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,
#701
Daniel Dombrowski
#17531
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Daniel A. Dombrowski is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at Seattle University. Since 2009 he has served as Editor of the journal Process Studies, and is a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America .
Go to Profile#702
Margaret Gilbert
#4895
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Margaret Gilbert is a British philosopher best known for her founding contributions to the analytic philosophy of social phenomena. She has also made substantial contributions to other philosophical fields including political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and ethics. She is currently a Distinguished Professor and the Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#703
Genevieve Lloyd
#15192
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Genevieve Mary Lloyd , is an Australian philosopher and feminist. Biography Lloyd studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s and then at Somerville College, Oxford. Her D.Phil, awarded in 1973, was on "Time and Tense". From 1967 until 1987 she lectured at the Australian National University, during which period she developed her most influential ideas and wrote The Man of Reason, which was published in 1984. In 1987 she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, being the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia. On r...
Go to Profile#704
Claudia Card
#11365
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Claudia Falconer Card was the Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with teaching affiliations in Women's Studies, Jewish Studies, Environmental Studies, and LGBT Studies.
Go to Profile#705
J. L. Schellenberg
#12579
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
John L. Schellenberg is a Canadian philosopher, best known for his work in philosophy of religion. He has earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Go to Profile#706
Harry V. Jaffa
#5439
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist, and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont Graduate University, and was a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times".
Go to Profile#707
Abner Shimony
#5436
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Abner Eliezer Shimony was an American physicist and philosopher. He specialized in quantum theory and philosophy of science. As a physicist, he concentrated on the interaction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He authored many works and research on complementarity in quantum entanglement as well as multiparticle quantum interferometry, both relating to quantum coherence. He authored research articles and books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. He received the 1996 Lakatos Prize for his work in philosophy of science. Shimony is also the author of Tibaldo and the Hole in ...
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Seth Benardete
#8950
Overall Influence
1930 - 2001 (71 years)
Seth Benardete was an American classicist and philosopher, long a member of the faculties of New York University and The New School. In addition to teaching positions at Harvard, Brandeis, St. John's College, Annapolis and NYU, Benardete was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.
Go to Profile#709
James G. Lennox
#14103
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James G. Lennox is an emeritus professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, United States, with secondary appointments in the departments of Classics and Philosophy. He is a leader in the study of Aristotelian science in light of his groundbreaking work on Aristotle's biology and philosophy of biology. In particular, Lennox's work in the 1980s catalyzed a renewed interest in Aristotle's biology by arguing that his natural historical works are consistent with and even demonstrative of the scientific methodology he lays out in the Posterior Analytics.
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Eli Hirsch
#17822
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Eli Hirsch is an American philosopher and the Charles Goldman Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He is best known for his work in meta-ontology. He coined the phrase "soft ontology" and has authored over 70 books and papers. Many of his books deal with objections to ontology based upon common sense and that most disputes involving metaphysical objects revolve around linguistics and are merely verbal in nature. Among his books are "Against Revisionary Ontology" and "Physical-Object Ontology, Verbal Disputes, and Common Sense" .
Go to Profile#711
Christia Mercer
#12030
Overall Influence
Christia Mercer is an American philosopher and the Gustave M. Berne Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is known for her work on the history of early modern philosophy, the history of Platonism, and the history of gender. She has received national attention for her work teaching in prisons and advocating for educational opportunities for incarcerated people. She is the Director and Founder of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University, which "supports innovative research in the history of philosophy and promotes diversity in the teachin...
Go to Profile#712
Alexander Piatigorsky
#5658
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Alexander Moiseyevich Piatigorsky was a Soviet dissident, Russian philosopher, scholar of Indian philosophy and culture, historian, philologist, semiotician, writer. Well-versed in the study of language, he knew Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali, Tibetan, German, Russian, French, Italian and English. In an obituary appearing in the English-language newspaper The Guardian, he was cited as "a man who was widely considered to be one of the more significant thinkers of the age and Russia's greatest philosopher." On Russian television stations he was mourned as "the greatest Russian philosopher."
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Irving Copi
#15379
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Irving Marmer Copi was an American philosopher, logician, and university textbook author. Biography Copi studied under Bertrand Russell while at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he contributed to the calculus of relations with his article using logical matrices.
Go to Profile#714
Thupten Jinpa
#3267
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Thupten Jinpa Langri is a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, former monk and an academic of religious studies and both Eastern and Western philosophy. He has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than ten books by the Dalai Lama including The World of Tibetan Buddhism , A Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus , and the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium .
Go to Profile#715
Paul Moser
#15452
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul K. Moser is an American philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and a former editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.
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Werner Hamacher
#8781
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Werner Hamacher was a German literary critic and theorist influenced by deconstruction. Hamacher studied philosophy, comparative literature and religious studies at the Free University of Berlin and the École Normale Supérieure , where he met and came to know Jacques Derrida. From 1998 to 2013 he was a Professor in the University of Frankfurt's Institute for General and Comparative Literature , and since 2003 he was on the faculty of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
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Hans Kamp
#11366
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp is a Dutch philosopher and linguist, responsible for introducing discourse representation theory in 1981. Kamp was born in Den Burg. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at Cornell University, University of London, University of Texas, Austin, and University of Stuttgart. His dissertation, Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order was devoted to functional completeness in tense logic, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until", provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous linear ordering.
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Ilkka Niiniluoto
#13214
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ilkka Maunu Olavi Niiniluoto is a Finnish philosopher and mathematician, serving as a professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki since 1981. He is currently on leave from his position, having been appointed as rector of the University of Helsinki on 1 August 2003, for a five-year period. On 25 April 2008 he was chosen to succeed Kari Raivio as chancellor of the University of Helsinki, beginning 1 June 2008.
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Gian-Carlo Rota
#590
Overall Influence
1932 - 1999 (67 years)
Gian-Carlo Rota was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, probability theory, and phenomenology.
Go to Profile#720
Douglas Moggach
#10976
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Douglas Moggach is a professor at the University of Ottawa and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and has held visiting appointments at Sidney Sussex College and King's College, Cambridge, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa., and the Fondazione San Carlo di Modena,where he taught a graduate seminar in Italian on German Idealism. Moggach has also held the University Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, he won the Killam Research Fellowship awarded by the Canada Council for the arts.
Go to Profile#721
Michael Krausz
#12573
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Krausz is a Swiss-born American philosopher as well as an artist and orchestral conductor. His philosophical works focus on the theory of interpretation, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and philosophy of art and music. Krausz is Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, and he teaches Aesthetics at the Curtis Institute of Music. He has taught at University of Toronto and has been visiting professor at American University, Georgetown University, Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, American University in Cairo, University of Nairobi, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and University of Ulm, among others.
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Raimon Panikkar
#4835
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Raimon Panikkar Alemany, also known as Raimundo Panikkar and Raymond Panikkar , was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and a proponent of Interfaith dialogue. As a scholar, he specialized in comparative religion.
Go to Profile#723
Alain de Botton
#3909
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love , which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life , Status Anxiety , and The Architecture of Happiness .
Go to Profile#724
Wolfgang Smith
#4748
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic and member of the Traditionalist School. He has written extensively in the field of differential geometry, as a critic of scientism and as a proponent of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that draws heavily from premodern ontology and realism.
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A. J. Baker
#14987
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Allan James "Jim" Baker , usually cited as A. J. Baker, was an Australian philosopher who was best known for having systematised the realist philosophy of John Anderson. He studied under Anderson at Sydney University and had taught philosophy in Scotland, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia. He was a prominent member of the Sydney Libertarians and the Sydney Push. He instigated, and was a prolific contributor to, several journals, compilations and newsletters that addressed issues, philosophical and otherwise, associated with Sydney Libertarianism. Among these were Libertarian , Broa...
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Wolfe Mays
#9999
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Wolfe Mays was a British philosopher. He was the founder of British Society for Phenomenology and the editor of its journal. Mays is known for his efforts for introducing phenomenology in England. He taught at the University of Manchester from 1946 until his retirement in 1979. His students included Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith.
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Edmund Pellegrino
#13029
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Edmund Daniel Pellegrino was an American bioethicist and academic who served as the 11th president of The Catholic University of America from 1978 to 1982. For 35 years, Pellegrino was a distinguished professor of medicine and medical ethics and the Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. Pellegrino was an expert both in clinical bioethics, and in the field of medicine and the humanities, specifically, the teaching of humanities in medical school, which he helped pioneer
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Sylvain Lazarus
#7238
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sylvain Lazarus is a French sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist. He has also written under the pseudonym Paul Sandevince. Lazarus is a professor at the Paris 8 University. Life and work Sylvain Lazarus worked out a theory of the social function of political categorizations , exploring in the anthropological field what his Lacanianian friends Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner worked out, respectively, in the fields of philosophy, of linguistics and of psychoanalytic theory.
Go to Profile#729
Achille Mbembe
#3403
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe , is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and public intellectual who is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory.
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Robert Fogelin
#17662
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Robert John Fogelin was an American philosopher, and advocate and leading scholar of modern Pyrrhonism. He was a professor of philosophy and Sherman Fairchild Professor in the humanities at Dartmouth College where he had taught since 1980. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
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Robin Gandy
#7176
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Robin Oliver Gandy was a British mathematician and logician. He was a friend, student, and associate of Alan Turing, having been supervised by Turing during his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where they worked together.
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Jitendra Nath Mohanty
#16416
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Jitendra Nath Mohanty was an Indian philosopher. He served as emeritus professor of philosophy at Temple University. Born in Cuttack, in 1928 in Orissa, India, Mohanty had a distinguished career where he stood first in all public examinations and in B.A. Presidency College, Kolkata and M.A. examination at the University of Calcutta. Subsequently, he did a Ph.D. from University of Göttingen in 1954. In his long academic career, he taught at the University of Burdwan, University of Calcutta, New School for Social Research, University of Oklahoma, Emory University, and Temple University and hel...
Go to Profile#733
Paul Helm
#11156
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Paul Helm is a Reformed British philosopher and theologian. Helm was born in 1940. He taught at Regent College, having served as the first incumbent of the J.I. Packer Chair of Theology there from 2001 to 2005. He also served as Professor of Theology at Highland Theological College, Scotland, from 2007 to 2010.
Go to Profile#734
Gabriel Liiceanu
#9113
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gabriel Liiceanu is a Romanian philosopher. He graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy in 1965, and from Faculty of Classical Languages in 1973. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 1976. Between 1965 and 1975, Liiceanu was a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, and between 1975 and 1989 at the Institute of Art History. He received a fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation between 1982 and 1984.
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Pekka Himanen
#8422
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Pekka Himanen is a Finnish philosopher. Professional career Pekka Himanen studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki, under professor Esa Saarinen. In 1994, with his thesis on the philosophy of religion, The challenge of Bertrand Russell, he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the same university, breaking the record as the youngest person to obtain a PhD in Finland, following other record-breaking young PhDs supervised by Saarinen.
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Daniel Bensaïd
#6751
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Daniel Bensaïd was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Life and career Bensaïd was born in Toulouse, France, to a father who was a Sephardic Jew from Algeria, and who had moved from Oran, where he met Bensaïd's mother, to Vichy Toulouse. In response to the 8 February 1962 Charonne massacre of Algerians in Paris, Bensaïd joined the Union of Communist Students. Irritated by the party orthodoxy he swiftly became part of a left opposition within the union, ...
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Christine Buci-Glucksmann
#6877
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Christine Buci-Glucksmann is a French philosopher and Professor Emeritus from University of Paris VIII specializing in the aesthetics of the Baroque and Japan, and computer art. Her best-known work in English is Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity.
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Stephen Davies
#15322
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stephen John Davies is a Distinguished Professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He mainly writes on aesthetics, particularly the philosophy of music but also works on political philosophy. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics , and the New Zealand division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy .
Go to Profile#739
Teodor Oizerman
#10442
Overall Influence
1914 - 2017 (103 years)
Teodor Ilyich Oizerman was a Soviet and Russian philosopher and academician. Biography Oizerman was born in Petroverovka village, Tiraspolsky Uyezd, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire, into a Jewish family. His parents were teachers. During World War II he served in the Red Army.
Go to Profile#740
Anselm Kiefer
#1472
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horrors of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.
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Dag Prawitz
#17050
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Dag Prawitz is a Swedish philosopher and logician. He is best known for his work on proof theory and the foundations of natural deduction. Prawitz is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and Antiquity and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#742
Katerina Kolozova
#17348
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Katerina "Katarina" Kolozova Biography She is a director of and professor of gender studies and philosophy at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje and a professor of the University American College Skopje, both in Skopje, North Macedonia. She has been associated with speculative realism and has written about the non-philosophy of François Laruelle and the works of Karl Marx. She has been a member of the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale , with headquarters in Paris, France, since it was founded. She is a board member of The New Centre for Research & Practice of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Go to Profile#743
Horst Matthai Quelle
#12820
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Horst Matthai Quelle was a Spanish-speaking German philosopher. Biography Quelle was born in Hanover, Germany in 1912. In 1938, at the beginning of the German economic crisis and the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, Quelle moved to Mexico. There, he began studying philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico where he took classes with writer Carlos Monsivais and philosophers Leopoldo Zea and Emilio Uranga. Quelle earned his undergraduate degree, master's and doctorate in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he returned as a professor of philosophy in the 1980s.
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Garry Wills
#991
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Garry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
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Alan Musgrave
#11512
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Alan Musgrave is an English-born New Zealand philosopher. Biography Musgrave was educated at the London School of Economics with a BA Honours philosophy and economics 1961. Karl Popper supervised Musgrave's PhD which was completed in 1969. Musgrave worked as Popper's research assistant, initially then as a lecturer. Musgrave was appointed to the chair of the philosophy department at the University of Otago in 1970, and was head of department from 1970 to 2005. He was 30 years old at his appointment. Along with Imre Lakatos, a friend and colleague, they edited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge .
Go to Profile#746
Amélie Rorty
#10796
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty was a Belgian-born American philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of mind , history of philosophy , and moral philosophy. Career Rorty received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1954 and 1961 respectively, and an M.A. from Princeton University in anthropology. She began her academic career at Wheaton College , then began teaching at Rutgers in 1962 and taught there through to 1988, by which time she had achieved the rank of distinguished professor. She was also professor in the history of ideas ...
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Geoffrey Brennan
#6843
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
Geoffrey Brennan was an Australian philosopher. He was professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, professor of political science at Duke University, and faculty member in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He was the Director of the Research School from 1991-1996.
Go to Profile#748
Trudy Govier
#7831
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Trudy Rose Govier is a Canadian philosopher known for her work in informal logic and argumentation. She is the author of the influential text A Practical Study of Argument. She has also been a frequent commentator in Canadian media on issues related to violence and conflict resolution.
Go to Profile#749
Nina Power
#8393
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nina Power is an English writer and philosopher. She is a senior editor of and columnist for the online magazine Compact. Power received a PhD in philosophy from Middlesex University on the topic of humanism and antihumanism in postwar French philosophy, and also has an MA and BA in philosophy from the University of Warwick. She was a senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University, and has taught at Middlesex, Orpington College, London College of Communication, Morley College. Power also worked as a tutor in critical writing in art and design at the Royal College of Art, is a fellow ...
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Björn Kraus
#7329
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Björn Kraus is a German philosopher, who unfolds epistemological theories for social work. He therefore picks up on the doubt about the possibilities of human perception, a topic that has been emphasized over and over in occidental philosophy. He thus stands in tradition of a skepticism as for example defined by Immanuel Kant and Ernst von Glasersfeld.
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