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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,

#751

Étienne-Gabriel Morelly

1717 - 1778 (61 years)

Étienne-Gabriel Morelly was a French utopian thinker, philosopher and novelist. An otherwise "obscure tax official", and teacher, Morelly wrote two books on education, a critique of Montesquieu and The Code of Nature, which was published anonymously in France in 1755. This book, initially attributed to philosophes including Rousseau and Diderot, criticised contemporary society, postulated a social order without avarice, and proposed a constitution intended to lead to an egalitarian society without property, marriage, church or police.

#752

Pascal Engel

#5975

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Pascal Engel is a French philosopher, working on the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of logic. He was a professor of philosophy of logic at the Sorbonne. He currently works at the University of Geneva, where he collaborates with, among others, Kevin Mulligan. He is a member of Institut Nicod.

#753

Kostas Axelos

#3904

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Kostas Axelos was a Greek-French philosopher. Biography Axelos was born in Athens in 1924 to a doctor and a woman from an old Athenian bourgeois family, and attended high school at the French Institute and the Varvakeio High School. He enrolled in the School of Law of the University of Athens in order to pursue studies in law and economics due to dissatisfaction with the philosophy taught at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, but did not attend. With the onset of World War II Axelos got involved in politics. Then during the German and Italian occupation he participated in t...

#754

Allen Buchanan

#3712

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Allen Edward Buchanan is a moral, political and legal philosopher. As of 2022, he held multiple academic positions: Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University, Visiting Professor of the philosophy of international law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, London, and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University.

#755

Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro

1830 - 1903 (73 years)

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

#756

Ludwig Landgrebe

#6337

Overall Influence

1902 - 1991 (89 years)

Ludwig Landgrebe was an Austrian phenomenologist and Professor of philosophy. He is the grandfather of award-winning German actor Max Landgrebe. Life Landgrebe studied philosophy, history and geography in Vienna. Influenced by Max Scheler, he continued his studies in Freiburg. In 1923 Landgrebe became assistant to Edmund Husserl . After the approval of his doctoral dissertation, Landgrebe transferred to Prague for his postdoctoral qualification under Oskar Kraus. From 1939 he collaborated with Eugen Fink at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven. Landgrebe's wife, Ilse Maria Goldschmidt, was of Jewish ancestry and sister of the writer Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.

#757

Hillel Steiner

#5540

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Hillel Isaac Steiner is a Canadian political philosopher and is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 1999.

#758

Guo Xiang

252 - 312 (60 years)

Guo Xiang is credited with the first and most important revision of the text known as the Zhuangzi which, along with the Tao Te Ching, forms the textual and philosophical basis of the Taoist school of thought. He was also a scholar of xuanxue.

#759

John Martin Fischer

#7244

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

#760

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

1463 - 1494 (31 years)

Giovanni Pico dei conti della Mirandola e della Concordia , known as Pico della Mirandola, was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic Reformation". He was the founder of the tradition of Christian Kabbalah, a key tenet of early modern Western esotericism.

#761

Strato of Lampsacus

Strato of Lampsacus

335 BC - 269 BC (66 years)

Strato of Lampsacus was a Peripatetic philosopher, and the third director of the Lyceum after the death of Theophrastus. He devoted himself especially to the study of natural science, and increased the naturalistic elements in Aristotle's thought to such an extent, that he denied the need for an active god to construct the universe, preferring to place the government of the universe in the unconscious force of nature alone.

#762

Peter Marshall

#4736

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter Hugh Marshall is an English author of over a dozen works of philosophy, history, biography, travel writing, and poetry. He is best known for his 1991 history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, and his 1984 biography of William Godwin.

#763

Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi

1798 - 1837 (39 years)

Count Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist, and philologist. He is considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the principals of literary romanticism; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition—of sensuous and materialist inspiration—has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century but routinely compared ...

#764

Pamela Sue Anderson

#8144

Overall Influence

1955 - 2017 (62 years)

Pamela Sue Anderson was an American philosopher who specialized in philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy and continental philosophy. In 2007 she was an Official Fellow, Tutor in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Dean, and Women's Advisor of Regent's Park College in the University of Oxford. Her former students include feminist philosopher Hanneke Canters.

#765

Frans H. van Eemeren

#4256

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Frans Hendrik van Eemeren is a Dutch scholar, professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. He is noted for his Pragma-dialectics theory, an argumentation theory which he developed with Rob Grootendorst from the early 1980s onwards. He has published numerous books and papers, including Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse.

#766

Michael Ruse

#2018

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. Ruse currently teaches at Florida State University.

#767

Dugald Stewart

1753 - 1828 (75 years)

Dugald Stewart was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment, he was renowned as a populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and of Adam Smith. Trained in mathematics, medicine and philosophy, his lectures at the University of Edinburgh were widely disseminated by his many influential students. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In most contemporary documents he is referred to as Prof Dougal Stewart.

#768

Ralph Barton Perry

1876 - 1957 (81 years)

Ralph Barton Perry was an American philosopher. He was a strident moral idealist who stated in 1909 that, to him, idealism meant "to interpret life consistently with ethical, scientific, and metaphysical truth." Perry's viewpoints on religion stressed the notion that religious thinking possessed legitimacy should it exist within a framework accepting of human reason and social progress.

#769

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

1828 - 1882 (54 years)

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti , generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti , was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti inspired the next generation of artists and writers, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in particular. His work also influenced the European Symbolistss and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

#770

Jan Patočka

1907 - 1977 (70 years)

Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher. Having studied in Prague, Paris, Berlin, and Freiburg, he was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Freiburg he also developed a lifelong philosophical friendship with Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink. Patočka worked in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for almost his entire career, but never joined the Communist Party and was affected by persecution, which ended in his death as a dissident spokesperson of Charter 77.

#771

Maine de Biran

1766 - 1824 (58 years)

François-Pierre-Gontier de Biran , usually known as Maine de Biran , was a French philosopher. Life Maine de Biran was born at Bergerac; died at Paris, 16 July, 1824. The name Maine he assumed from an estate called Le Maine, near Mouleydier. After studying with distinction at Périgueux, he entered the life guards of King Louis XVI of France, and was present at Versailles during the events of October 1789.

#772

Mark Poster

#3496

Overall Influence

1941 - 2012 (71 years)

Mark Poster was Professor Emeritus of History and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he also taught in the Critical Theory Emphasis. He was pivotal to "bringing French critical theory to the U.S., and went on to analyse contemporary media."

#773

Dallas Willard

#3946

Overall Influence

1935 - 2013 (78 years)

Dallas Albert Willard was an American philosopher also known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. Much of his work in philosophy was related to phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, many of whose writings he translated into English for the first time.

#774

Jesse Prinz

#1842

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jesse J. Prinz is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and Director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

#775

Ferdinand Alquié

1906 - 1985 (79 years)

Ferdinand Alquié was a French philosopher and member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques from 1978. In the years 1931 to 1945 he was a professor in various provincial and Parisian lycees, and later at the University of Montpellier and Sorbonne where he worked until he retired in 1979.

#776

Keith Yandell

#8167

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Keith Edward Yandell was a philosopher of religion who became notable by his teaching and his writings. Teaching Yandell began teaching in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1966. He had become the Julius R. Weinberg Professor of Philosophy when he retired in 2011.

#777

A.C. Grayling

#3953

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

#778

Crates of Thebes

Crates of Thebes

365 BC - 285 BC (80 years)

Crates of Thebes was a Greek Cynic philosopher, the principal pupil of Diogenes of Sinope and the husband of Hipparchia of Maroneia who lived in the same manner as him. Crates gave away his money to live a life of poverty on the streets of Athens. Respected by the people of Athens, he is remembered for being the teacher of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Various fragments of Crates' teachings survive, including his description of the ideal Cynic state.

#779

John Lachs

#7727

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

John Lachs was a Hungarian-born American philosopher. He was Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, where he began teaching in 1967. Lachs received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1961. His primary focus was on American philosophy and German Idealism.

#780

Georges Palante

Georges Palante

1862 - 1925 (63 years)

Georges Toussaint Léon Palante was a French philosopher and sociologist. Palante advocated aristocratic individualist ideas similar to Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He was opposed to Émile Durkheim's holism, promoting methodological individualism instead.

#781

R. G. Collingwood

R. G. Collingwood

1889 - 1943 (54 years)

Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art and the posthumously published The Idea of History .

#782

Mary Anne Warren

#9110

Overall Influence

1946 - 2010 (64 years)

Mary Anne Warren was an American writer and philosophy professor, noted for her writings on the issue of abortion and animal rights. Biography Warren was a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University for many years. Her essays have sometimes been required readings in academic courses dealing with the abortion debate and they are frequently cited in major publications like Peter Singer's The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature and Bernard Gert's Bioethics: A Systematic Approach. She was sometimes described as a feminist, largely due to her pro-choice writings.

#783

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

1873 - 1962 (89 years)

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being , on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.

#784

Julia Annas

#9265

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Julia Elizabeth Annas is a British philosopher who has taught in the United States for the last quarter-century. She is Regents Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Arizona. Education and career Annas graduated from Oxford University in 1968 with a B.A. and from Harvard University with an A.M. and a Ph.D. . She was a Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh's College, Oxford for fifteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1986, where she taught until her retirement, apart for one year as a professor at Columbia University.

#785

Eugenio Garin

#5091

Overall Influence

1909 - 2004 (95 years)

Eugenio Garin was an Italian philosopher and Renaissance historian. He was recognised as an authority on the cultural history of the Renaissance. Born at Rieti, Garin studied philosophy at the University of Florence, graduating in 1929, and after a period as professor of philosophy at the liceo scientifico Stanislao Cannizzaro in Palermo and the University of Cagliari, Garin began teaching at his alma mater in 1949 until 1974, then moving to the Scuola Normale di Pisa until his retirement in 1984. The Graduate School of Historical Studies at San Marino was inaugurated with a public lecture by Eugenio Garin on 30 September 1989.

#786

Richard Sylvan

#9893

Overall Influence

1935 - 1996 (61 years)

Richard Sylvan was a New Zealand–born philosopher, logician, and environmentalist. Biography Sylvan was born Francis Richard Routley in Levin, New Zealand, and his early work is cited with this surname. He studied at Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand , and then Princeton University, before taking positions successively at several Australian institutions, including the University of Sydney. From 1971 until his death in Bali, Indonesia, he was a fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra.

#787

Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile

1875 - 1944 (69 years)

Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher, educator, and politician. Described by himself and by Benito Mussolini as the "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian Fascism, and ghostwrote part of "The Doctrine of Fascism" with Mussolini. He was involved in the resurgence of Hegelian idealism in Italian philosophy and also devised his own system of thought, which he called "actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition".

#788

Robert Hooke

1635 - 1703 (68 years)

Robert Hooke FRS was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of the first two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that he built himself, the other scientist being Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1674. An impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood, he found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London's great fire of 1666. Hooke was also a member of the Royal Society and since 1662 was its curator of experiments. Hooke was also Professor of Geometry a...

#789

Friedrich Albert Lange

Friedrich Albert Lange

1828 - 1875 (47 years)

Friedrich Albert Lange was a German philosopher and sociologist. Biography Lange was born in Wald, near Solingen, the son of the theologian, Johann Peter Lange. He was educated at Duisburg, Zürich and Bonn, where he distinguished himself in gymnastics as much as academically. In 1852 he became a schoolmaster at Cologne; in 1853 Privatdozent in philosophy at Bonn; and in 1858 schoolmaster at Duisburg, resigning when the government forbade schoolmasters to take part in political activities.

#790

Brand Blanshard

1892 - 1987 (95 years)

Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of reason and rationalism. A powerful polemicist, by all accounts he comported himself with courtesy and grace in philosophical controversies and exemplified the "rational temper" he advocated.

#791

Muhammad Iqbal

1877 - 1938 (61 years)

Sir Muhammad Iqbal , was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, and politician, whose poetry in the Urdu language is considered among the greatest of the twentieth century, and whose vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British-ruled India was to animate the impulse for Pakistan. He is commonly referred to by the honorific Allama .

#792

Stanley Rosen

#6014

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Stanley Rosen was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.

#793

David Abram

#2635

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World , for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics ; his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as the online magazine Emergence, Or...

#794

John M. Dillon

#5548

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Myles Dillon is an Irish classicist and philosopher who was Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin between 1980 and 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens on 15 June 2010. Dillon's area of research lies in the history of Platonism from the Old Academy to the Renaissance, and also Early Christianity.

#795

Michael Tye

#9389

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Michael Tye is a British philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind. Education and career Tye completed his undergraduate education at Oxford University in England, studying first physics and then physics and philosophy. He went on to complete a PhD in philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Before moving to Texas, Tye taught at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia and Temple University in Philadelphia proper. He was also a visiting professor at King's Co...

#796

Philipp Mainländer

Philipp Mainländer

1841 - 1876 (35 years)

Philipp Mainländer was a German philosopher and poet. Born Philipp Batz, he later changed his name to "Mainländer" in homage to his hometown, Offenbach am Main. In his central work — according to Theodor Lessing, "perhaps the most radical system of pessimism known to philosophical literature" — Mainländer proclaims that life is worthless, and that "the will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."

#797

Bernard Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville

1670 - 1733 (63 years)

Bernard Mandeville, or Bernard de Mandeville , was an Anglo-Dutch philosopher, political economist and satirist. Born in Rotterdam, he lived most of his life in England and used English for most of his published works. He became famous for The Fable of the Bees.

#798

Alexander Bain

1818 - 1903 (85 years)

Alexander Bain was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist in the British school of empiricism and a prominent and innovative figure in the fields of psychology, linguistics, logic, moral philosophy and education reform. He founded Mind, the first ever journal of psychology and analytical philosophy, and was the leading figure in establishing and applying the scientific method to psychology. Bain was the inaugural Regius Chair in Logic and Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, where he also held Professorships in Moral Philosophy and English Literature and was twice elected Lord...

#799

Francisco J. Ayala

Francisco J. Ayala

#2009

Overall Influence

1934 - 2023 (89 years)

Francisco José Ayala Pereda was a Spanish-American evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and Catholic priest who was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, Davis.

#800

Hypatia

360 - 415 (55 years)

Hypatia was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although preceded by Pandrosion, another Alexandrine female mathematician, she is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's ...

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