College London for a text, translation and commentary on Book XXVIII of Epicurus' On Nature.

#661

Keith Campbell

#16690

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Keith Campbell is an Australian philosopher working in metaphysics. Biography With D. M. Armstrong, Campbell is one of the founders of so-called Australian materialism and, within it, of a variety of trope theory. He also has a distinctive view of concrete and abstract objects: the former can exist by themselves, and the latter are incapable of independent existence.

#662

Dorothy Emmet

#16025

Overall Influence

1904 - 2000 (96 years)

Dorothy Mary Emmet was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years. With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers. She was the doctoral advisor of Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Austin Markus. Emmet was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, where she took first-class honours in 1927.

#663

Adam Schaff

#13307

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

Adam Schaff was a Polish Marxist philosopher. Life Of Jewish origin, Schaff was born in Lemberg into a lawyer's family. Schaff studied economics at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques et Economiques in Paris, and philosophy in Poland, specializing in epistemology. In 1945 he received a philosophy degree at Moscow University, and in 1948 he returned to Warsaw University. He was considered the official ideologue of the Polish United Workers' Party, especially during its Stalinist period.

#664

Tomonobu Imamichi

Tomonobu Imamichi

#14555

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Tomonobu Imamichi was a Japanese philosopher who studied Chinese philosophy. Life Imamichi taught in Europe as well as in Japan . Beginning in 1979 he was the president of the Centre International pour l'Étude Comparée de Philosophie et d'Esthétique and after 1997 of the International Institute of Philosophy. In 1976 he founded the journal Aesthetics.

#665

Michael Devitt

#13637

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Michael Devitt is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City. His primary interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His current work involves the philosophy of linguistics, foundational issues in semantics, the semantics of definite descriptions and demonstratives, semantic externalism, and scientific realism.

#666

Phillip Blond

#5657

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Phillip Blond is an English political philosopher, Anglican theologian, and director of the ResPublica think tank. Early life Born in Liverpool and educated at Pensby High School for Boys, Blond went on to study philosophy and politics at the University of Hull, continental philosophy at the University of Warwick, and theology at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge. At Peterhouse, he was a student of John Milbank, founder of the radical orthodoxy theological movement and a noted critic of liberalism, philosophically understood. Blond's first work, Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philos...

#667

Gideon Rosen

#14054

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Gideon Rosen is an American philosopher. He is a Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, and ethics. Education and career Rosen graduated from Columbia University in 1984 and obtained his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1992, under the supervision of Paul Benacerraf. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for several years before joining the Princeton faculty in 1993. He has served as chair of Princeton's Council of the Humanities and director of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows.

#668

Matti Häyry

#11873

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Matti Häyry is Professor of Philosophy at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. In 2004-2013, he was Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law at the University of Manchester in England, and before that he held professorships in philosophy and moral philosophy at the universities of Central Lancashire and Kuopio.

#669

James F. Conant

#9587

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James Ferguson Conant is an American philosopher at the University of Chicago who has written extensively on topics in philosophy of language, ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is perhaps best known for his writings on Wittgenstein, and his association with the New Wittgenstein school of Wittgenstein interpretation initiated by Cora Diamond.

#670

George Emil Palade

George Emil Palade

#707

Overall Influence

1912 - 2008 (96 years)

George Emil Palade was a Romanian-American cell biologist. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine along with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology, the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum – which he first described in 1955.

#671

Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Joseph B. Soloveitchik

#3675

Overall Influence

1903 - 1993 (90 years)

Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was a major American Orthodox rabbi, Talmudist, and modern Jewish philosopher. He was a scion of the Lithuanian Jewish Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. As a rosh yeshiva of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York City, The Rav, as he was known, ordained close to 2,000 rabbis over the course of almost half a century. Rabbinic literature sometimes refers to him as הגרי"ד, short for "The great Rabbi Yosef Dov".

#672

Dan Zahavi

#8632

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Dan Zahavi is a Danish philosopher. He is currently a professor of philosophy at University of Copenhagen. Biography Dan Zahavi was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Israeli father and a Danish mother. He initially studied phenomenology at the University of Copenhagen. He obtained his PhD in 1994 from the Husserl Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium, with Rudolf Bernet as his doctoral supervisor. In 1999 he defended his Danish Disputats at the University of Copenhagen. In 2002, at the age of 34, he became Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen.

#673

Gerd B. Achenbach

#5831

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Gerd B. Achenbach is a German philosopher. He is widely noted for founding the world's first philosophical practice in 1981, a contemporary movement in practical philosophy. He received a doctorate in philosophy under Odo Marquard in 1981.

#674

Leslie Green

#4375

Overall Influence

1918 - Present (106 years)

Leslie John Green is a Scottish-Canadian legal scholar specialising in jurisprudence. He is Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Queen's University, Kingston. A legal positivist, his research also focuses on political philosophy and constitutional theory.

#675

Alan Ryan

#4859

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Alan James Ryan is a British philosopher. He was Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford. He was also Warden of New College, Oxford, from 1996 to 2009. He retired as Professor Emeritus in September 2015 and lives in Summertown, Oxford.

#676

Jacob M. Appel

#1397

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Jacob M. Appel is an American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. He is the director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he practices emergency psychiatry at the adjoining Mount Sinai Health System. Appel is the subject of the...

#677

Joseph Runzo

#17230

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Joseph Runzo is an American professor publishing mainly in the area of a global philosophy of religion. He is currently Life Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. Bibliography BibliographyGlobal Philosophy of Religion: A Short Introduction. Tsinghua University Distinguished Translation Series in Philosophy, Forthcoming 2007.Human Rights and Responsibilities: The Contribution of the World Religions. Co-editor with Nancy M. Martin. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, The Library of Global Ethics and Religion, Fall 2003. 364 pp.Ethics in the World Religions. Co-editor with Nancy M. Martin. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, The Library of Global Ethics and Religion, 2001.

#678

Susan Moller Okin

#7988

Overall Influence

1946 - 2004 (58 years)

Susan Moller Okin was a liberal feminist political philosopher and author. Life Okin was born in 1946 in Auckland, New Zealand. She attended Remuera Primary School and Remuera Intermediate and Epsom Girls' Grammar School, where she was Dux in 1963.

#679

John A. Leslie

#5967

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John Andrew Leslie is a Canadian philosopher and writer. Biography Leslie was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, earning his B.A. in English Literature in 1962 and his M.Litt. in Classics in 1968. He is currently Professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.

#680

Arthur F. Holmes

#7243

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Arthur Frank Holmes was an English philosopher who served as Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College in Illinois, US from 1951 to 1994. He built the philosophy department at Wheaton where he taught, wrote about the philosophy of Christian education, and participated in the creation of the Society of Christian Philosophers. Wheaton College President Philip Ryken said "It would be hard to think of anyone who has had a greater impact on Christian higher education than Arthur Holmes." Holmes died in Wheaton, Illinois, on October 8, 2011, at age 87.

#681

Steven Nadler

#13304

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Steven M. Nadler is an American academic and philosopher specializing in early modern philosophy. He is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

#682

Lou Marinoff

#4997

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lou Marinoff is a Canadian-born academic, author, and Commonwealth Scholar. He is Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies at The City College of New York and founding President of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association.

#683

John Perry

#6290

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John Richard Perry is a professor at Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside. He has made significant contributions to philosophy in the fields of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics , reflexivity, indexicality, personal identity, and self-knowledge.

#684

Jesús Padilla Gálvez

Jesús Padilla Gálvez

#10997

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jesús Padilla Gálvez is a philosopher who worked primarily in philosophy of language, logic, and the history of sciences. Professional biography Jesús Padilla Gálvez studied Philosophy, History and Mathematics at the University of Cologne and was awarded the M.A. in 1983 and a Dr. phil. in Philosophy in 1988. He was Research Assistant at the University of Murcia and later held the post of Associate Professor for Logic and Philosophy of Language at the University of León . From 1994 to 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz . Since 1999 he has been Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo .

#685

Gisela Striker

#17371

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gisela Striker is a German classical scholar. She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Classics at Harvard University and a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Education and career Striker was born and educated in Germany, earning her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Günther Patzig in 1969 and her Habilitation, also from Göttingen in 1978. She taught philosophy at Göttingen from 1971–1986, and then was professor of philosophy at Columbia University from 1986–1989, and then at Harvard from 1989–1997. In 1997, she became the sixt...

#686

Charles Parsons

#11076

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Charles Dacre Parsons is an American philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of mathematics and the study of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University.

#687

Bradley Dowden

#12004

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Bradley Harris Dowden is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the California State University, Sacramento. Work He is a general editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dowden received his MS in physics from Ohio State University and his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. His main interests are metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, logic, time, paradox and infinity.

#688

Esa Saarinen

#9862

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Esa Jouni Olavi Saarinen is a Finnish philosopher who was a professor of applied philosophy at Aalto University and co-director of the Systems Intelligence Research Group. until his retirement in 2021.

#689

Norman Kretzmann

#17045

Overall Influence

1928 - 1998 (70 years)

Norman J. Kretzmann was a professor of philosophy at Cornell University who specialised in the history of medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion. Biography Kretzmann joined Cornell's Department of Philosophy in 1966. His work as a teacher and scholar was recognized in 1970, when he was appointed Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, and in 1977 when he was elected a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy by the University Board of Trustees. In 1992, he received a Graduate Teaching Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Deans for his excellence and creativity in the teaching of graduate students.

#690

J. Baird Callicott

J. Baird Callicott

#12115

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

J. Baird Callicott is an American philosopher whose work has been at the forefront of the new field of environmental philosophy and ethics. He is a University Distinguished Research Professor and a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies and the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. Callicott held the position of Professor of Philosophy and Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point from 1969 to 1995, where he taught the world's first course in environmental ethics in 1971. From 1994 to 2000, he served as vice president then president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics.

#691

Alexander R. Galloway

#12117

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Alexander R. Galloway is an author and professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He has a bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University in 2001. Galloway is known for his writings on philosophy, media theory, contemporary art, film, and video games.

#692

Robert C. Koons

#17824

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Robert Charles Koons is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas , noted for his contribution to metaphysics and philosophical logic. Koons has also advocated for academic freedom and courses on Western civilization.

#693

Bert Vogelstein

Bert Vogelstein

#5661

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Bert Vogelstein is director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pioneer in the field of cancer genomics, his studies on colorectal cancers revealed that they result from the sequential accumulation of mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. These studies now form the paradigm for modern cancer research and provided the basis for the notion of the somatic evolution of cancer.

#694

Ralph Johnson

#9722

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ralph Henry Johnson is a Canadian American philosopher, born in Detroit, Michigan. Johnson has been credited as one of the founding members of the informal logic movement in North America, along with J. Anthony Blair who co-published one of the movement's most influential texts, Logical Self-Defense, with Johnson. Alongside its founder, Blair, Johnson co-directed the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor. As Johnson and Blair write in the preface to the newest edition of Logical Self-Defense on the influential nature of the text:

#695

Daniel Bonevac

#22037

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Daniel Bonevac is an American philosopher born in Pittsburgh. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has degrees in philosophy from Haverford College, and the University of Pittsburgh. His areas of interest are metaphysics, philosophical logic, ethics, and Eastern philosophy. In autumn 2016, Bonevac joined 145 other scholars and writers in declaring support for Donald Trump for president. He has posted hundreds of philosophy videos on his YouTube channel.

#696

Giorgi Japaridze

#13247

Overall Influence

Giorgi Japaridze is a Georgian-American researcher in logic and theoretical computer science. He currently holds the title of Full Professor at the Computing Sciences Department of Villanova University. Japaridze is best known for his invention of computability logic, cirquent calculus, and Japaridze's polymodal logic.

#697

Fred Sommers

#16872

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Frederic Tamler Sommers , better known as Fred Sommers, was an American philosopher who, after an initial focus on ontology generally, turned his attention specifically to a revival of classical logic. He is the father of the philosopher Tamler Sommers.

#698

Byung-Chul Han

#6088

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there. Biography Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy at Korea University in Seoul before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. In 1994 he received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Stimmung, or mood, in Martin Heidegger.

#699

David Makinson

#13647

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Clement Makinson , is an Australian mathematical logician living in London, England. Career Makinson began his studies at Sydney University in 1958 and was an associate of the Libertarian Society and Sydney Push. He is a Visiting Professor in the London School of Economics, University of London, and an associate member of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée , École Polytechnique, Paris. He has held professorial rank positions in King's College London, University of London and in the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. From 1980 till 2001 he worked for UNESCO, Paris.

#700

Naomi Klein

#365

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofeminism, organized labour, leftism and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. As of 2021 she is Associate Professor, and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, co-directing a Centre for Climate Justice.

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