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,
#751
John Warwick Montgomery
#2869
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
John Warwick Montgomery is a lawyer, professor, Lutheran theologian, and author living in France. He was born in Warsaw, New York, United States. Montgomery maintains multiple citizenship in the United States, United Kingdom and France. From 2014 to 2017, he was Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University, Wisconsin. He is currently Professor-At-Large, 1517: The Legacy Project. He is named Avocat honoraire, Barreau de Paris , after 20 years in French legal practise. He continues to work as a barrister specializing in religious freedom cases in international Human Ri...
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Tim Crane
#9304
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Timothy Martin Crane is a British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics. His contributions to philosophy include a defence of a non-physicalist account of the mind; a defence of intentionalism about consciousness; a defence of the thesis that perceptual experience has non-conceptual content; a psychologistic approach to the objects of thought; and a defence of the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. He is currently the Head of Department and Professor of Philosophy at Central European University...
Go to Profile#753
Andrei Pleșu
#6793
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Andrei Gabriel Pleșu is a Romanian philosopher, essayist, journalist, literary and art critic. He has been intermittently involved in politics, having been appointed Minister of Culture , Minister of Foreign Affairs and presidential counsellor for external affairs .
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William A. Dembski
#2774
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Trained as a mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, William Albert “Bill” Dembski is a writer, editor, and researcher whose books and articles range over mathematics, engineering, philosophy, theology, and education. A past philosophy professor, he retired from teaching in 2013. A prominent proponent of intelligent design (ID), specifically for developing rigorous methods of design detection, he was a senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture until 2016 and is currently a member of Discovery’s Institute’s governing board. He has secured the rights from Cambridg...
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Evan Thompson
#3288
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He writes about cognitive science, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
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Erik De Clercq
#14744
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Erik De Clercq M.D. Ph.D., is a Belgian physician and biologist. He studied medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven . He did research and later became a professor at the Department of Medicine, where he specialised in microbiology and immunology. He worked at the Rega Institute for Medical Research. He is one of the founders and the second president of the International Society for Antiviral Research.
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Michael Allen Gillespie
#15309
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Allen Gillespie is an American philosopher and Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Duke University. His areas of interest are political philosophy, continental philosophy, history of philosophy, and the origins of modernity. He has published on the relationship between theology and philosophy, medieval theology, liberalism, and a number of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant.
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Didier Raoult
#9342
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Didier Raoult is a retired French physician and microbiologist specialising in infectious diseases. He taught about infectious diseases at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University , and in 1984, created the Rickettsia Unit of the university. From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes. He gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for vocally promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease, despite the lack of evidence for its effectiveness and the subsequent opposit...
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Oscar Horta
#15106
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Óscar Horta Álvarez is a Spanish animal activist and moral philosopher who is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela and one of the co-founders of the organization Animal Ethics. He is known for his work in animal ethics, especially around the problem of wild animal suffering. He has also worked on the concept of speciesism and on the clarification of the arguments for the moral consideration of nonhuman animals. In 2022, Horta published his first book in English, Making a Stand for Animals.
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Gualtiero Piccinini
#6156
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gualtiero Piccinini is an Italian–American philosopher known for his work on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department and Associate Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
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Konrad Ott
#15883
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Konrad Ott is a German philosopher with a special interest in discourse ethics and environmental ethics. Biography Konrad Ott was born 1959 in Bergkamen, Germany. From 1981 to 1986, he studied philosophy, history and German philology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is regarded as a representative of the 'Third Generation' of the Frankfurt School.
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Henry Jenkins
#846
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Henry Guy Jenkins III is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.
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R. Edward Freeman
#5201
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Robert Edward Freeman is an American philosopher and professor of business administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, particularly known for his work on stakeholder theory and on business ethics.
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William Barrett
#9371
Overall Influence
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
William Christopher Barrett was a professor of philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979, and later at Pace University. Biography Precociously, Barrett began post-secondary studies at the City College of New York when 15 years old. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He was an editor of Partisan Review and later the literary critic of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Barrett wrote philosophical works for nonexperts, including Irrational Man and The Illusion of Technique, which remain in print.
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Mary J. Gregor
#17180
Overall Influence
1928 - 1994 (66 years)
Mary J. Gregor was an American author, translator, and professor. She was a Kant scholar and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at San Diego State University, best known for translating the works of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
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Lewis Gordon
#8230
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness.
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Frederick Sontag
#8596
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Frederick Earl Sontag was a professor of philosophy and author. He taught at Pomona College in Claremont, California from 1952 to 2009, retiring shortly before his death. Biography Sontag served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, becoming a sergeant. He graduated from Stanford University in 1949 with a B.A. , then attended Yale University where he earned an M.A. in 1951 and a Ph.D. in 1952.
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Gillo Dorfles
#8977
Overall Influence
1910 - 2018 (108 years)
Angelo Eugenio "Gillo" Dorfles was an Italian art critic, painter, and philosopher. Biography Born in Trieste to a Gorizian father of Jewish descent and a Genoese mother, Dorfles graduated in medicine, specializing in psychiatry. He was a professor in aesthetics at the University of Trieste, Milan and Cagliari and, in 1948, established the MAC with artists Atanasio Soldati, Galliano Mazzon, Gianni Monnet, and Bruno Munari. His paintings were displayed in two personal exhibitions held in Milan in 1949 and 1950 and also in numerous collective MAC exhibitions in the 1950s. In 1956 Dorfles co-fo...
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John Greco
#19567
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
John Greco is the Robert L. McDevitt and Catherine H. McDevitt Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Before coming to Georgetown, Greco taught at Saint Louis University. Greco received his A.B. from Georgetown University in 1983 and completed his Ph.D. at Brown University in 1989 under Ernest Sosa. His research interests are in epistemology and metaphysics and he has published widely on virtue epistemology, epistemic normativity, skepticism, and Thomas Reid. From 2013 until 2020, he was the Editor of American Philosophical Quarterly. For 2013–15, together with Eleonore Stump, he h...
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John Corvino
#14672
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
John Frank Corvino is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and the dean of the Honors College at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and the author of several books, with a focus on the morality of homosexuality. Corvino is sometimes referred to as "The Gay Moralist", a sobriquet he assumed while writing a column of the same name.
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David Schmidtz
#11614
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.
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Peter Simons
#13716
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Peter Murray Simons, is a British retired philosopher and academic. From 2009 to 2016, he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin; he is now professor emeritus. He is known for his work with Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith on metaphysics and the history of Austrian philosophy. Since 2018 he is visiting professor at the University of Italian Switzerland.
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Bernard d'Espagnat
#10218
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Bernard d'Espagnat was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality. Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality is partially named after him.
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Jay Rosenberg
#22576
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Jay Frank Rosenberg was an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He spent his teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Department of Philosophy in 1966 and was appointed Taylor Grandy Professor of Philosophy in 1987. Rosenberg was a student of Wilfrid Sellars and established his reputation with ten books and over 80 articles in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy . His most commercially successful work, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners, is a standard text in introduc...
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Gregg L. Semenza
#5679
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Gregg Leonard Semenza is a pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had ten research papers r...
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Carlos Santiago Nino
#11597
Overall Influence
1943 - 1993 (50 years)
Carlos Santiago Nino was an Argentine moral, legal and political philosopher. Biography Nino studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and at the University of Oxford, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 with a thesis directed by John Finnis and Tony Honoré.
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Anthony Quinton
#13773
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton, FBA was a British political and moral philosopher, metaphysician, and materialist philosopher of mind. He served as President of Trinity College, Oxford from 1978 to 1987; and as chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990. He is also remembered as a presenter of the BBC Radio programme, Round Britain Quiz.
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William J. Richardson
#17548
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
William John Richardson, S.J. was an American philosopher, who was among the first to write a comprehensive study of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, featuring an important preface by Heidegger himself. In addition to his specialization in Heidegger, Richardson was also, as a trained psychoanalyst, a specialist in the thought of Jacques Lacan. He was a Jesuit priest . He taught philosophy at Fordham University and, beginning in 1981, at Boston College, where he was, at the time of his death, emeritus professor of philosophy. He died in December 2016 in Weston, Massachusetts at the age of 9...
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Karen Neander
#14601
Overall Influence
1954 - 2020 (66 years)
Karen Neander was a philosopher and professor at Duke University. She was known for her work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of action, philosophy of biology, philosophy of neuroscience and cognitive science.
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Michael Tooley
#16892
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Michael Tooley is an American philosopher, now emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, best known for his contributions to metaphysics. Education and career He has a BA from the University of Toronto and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1968. He taught at Stanford University and the Australian National University and since 1992 at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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Kevin Mulligan
#13729
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Kevin Mulligan is a British philosopher, working on ontology, the philosophy of mind, and Austrian philosophy. He is currently Honorary Professor at the University of Geneva, Full Professor at the University of Italian Switzerland, Director of Research at the Institute of Philosophy of Lugano, and member of the Academia Europaea and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. He is also known for his work with Peter Simons and Barry Smith on metaphysics and the history of Austrian philosophy.
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Leonardo Polo
#11288
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Leonardo Polo was a renowned Spanish philosopher best known for his philosophical method called abandonment of the mental limit and the profound philosophical implications and results of the application of this method.
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Roberto Esposito
#8004
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Roberto Esposito is an Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, and professor, notable for his academic research and works on biopolitics. He currently serves as professor of theoretical philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Go to Profile#784
Jessica Wilson
#16072
Overall Influence
Jessica M. Wilson is an American professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on metaphysics, especially on the metaphysics of science and mind, the epistemologies of skepticism, a priori deliberation, and necessity. Wilson was awarded the Lebowitz Prize for excellence in philosophical thought by Phi Beta Kappa in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association.
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Petr Hájek
#12018
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Petr Hájek was a Czech scientist in the area of mathematical logic and a professor of mathematics. Born in Prague, he worked at the Institute of Computer Science at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and as a lecturer at the faculty of mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague and at the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague.
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Stephen Palmquist
#16461
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Stephen Richard Palmquist is an American philosopher, currently living in Los Angeles. He taught philosophy at various universities in Hong Kong from 1987 to 2021. A Patheos article referred to him as "one of the greatest living interpreters of Kant".
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Adam Morton
#17694
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Adam Morton was a Canadian philosopher. Morton's work focused on how we understand one another's behaviour in everyday life, with an emphasis on the role mutual intelligibility plays in cooperative activity. He also wrote on ethics, decision-making, philosophy of language and epistemology. His later work concerned our vocabulary for evaluating and monitoring our thinking. Morton was Professor of Philosophy from 1980 to 2000 at the University of Bristol in the UK and finished his academic career at the University of British Columbia. He was president of the Aristotelian Society during 1998–19...
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Cristina Bicchieri
#3518
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Cristina Bicchieri is an Italian–American philosopher. She is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. She has worked on problems in the philosophy of social science, rational choice and game theory. More recently, her work has focused on the nature and evolution of social norms, and the design of behavioral experiments to test under which conditions norms will be followed.
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Gregory Lip
#26133
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gregory Lip is a clinical researcher and Price-Evans Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine, at the University of Liverpool. He is Director of the Liverpool Centre for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital.
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Arnold Davidson
#8467
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Arnold Ira Davidson is an American philosopher and academic, and the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, History of Science, and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Chicago and a professor at the Università di Pisa in Pisa, Italy.
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Gordon Guyatt
#11395
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Gordon Henry Guyatt is a Canadian physician who is Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact and Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is known for his leadership in evidence-based medicine, a term that first appeared in a single-author paper he published in 1991. Subsequently, a 1992 JAMA article that Guyatt led proved instrumental in bringing the concept of evidence-based medicine to the world's attention.[2] In 2007, The BMJ launched an international election for the most important contributions to healthcare. Evidence-based medicine came 7th, ahead of the computer and medical imaging.
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Nathan Salmon
#18834
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nathan U. Salmon is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic. Life and career Salmon was born January 2, 1951, in Los Angeles to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews of Spanish-Turkish heritage. He is the grandson of archivist Emily Sene and oud player Isaac Sene. Salmon attended Lincoln Elementary School in Torrance, California through eighth grade, where he was a classmate and friend of the child prodigy, James Newton Howard. Salmon graduated from North High School in 1969.
Go to Profile#793
Hans-Joachim Niemann
#12744
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Hans-Joachim Niemann , is a German philosopher and PhD chemist, who has become known especially as a translator and editor of works by Karl Popper, including first editions and first translations. As a scholarly writer, he first published scientific papers, then many essays and several books on Karl Popper's philosophy and Critical Rationalism, including a 400-page Lexicon of Critical Rationalism. His Popper studies helped to establish Karl Popper as a major ethicist and as an important biophilosopher.
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Leo Kofler
#9021
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Leo Kofler was an Austrian-German Marxist sociologist. He ranks with the Marburg politicologist Wolfgang Abendroth and the Frankfurt school theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno among the few well-known Marxist intellectuals in post-war Germany. However, almost nothing of his work was ever translated into English, and he is therefore little known in the English-speaking world. Kofler had his own, distinctive interpretation of Marxism, which connected sociology and history with aesthetics and anthropology.
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Alison Wylie
#15079
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Alison Wylie is a Canadian philosopher of archaeology. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and holds a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of the Social and Historical Sciences.
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David Ellerman
#6083
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David Patterson Ellerman is a philosopher and author who works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, quantum mechanics, and in mathematics. He has written extensively on workplace democracy based on a modern treatment of the labor theory of property and the theory of inalienable rights as rights based on de facto inalienable capacities.
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Luigi Pareyson
#17637
Overall Influence
1918 - 1991 (73 years)
Luigi Pareysón was an Italian philosopher, best known for challenging the positivist and idealist aesthetics of Benedetto Croce in his 1954 monograph, Estetica. Teoria della formatività , which builds on the hermeneutics of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Jay L. Garfield
#9899
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#799
Christina Hoff Sommers
#1765
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys . She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Go to Profile#800
Günter Abel
#21655
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Günter Abel is a German philosopher and former professor for theoretical philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin. Abel studied philosophy, history, romance studies and political science at the University of Marburg and the University of Lausanne. After finishing his PhD thesis on stoicism Abel habilitated in 1981 with a work on Friedrich Nietzsche. Since 1987 he is professor for theoretical philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin. From 1999 to 2001 he was vice-president of the Technical University of Berlin, from 2002 to 2005 he was president of the German Society of Philosophy .
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