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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.

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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#6651

Joaquim Carreras i Artau

1894 - 1968 (74 years)

Joaquim Carreras i Artau was a Catalan philosopher. He began his studies of scholastic philosophy at the Girona Seminary, where he stayed for ten years. Later he graduated from the University of Barcelona with BAs in Law and Philosophy. The thesis Ensayo sobre el voluntarismo de J. Duns Scoto gave him a Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Madrid. He taught both at secondary schools and at the University of Barcelona from 1939 to 1964, first as a teaching assistant and, for the last twelve years, as professor.

#6652

Norbert M. Samuelson

#50389

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Norbert Max Samuelson was a scholar of Jewish philosophy. He was Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, having held the Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies there. He wrote 13 books and over 200 articles, with research interests in Jewish philosophy, philosophy and religion, philosophy and science, 20th-century philosophy , history of Western philosophy, and Jewish Aristotelians . He also lectured at university-level conferences around the world.

#6653

Hans Joachim Moser

1889 - 1967 (78 years)

Hans Joachim Moser was a German musicologist, composer and singer. Moser was the son of the music-professor Andreas Moser , a pupil and important early biographer of Joseph Joachim. He studied the History of Music , German philology and Philosophy in Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig, and studied violin with his father. With the work Musical Confederations in the German Middle Ages he obtained his doctorate in 1910 at Rostock.

#6654

Terpsion

450 BC - Present (2476 years)

Terpsion of Megara is a speaker in Plato's dialogues. In the frame story which serves as the prologue to Plato's Theaetetus, Terpsion asks his friend Euclid of Megara to recount the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus. Terpsion also appears in the Phaedo as one of the people who was present at the death of Socrates. Debra Nails states that nothing else reliable can be determined about Terpsion, and all later sources that mention him, such as Plutarch and the pseudonymous Socratic letters, are derived from the account in Plato's dialogues.

#6655

Nubia Muñoz

#64365

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Nubia Muñoz is a Colombian medical scientist and epidemiologist, whose research has been instrumental in establishing that human papillomavirus infection is the primary cause of cervical cancer which has led to the development of a vaccine that is capable of preventing 70% of all cervical cancers.

#6656

William Desmond

William Desmond

#89988

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

William James Desmond is an Irish philosopher who has written on ontology, metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Desmond earned his B.A. and M.A. from University College, Cork, in 1972 and 1974; Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1978.

#6657

Alden Springer Crafts

1897 - 1990 (93 years)

Alden Springer Crafts was an American professor of botany, known as the first person in the United States to have the title "Weed Control Scientist" in academic employment. He was President of the American Society of Plant Physiologists for 1955, and President of the Weed Society of America for 1958–1960. Crafts was the editor of the Annual Review of Plant Physiology from 1957 to 1959.

#6658

Jan Hartman

#67297

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Jan Marek Hartman is a Polish of Jewish descent philosopher specializing in bioethics, writer, anticlerical, opinion journalist and politician, professor of the humanities. Early life and education He is the son of mathematics professor and a great-great grandson of rabbi Izaak Kramsztyk.

#6659

Saint Lucy

283 - 304 (21 years)

Lucia of Syracuse , also called Saint Lucia was a Roman Christian martyr who died during the Diocletianic Persecution. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox churches. She is one of eight women explicitly commemorated by Catholics in the Canon of the Mass. Her traditional feast day, known in Europe as Saint Lucy's Day, is observed by Western Christians on 13 December. Lucia of Syracuse was honored in the Middle Ages and remained a well-known saint in early modern England. She is one of the best known virgin martyrs, along with Agatha of Sicily,...

#6660

Giuseppe Furlani

1885 - 1962 (77 years)

Giuseppe Furlani was an Italian archaeologist, orientalist, philologist, and historian of religions, and the founder of Italian Assyriology and Hittite studies. Biography Giuseppe Furlani was born on 10 November 1885 in Pula in Croatia, at the time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Francesco and Luigia Damiani. In 1908, he graduated in law, and in 1913 in philosophy at the University of Graz.

#6661

Leo Groarke

#55013

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Leo Groarke is a Canadian philosopher, known for his contributions to argumentation theory and informal logic. Groarke has authored and edited a number of books, articles, and anthologies. Groarke has held numerous administrative positions at various Canadian universities, and currently serves as the President of Trent University.

#6662

George A. Diamond

#105085

Overall Influence

#6663

Seo Gyeong-deok

1489 - 1546 (57 years)

Seo Gyeong-deok was a Korean Neo-Confucianist philosopher during the Joseon Dynasty. His philosophy studied materialism and phenomenology based on ancient taoist philosophy theories absorbed by neoconfucianism, like Yin and Yang and Ki.

#6664

Kate Millett

#19722

Overall Influence

1934 - 2017 (83 years)

Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics , which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes the attainment of previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and a ...

#6665

Joseph Hillebrand

1788 - 1871 (83 years)

Joseph Hillebrand was a German novelist, philosopher and historian of literature. Biography He was originally a Catholic, studied at Hildesheim and at Göttingen, and in 1815 entered the priesthood and taught at Hildesheim, but resigned his position on accepting Protestant views. Upon Hegel's departure from the University of Heidelberg in 1818, he was appointed a professor of philosophy there, and in 1822 took a like position at the University of Giessen. He was elected to the lower house of the Hessian chamber in 1847, where he took the side of the liberals and became president in 1848. When ...

#6666

Christopher Paul Day

#105121

Overall Influence

#6667

Menedemus

340 BC - 265 BC (75 years)

Menedemus of Eretria was a Greek philosopher and founder of the Eretrian school. He learned philosophy first in Athens, and then, with his friend Asclepiades, he subsequently studied under Stilpo and Phaedo of Elis. Nothing survives of his philosophical views apart from a few scattered remarks recorded by later writers.

#6668

Dan Barouch

#61389

Overall Influence

Dan Hung Barouch is an American physician, immunologist, and virologist. He is known for his work on the pathogenesis and immunology of viral infections and the development of vaccine strategies for global infectious diseases.

#6669

Heinrich Rombach

#92761

Overall Influence

1923 - 2004 (81 years)

Heinrich Rombach was a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. He is known for developing structural ontology. Works Über Ursprung und Wesen der Frage, Freiburg / München: Alber 1952, ²1988. Substanz System Struktur: Die Ontologie des Funktionalismus und der philosophische Hintergrund der modernen Wissenschaft, 2 Bde., Freiburg / München: Alber 1965/66, ²1981. Studienausgabe 2010 mit dem Untertitel Die Hauptepochen der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, Band 1: , Band 2: Strukturontologie: Eine Phänomenologie der Freiheit, Freiburg / München: Alber 1971, ²1988 Mutmaßungen über das Ende der Hochkulturen, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 , S.

#6670

Hayashi Gahō

1618 - 1688 (70 years)

Hayashi Gahō, also known as Hayashi Shunsai|林春斎|, was a Japanese Neo-Confucian philosopher and writer in the system of higher education maintained by the Tokugawa bakufu during the Edo period. He was a member of the Hayashi clan of Confucian scholars.

#6671

Bohdan Pomahač

#14906

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Bohdan Pomahač is a Czech plastic surgeon. He led the team that performed the first full face transplant in United States and the third overall in the world. Biography Pomahač's parents were a chemical engineer and a school teacher. The family lived in the industrial city of Ostrava, today's Czech Republic, in a small three-room apartment, and used to spend weekends at their weekend house in Morávka, a municipality in the Moravian-Silesian Beskids mountain range.

#6672

Paul the Persian

550 - 600 (50 years)

Paul the Persian or Paulus Persa was a 6th-century East Syriac theologian and philosopher who worked at the court of the Sassanid king Khosrau I. He wrote several treatises and commentaries on Aristotle, which had some influence on medieval Islamic philosophy. He is identified by some scholars with Paulus of Nisibis and with Paul of Basra. According to Jackson, he was "a Christian who may have studied Greek philosophy in the schools of Nisibis and Gundeshapur". He is remembered for his writings in Syriac for his royal patron. These include his notes in Syriac on Aristotle's Logic, in which he...

#6673

Harold C. Sox

#75677

Overall Influence

Harold 'Hal' Sox is an Editor Emeritus of the Annals of Internal Medicine and member of the National Academy of Medicine. Sox was an associate editor of Scientific American Medicine, a consulting associate editor of The American Journal of Medicine and a member of the editorial boards of three medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine.

#6674

Daniel E. Singer

#105220

Overall Influence

#6675

David Archard

#91885

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

David Archard is a British moral philosopher who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast. He is known for his work on children and families. Career As an undergraduate, Archard studied philosophy at Corpus Christi, University of Oxford from 1969 to 1972, and then read for a PhD at the London School of Economics from 1972 to 1976. In 1976, he took up a lectureship at Ulster Polytechnic, later being promoted to senior Lecturer. In 1995, he moved to St. Andrews as a reader in moral philosophy, and, in 2003, became a professor of philosophy & public policy in 2003. He left Lancaster in 2018 and became a professor of philosophy at Queen's University Belfast.

#6676

Manuel Sánchez Cuesta

#71978

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Manuel Sánchez Cuesta is philosopher, ethicist and humanist. He studied in the University of Salamanca, Complutense University of Madrid, Heidelberg University and the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He is Philosophical Doctor. Since 1991 he is professor of ethics in the Complutense University of Madrid. He has also taught logic at the same university, Spanish literature and Spanish history of philosophy at the Heidelberg University as well as ethics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Amongst other publications, he has regularly written about ethics ...

#6677

John W. Auteur Dominiczak Marek H. Auteur Baynes

#105246

Overall Influence

#6678

Thomas Scott Edgington

#105265

Overall Influence

#6679

Michael Heizer

#11416

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael Heizer is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.

#6680

Rober T. Machemer

#105298

Overall Influence

#6681

Étienne Noël Damilaville

Étienne Noël Damilaville

1723 - 1768 (45 years)

Étienne Noël Damilaville was an 18th-century French man of letters, friend of Voltaire, Diderot and d'Alembert. He served in various military and administrative functions of the Ancien Régime. He was a member of the bodyguard of King Louis XV, and then a senior civil servant in the tax office responsible for supervising the Vingtième. His official roles meant that his correspondence was unexamined by censors, enabling him to circulate letters between leading thinkers of the day, most particularly during the Sirven affair.

#6682

Stephen W. Macmahon

#105327

Overall Influence

#6683

James Hunt

1833 - 1869 (36 years)

James Hunt was an anthropologist and speech therapist in London, England, during the middle of the nineteenth century. His clients included Charles Kingsley, Leo Tennyson , and Lewis Carroll author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

#6684

Michael Hooker

#85922

Overall Influence

1946 - 1999 (53 years)

Michael Kenneth Hooker was an American academic who served as the eighth Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and President of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Bennington College.

#6685

Bernard Devauchelle

#15399

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Bernard Devauchelle is a French oral and maxillofacial surgeon, best known for successfully completing the first face transplant in November 2005 at Amiens University Hospital.

#6686

Rudolf Pichlmayr

#47118

Overall Influence

1932 - 1997 (65 years)

Rudolf Pichlmayer was a German surgeon and head of the Abdominal and Transplantation Surgery Department of the Hannover Medical School. He was one of the leading transplant physicians in Germany. He is considered a pioneer in liver transplantation. The introduction of the term "transplantation medicine" goes back to Pichlmayr.

#6687

Harry Prosch

#99034

Overall Influence

1917 - 2005 (88 years)

Harry Prosch was an American philosopher born in Logansport, Indiana. Life Prosch, the son of a grocer, was told he was ineligible to enter college because he had not studied Latin. "He was placed in the Industrial Arts program from which he graduated in 1935 and became an apprentice pattern-maker at a machine company where he worked for several years." He joined the army in 1942 and served in the Pacific in New Guinea and the Philippines as a supply sergeant.

#6688

Gunnar Landtman

1878 - 1940 (62 years)

Gunnar Landtman was a Finnish philosopher as well as a sociology and philosophy professor. A pupil of Edvard Westermarck, he graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1905. He later became an associate professor there from 1910 to 1927 and then a temporary professor until his death in 1940. At the university, Landtman was a member of the Prometheus Society, a student society promoting freedom of religion. Landtman was the first modern sociological anthropologist. His most important journey was a two-year trip to Papua New Guinea where he lived with the Kiwai Papuans from 1910 to 1912. He w...

#6689

Mathew Chandrankunnel

Mathew Chandrankunnel

#23847

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Prof. Dr. Mathew Chandrankunnel CMI is a professor of philosophy of science at Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram and Christ University, both in Bangalore, India. He is the author of several books including "Philosophy of Quantum mechanics" and "Ascent to Truth: The Physics, philosophy and Religion of Galileo Galilei". He is a scientist, philosopher and theologian.

#6690

Hsu Su-ming

#103189

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Hsu Su-ming is a Taiwanese pathologist. Hsu studied medicine at National Taiwan University and split his residency between National Taiwan University Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital. He remained in the United States, first working for the National Institutes of Health, then teaching at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and later the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He returned to Taiwan in 1995 to teach at NTU. From 1985, Hsu was an ISI highly cited researcher.

#6691

Joachim Boldt

#30970

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Joachim Boldt is a German anesthesiologist who fabricated or falsified data, including those reporting clinical trial results. Medical research fabrication Boldt was previously considered to be a leading researcher of medicinal colloids. He was an advocate for the use of colloidal hydroxyethyl starch to boost blood pressure during surgery. However, a meta-analysis of trials that excluded Boldt's fabricated data found that the intravenous use of hydroxyethyl starch is associated with a significant increased risk of death and acute kidney injury compared with other resuscitation solutions. He...

#6692

Gerard van Swieten

Gerard van Swieten

1700 - 1772 (72 years)

Gerard van Swieten was a Dutch physician who from 1745 was the personal physician of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and transformed the Austrian health service and medical university education. He was the father of Gottfried van Swieten, patron of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

#6693

John Argyropoulos

John Argyropoulos

1415 - 1487 (72 years)

John Argyropoulos was a lecturer, philosopher and humanist, one of the émigré Greek scholars who pioneered the revival of classical Greek learning in 15th century Italy. He translated Greek philosophical and theological works into Latin besides producing rhetorical and theological works of his own. He was in Italy for the Council of Florence during 1439–1444, and returned to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople, teaching in Florence in 1456–1470 and in Rome in 1471–1487.

#6694

Sidney C. Werner

#105467

Overall Influence

#6695

Ingrid Scheffer

Ingrid Scheffer

#81883

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ingrid Eileen Scheffer is an Australian paediatric neurologist and senior research fellow at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. She has made several major advances in the field of epilepsy research. Scheffer is credited with finding the first gene implicated in epilepsy. She has also described and classified novel epileptic syndromes such as Epilepsy limited to Females with Mental Retardation.

#6696

Murray A. Falconer

#105475

Overall Influence

#6697

Gerald F. Jr. Combs

#105485

Overall Influence

#6698

Jon Mandle

#85815

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Jonathan Mandle is a Professor of Philosophy and former Philosophy Department Chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. He is a member of the Crooked Timber group blog. He is the brother of NBA player Adonal Foyle.

#6699

Jörg-rüdiger Siewert

#105499

Overall Influence

#6700

Rand Paul

#13358

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Randal Howard Paul is an American politician serving as the junior United States senator from Kentucky since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he is a son of former three-time presidential candidate and 12-term U.S. representative from Texas, Ron Paul. Paul describes himself as a constitutional conservative and supporter of the Tea Party movement.

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