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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,

#701

Paul Kurtz

#2127

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Paul Kurtz was an American scientific skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism". He was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for Social Research.

#702

W. K. C. Guthrie

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

William Keith Chambers Guthrie , usually cited as W. K. C. Guthrie, was a Scottish classical scholar, best known for his History of Greek Philosophy, published in six volumes between 1962 and his death. He served as Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1952 to 1973 and as master of Downing College, Cambridge from 1957 to 1972.

#703

Michael Scriven

#4569

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Michael John Scriven was a British-born Australian polymath and academic philosopher, best known for his contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation. Biography Scriven was born in the UK and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. He held BSc and MS degrees in mathematics from the University of Melbourne, where he was in residence at Trinity College from 1946, winning an entrance scholarship. He then completed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford .

#704

Michel Serres

#1388

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose. Life and career The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Paris , and began teaching in 1969 at the University of Paris I.

#705

Robert Magliola

#3069

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Roberto Rino Magliola is an Italian-American academic specializing in European hermeneutics and deconstruction, comparative philosophy, and inter-religious dialogue. He is retired from National Taiwan University and Assumption University of Thailand.

#706

T. M. Scanlon

#6339

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon , usually cited as T. M. Scanlon, is an American philosopher. At the time of his retirement in 2016, he was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy, where he had taught since 1984. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

#707

Allen W. Wood

#5723

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity ...

#708

William Lycan

#5180

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

William G. Lycan is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was formerly the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. Since 2011, Lycan is also distinguished visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to research, teach, and advise graduate students.

#709

Sun Tzu

544 BC - 496 BC (48 years)

Sun Tzu was a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Eastern Zhou period . Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, an influential work of military strategy that has affected both Western and East Asian philosophy and military thinking. Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and military figure. His birth name was Sun Wu and he was known outside of his family by his courtesy name Changqing . The name Sun Tzuby which he is more popularly knownis an honorific which means "Master Sun".

#710

Paul W. Taylor

#6984

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

Paul W. Taylor was an American philosopher best known for his work in the field of environmental ethics. Biography Taylor's theory of biocentric egalitarianism, related to but not identical with deep ecology, was expounded in his 1986 book Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, and has been taught in university courses on environmental ethics. Taylor taught philosophy for four decades at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and was professor emeritus there at the time of his death.

#711

George H. Smith

#3444

Overall Influence

1949 - 2022 (73 years)

George Hamilton Smith was an American author, editor, educator, and speaker, known for his writings on atheism and libertarianism. Biography Smith grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, and attended the University of Arizona for several years before leaving without a degree; he relocated to Los Angeles during 1971. With the help of libertarian editor Roy A. Childs, Jr., he secured a contract from Nash Publishing to produce a book on atheism. The finished product was his first book, Atheism: The Case Against God .

#712

Ernest Mandel

#1163

Overall Influence

1923 - 1995 (72 years)

Ernest Ezra Mandel Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university.

#713

Hans Blumenberg

#4140

Overall Influence

1920 - 1996 (76 years)

Hans Blumenberg was a German philosopher and intellectual historian. He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics and is considered to be one of the most important German philosophers of the century. He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge , Germany.

#714

William MacAskill

#4194

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is an associate professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research. He co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty .

#715

Raïssa Maritain

1883 - 1960 (77 years)

Raïssa Maritain was a French poet and philosopher. She was the wife of Jacques Maritain, with whom she worked and whose companion she was for more than half a century, at the center of a circle of French Catholic intellectuals. Her memoir, Les Grandes Amitiés, which won the prix du Renouveau français, chronicles this. Jacques Maritain, Raïssa and her sister Vera formed what would be called "the three Maritains".

#716

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg

1802 - 1872 (70 years)

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and philologist. Life He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was placed in a gymnasium in Eutin, which was under the direction of , a philologist influenced by Immanuel Kant.

#717

Ernst Nolte

#713

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism . Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controvers...

#718

Antisthenes

444 BC - 365 BC (79 years)

Antisthenes was a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. Antisthenes first learned rhetoric under Gorgias before becoming an ardent disciple of Socrates. He adopted and developed the ethical side of Socrates' teachings, advocating an ascetic life lived in accordance with virtue. Later writers regarded him as the founder of Cynic philosophy.

#719

Roy Bhaskar

#3727

Overall Influence

1944 - 2014 (70 years)

Ram Roy Bhaskar was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism . Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it. He went on to apply that realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and...

#720

Brian McGuinness

#6524

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Brian McGuinness was a Wittgenstein scholar best known for his translation, with David Pears, of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. He was christened with the forenames "Bernard Francis" but changed his name to "Brian" in his youth. He commonly published, and was cited, as B. F. McGuinness.

#721

David Stove

#5852

Overall Influence

1927 - 1994 (67 years)

David Charles Stove was an Australian philosopher whose writings often challenged prevailing academic orthodoxy. He was known for his critiques of postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism. Philosophy His work in philosophy of science included criticisms of David Hume's Inductive scepticism. He offered a positive response to the problem of induction in his 1986 work, The Rationality of Induction. In Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Stove attacked the leading philosophers of science, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, on the grounds that their commitm...

#722

Ibn al-Nafis

1210 - 1288 (78 years)

ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Abī Ḥazm al-Qarashī , known as Ibn al-Nafīs , was an Arab polymath whose areas of work included medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic studies, jurisprudence, and philosophy. He is known for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The work of Ibn al-Nafis regarding the right sided circulation pre-dates the later work of William Harvey's De motu cordis. Both theories attempt to explain circulation. 2nd century Greek physician Galen's theory about the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged unt...

#723

J. O. Urmson

#7758

Overall Influence

1915 - 2012 (97 years)

James Opie Urmson , was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy .

#724

Philippe Van Parijs

Philippe Van Parijs

#2915

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Philippe Van Parijs is a Belgian political philosopher and political economist, best known as a proponent and main defender of the concept of an unconditional basic income and for the first systematic treatment of linguistic justice.

#725

Norman Geisler

#2311

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Norman Leo Geisler was an American Christian systematic theologian, philosopher, and apologist. He was the co-founder of two non-denominational evangelical seminaries . He held a Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University and made scholarly contributions to the subjects of classical Christian apologetics, systematic theology, the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Biblical inerrancy, Bible difficulties, ethics, and more. He was the author, coauthor, or editor of over 90 books and hundreds of articles.

#726

Moses Hess

1812 - 1875 (63 years)

Moses Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, early communist and Zionist thinker. His socialist theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor Zionism.

#727

William Kingdon Clifford

William Kingdon Clifford

1845 - 1879 (34 years)

William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry.

#728

Heinrich Blücher

Heinrich Blücher

1899 - 1970 (71 years)

Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.

#729

Keith Ward

#3896

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Keith Ward is an English philosopher and theologian. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, until 2003. Comparative theology and the relationship between science and religion are two of his main topics of interest.

#730

Roger Scruton

#3790

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.

#731

Maurizio Ferraris

Maurizio Ferraris

#5384

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Maurizio Ferraris is an Italian continental philosopher and scholar, whose name is associated especially with the philosophical current named "new realism"—Ferraris wrote the Manifesto of New Realism in 2012, which was published by SUNY Press in 2014

#732

Michael Stocker

#9642

Overall Influence

Michael Adam Gerber Stocker is an American philosopher and Irwin & Marjorie Guttag Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Syracuse University. He is known for his works on ethics. Stocker is the author of the seminal paper The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.

#733

Mario Kopić

#4185

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mario Kopić is a philosopher, author and translator. His main areas of interest include: the history of ideas, the philosophy of art, the philosophy of culture, phenomenology and the philosophy of religion.

#734

Andy Clark

#1925

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Andy Clark, is a British philosopher who is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Prior to this, he was a professor of philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Clark is one of the founding members of the CONTACT collaborative research project whose aim is to investigate the role environment plays in shaping the nature of conscious experience. Clark's papers and b...

#735

Peter Unger

#8474

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

#736

Brian Leiter

#2833

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

#737

Greg Bahnsen

#2894

Overall Influence

1948 - 1995 (47 years)

Greg L. Bahnsen was an American Reformed philosopher, apologist, and debater. He was a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a full-time Scholar in Residence for the Southern California Center for Christian Studies . He is also considered a contributor to the field of Christian apologetics, as he popularized the presuppositional method of Cornelius Van Til. He is the father of David L. Bahnsen, an American portfolio manager, author, and television commentator.

#738

Maurice Cornforth

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

Maurice Campbell Cornforth was a British Marxist philosopher. Life Cornforth was born in Willesden, London, in 1909, and educated at University College School, where he was friends with Stephen Spender. In 1925 he went up to University College London, graduating in 1929, and then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the only student on a specialised course in logic, taught by Moore, Braithwaite, and Wittgenstein. In 1931, after graduating, Cornforth was awarded a three-year research scholarship at Trinity. In the summer of the same year he joined the Communist Party, setting up...

#739

Myles Burnyeat

#6442

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Myles Fredric Burnyeat was an English scholar of ancient philosophy. Early life and education Myles Burnyeat was born on 1 January 1939 to Peter James Anthony Burnyeat and Cynthia Cherry Warburg. He received his secondary school education at Bryanston School.

#740

Richard Montague

Richard Montague

1930 - 1971 (41 years)

Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory . For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.

#741

Śāntarakṣita

725 - 788 (63 years)

, whose name translates into English as "protected by the One who is at peace" was an important and influential Indian Buddhist philosopher, particularly for the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Śāntarakṣita was a philosopher of the Madhyamaka school who studied at Nalanda monastery under Jñānagarbha, and became the founder of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

#742

Dagfinn Føllesdal

#4881

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Dagfinn Føllesdal is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Biography and career Føllesdal was born in Askim. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Oslo, he attended Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 under Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught at Harvard University from 1961 to 1964, and began teaching at Stanford University in 1968.

#743

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia

1879 - 1953 (74 years)

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada. When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic". After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921. He was later briefly assoc...

#744

Edward N. Zalta

Edward N. Zalta

#6817

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Edward Nouri Zalta is an American philosopher who is a senior research scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He received his BA from Rice University in 1975 and his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981, both in philosophy. Zalta has taught courses at Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Auckland. Zalta is also the Principal Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

#745

Christian Garve

Christian Garve

1742 - 1798 (56 years)

Christian Garve was one of the best-known philosophers of the late Enlightenment along with Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn. Life Christian Garve was born into a family of manual workers and died aged 56 in his parental home. He studied in Frankfurt an der Oder and Halle . In 1766 he gained his master's degree in philosophy. From 1770 until 1772 he was extraordinary professor of mathematics and logic in Leipzig. From 1772 he was in Breslau, where he was active as a bookseller. The greatest part of his life was however spent staying with his mother in Breslau. In this city he also became a...

#746

Dominique Lecourt

Dominique Lecourt

#4739

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Dominique Lecourt was a French philosopher. He is known in the Anglophone world primarily for his work developing a materialist interpretation of the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard. Biography Lecourt was born in Paris. A former student at the École normale supérieure , an agrégé in philosophy , and a Docteur d'État ès lettres , he was professor at the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 and, until 2011, was director of the Centre Georges Canguilhem .

#747

David Hartley

1705 - 1757 (52 years)

David Hartley was an English philosopher and founder of the Associationist school of psychology. Early life and family history David Hartley was born in 1705 in the vicinity of Halifax, Yorkshire. His mother died three months after his birth. His father, an Anglican clergyman, died when David was fifteen. Hartley was educated at Bradford Grammar School and in 1722 was admitted as a Sizar to Jesus College, Cambridge where he was a Rustat scholar. He received his BA in 1726 and MA in 1729. In April 1730 he became the first layperson to be Master of Magnus Grammar School , Newark, and it was there that he began to practise medicine.

#748

John P. Burgess

#4996

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

John Patton Burgess is an American philosopher. He is John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University where he specializes in logic and philosophy of mathematics. Education and career Burgess received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley's Group in Logic and Methodology of Science. His interests include logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaethics. He is the author of numerous articles on logic and philosophy of mathematics. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the brother of Barbara Burgess.

#749

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712 - 1778 (66 years)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher , writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.

#750

Bernard Bosanquet

Bernard Bosanquet

1848 - 1923 (75 years)

Bernard Bosanquet was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work influenced but was later subject to criticism by many thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bernard was the husband of Helen Bosanquet, the leader of the Charity Organisation Society.

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