Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#901

Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers

#1871

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Philippe Sollers was a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde literary journal Tel Quel , which was published by Le Seuil and ran until 1982. Sollers then created the journal L'Infini, published first by Denoel, then by Gallimard with Sollers remaining as sole editor.

#902

Kuno Lorenz

#15888

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Kuno Lorenz is a German philosopher. He developed a philosophy of dialogue, in connection with the pragmatic theory of action of the Erlangen constructivist school. Lorenz is married to the literary scholar Karin Lorenz-Lindemann.

#903

William C. Roberts

William C. Roberts

#16113

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

William Clifford Roberts was an American physician specializing in cardiac pathology. He was a Master of the American College of Cardiology, a leading cardiovascular pathologist, and the former editor of both the American Journal of Cardiology and the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings.

#904

Rein Raud

#8092

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Rein Raud is an Estonian scholar and author. Early life He was born in 1961 in the family of Eno Raud and Aino Pervik, both children's authors. He is the eldest of three children. His younger brother Mihkel Raud is a playwright, television personality, singer, guitarist, journalist and member of the Estonian Parliament; his sister Piret Raud is an artist and translator. He is the grandson of playwright, poet and writer Mart Raud.

#905

Babette Babich

#19008

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Babette Babich is an American philosopher who writes from a continental perspective on aesthetics, philosophy of science, especially Nietzsche's, and technology, especially Heidegger's and Günther Anders, in addition to critical and cultural theory.

#906

Oliver Leaman

#10991

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Oliver Leaman is an American professor of philosophy and Zantker Professor of Judaic studies at the University of Kentucky, where he has been teaching since 2000. He specialized in the history of Islamic, Jewish, and Eastern philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1979.

#907

Elliott Mendelson

#13891

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Elliott Mendelson was an American logician. He was a professor of mathematics at Queens College of the City University of New York, and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was Jr. Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1956–58.

#908

Volker Gerhardt

Volker Gerhardt

#21248

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Volker Gerhardt is a German philosopher. He specializes in ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics and theology. His historical studies are centered on Plato, Kant and Nietzsche but have also dealt with Hegel, Marx, Jaspers, Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt and others.

#909

Eva Kittay

#16007

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Eva Feder Kittay is an American philosopher. She is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Her primary interests include feminist philosophy, ethics, social and political theory, metaphor, and the application of these disciplines to disability studies. Kittay has also attempted to bring philosophical concerns into the public spotlight, including leading The Women's Committee of One Hundred in 1995, an organization that opposed the perceived punitive nature of the social welfare reforms taking place in the United States at the time.

#910

Richard Taruskin

#3061

Overall Influence

1945 - 2022 (77 years)

Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of p...

#911

Kent Bach

#14982

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Kent Bach is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, linguistics and epistemology. He is the author of three books: Exit-existentialism: A philosophy of self-awareness, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, and Thought and Reference published by Wadsworth, the MIT Press, and Oxford University Press, respectively.

#912

Jacob Golomb

#18505

Overall Influence

1947 - 2023 (76 years)

Jacob Golomb was an Israeli philosopher. He was professor of philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Golomb specialised in continental philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature; Philosophy of Zionism and Jewish modern philosophy. Professor Golomb was acting as the Philosophical Editor of the Hebrew University Magnes Press and was a member of its academic committee.

#913

Jason Brennan

#6523

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is currently the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

#914

Peter Achinstein

#15469

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Peter Achinstein is an American philosopher of science at Johns Hopkins University. Biography Achinstein is the son of Betty and economist Asher Achinstein. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard with a dissertation on Carnap's theory of probability. It was the German philosopher Carl G. Hempel, in a visit to Harvard in 1953–4 , who motivated him to pursue philosophy of science. Upon getting a Harvard Traveling Fellowship, Achinstein spent a year in Oxford in 1959 working under the guidance of P. F. Strawson. In Oxford he attended seminars and lectures delivered by Gilbert Ryle, A.J. Ayer, and J.L.

#915

Zenon Pylyshyn

#2229

Overall Influence

1937 - 2022 (85 years)

Zenon Walter Pylyshyn was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He developed visual indexing theory which hypothesizes a pre-conceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. His very influential multiple object tracking experiment methodology emerged from this work.

#916

Dewi Zephaniah Phillips

Dewi Zephaniah Phillips

#20594

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

Dewi Zephaniah Phillips , known as D. Z. Phillips or simply DZ, was a Welsh philosopher. He was a leading proponent of the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. He had an academic career spanning five decades, and at the time of his death he held the Danforth Chair in Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, California, and was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swansea University.

#917

David Macarthur

#21881

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art . He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

#918

Martin Rhonheimer

#14413

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Martin Rhonheimer is a Swiss political philosophy professor and priest of the Catholic personal prelature Opus Dei. he is teaching professor at the Opus Dei-affiliated Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

#919

Martin Nakata

#14908

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Martin Nakata is an Australian academic, researcher and scholar in the field of Indigenous education, knowledge, and studies. He is the first aboriginal/indigenous person from the Torres Strait Islands to obtain a doctoral degree. He is also a proponent of indigenous standpoint theory. As of 2021, he is Deputy Vice-Chancellor of James Cook University. In 2020 he was conferred with Member of the Order of Australia for "significant service to tertiary education, and to learning outcomes for Indigenous students". An asteroid in the Koronis family has been named in his honour as 7547 Martinnakata...

#920

Joseph Cropsey

#9489

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Joseph Cropsey was an American political philosopher and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago, where he was also associate director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy.

#921

Divya Dwivedi

#11259

Overall Influence

Divya Dwivedi is an Indian philosopher and author. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work includes a focus on philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, and the political thought of Gandhi. She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics.

#922

Paul Gochet

#15446

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Paul Gochet was a Belgian logician, philosopher, and emeritus professor of the University of Liège. His research was mainly in the fields of logic and analytic philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his works on Quine's philosophy.

#923

John Broome

#11377

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John Broome is a British philosopher and economist. He was the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Biography Broome was educated at the University of Cambridge, at the University of London and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in economics. Before arriving at Oxford he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and, prior to that, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has held visiting posts at the University of Virginia, the Aust...

#924

Santiago Zabala

#16981

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Santiago Zabala is a philosopher and ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University. His books have been translated into several languages and his articles have been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets.

#925

Alan Chalmers

#12508

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Alan Francis Chalmers is a British-Australian philosopher of science and associate professor at the University of Sydney. His son, David Chalmers, is also a noted philosopher, working in philosophy of mind at NYU.

#926

William O. Stephens

#13440

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

William O. Stephens , is an American philosopher and scholar of Stoicism. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Creighton University after retiring from teaching at their Omaha Campus in 2020. Biography Stephens was born in Lafayette, Indiana and grew up in West Lafayette where he attended West Lafayette Senior High School and began his study of ancient civilizations and Latin. He studied Philosophy at the College of Wooster for two years before transferring to Earlham College, where he earned his undergraduate degree. Stephens completed his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under Charles H.

#927

Jeff McMahan

#17049

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014. Education and career McMahan completed a B.A. degree in English literature at the University of the South . He completed a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, then did graduate work in philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his M.A. at the University of Oxford. He was offered a research studentship at St. John's College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1983. He studied first under Jonathan Glover an...

#928

Amia Srinivasan

#15181

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher noted for her work in epistemology and feminist philosophy. Since January 2020, she has been Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.

#929

Dale Jamieson

#21799

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Dale Jamieson is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at New York University, a scholar of environmental ethics and animal rights, and an analyst of climate change discourse. He also serves as a faculty affiliate for the NYU School of Law and as director of NYU's Animal Studies Initiative, which was funded by Brad Goldberg with a $1 million donation in 2010. In addition to his affiliation with the NYU Departments of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Jamieson also holds positions at The Dickson Poon School of Law and at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia.

#930

Piergiorgio Odifreddi

Piergiorgio Odifreddi

#11991

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Piergiorgio Odifreddi is an Italian mathematician, logician, student of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.

#931

Lawrence Stepelevich

#20822

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Lawrence S. Stepelevich was an Americann philosopher associated with a renewed interest in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, with less emphasis placed on Karl Marx's interpretations than had previously been the case. Stepelevich also wrote on the works of Max Stirner.

#932

Carolyn Korsmeyer

#19124

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carolyn Korsmeyer is an author and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo in New York. She is generally recognized for her study and research on aesthetics, feminism, and emotion theory.

#933

Simon Glendinning

Simon Glendinning

#23017

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Simon Glendinning is an English philosopher. Glendinning is Professor of European Philosophy and Head of department in the European Institute at the London School of Economics. Academic career Glendinning studied philosophy at the University of Oxford and at the University of York, since which he has held a series of positions:1993–1997: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Kent1997–2004: Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Reading2004–2013: Reader in European Philosophy, European Institute, LSE2014–present: Professor of European Philosophy, European Institut...

#934

Gila Sher

#24669

Overall Influence

Gila Sher is an American logician and professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She has worked extensively in the theory of truth and philosophy of logic. Sher is a leading advocate of foundational holism, a holistic theory of epistemology.

#935

Mark Steiner

#14384

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Mark Steiner was an American-born Israeli professor of philosophy. He taught philosophy of mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Steiner died after contracting COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

#936

Susan Sherwin

#17422

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Susan Sherwin is a Canadian philosopher. Her pioneering work has shaped feminist theory, ethics and bioethics, and she is considered one of the world's foremost feminist ethicists. Education Sherwin received a B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from York University and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University . Her dissertation, “Moral Foundations of Feminism”, was written under the supervision of Thomas Schwartz, and was the first dissertation in the United States on feminist ethics. Sherwin also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Moral Problems of Medicine Project at Case ...

#937

Günter Grass

#856

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig . As a teenager, he was drafted into the military and served from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS. He was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.

#938

Lucien Sève

#13513

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Lucien Sève was a French philosopher, communist and political activist. He was an active member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 2010. His 1969 work Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité has been translated into 25 different languages. Sève died on 23 March 2020 of Coronavirus disease 2019

#939

Alasdair Urquhart

Alasdair Urquhart

#20952

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Alasdair Ian Fenton Urquhart is a Scottish–Canadian philosopher and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has made contributions to the field of logic, especially non-classical logic. One of his ideas is proving the undecidability of the relevance logic R. He also published papers in theoretical computer science venues, mostly on mathematical logic topics of relevance to computer science.

#940

Sherry Turkle

#1184

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

#941

Eliot Deutsch

#22479

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Eliot Sandler Deutsch was a philosopher, teacher, and writer. He made important contributions to the understanding and appreciation of Eastern philosophies in the West through his many works on comparative philosophy and aesthetics. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

#942

Craig Callender

#10907

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Craig Callender is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His main areas of research are philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and metaphysics. Education and career Callender obtained his PhD in 1997 from Rutgers University with a thesis entitled Time's Arrow under the supervision of Robert Weingard. From 1996-2000, he worked in the Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Currently, he is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego where he is also the co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego.

#943

Richard Doll

#2227

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of :lung cancer and :heart disease.

#944

Murray Murphey

#20436

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Murray Griffin Murphey was an American historian and philosopher. A native of Colorado Springs, Colorado born to Bradford and Margaret Murphey on February 22, 1928, Murray Murphey graduated from Harvard University and earned a doctorate from Yale University. He began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania as a Rockefeller Fellow shortly after completing his studies in 1954. Murphey joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1956, and became a full professor in 1966. He retired in 2000. Over the course of his career, Murphy earned awards from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the American Studies Association.

#945

Dean Zimmerman

#20902

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dean W. Zimmerman is an American professor of philosophy at Rutgers University specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Education and career Zimmerman received his bachelor's degree from Mankato State University in 1987 in French, philosophy, and English. He went on to receive a Master of Arts degree from Brown University in 1990 and then a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the same institution in 1992, where he worked with Jaegwon Kim and Roderick Chisholm. He taught at the University of Notre Dame and Syracuse University prior to joining Rutgers University, where he is also now Director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.

#946

Lorraine Code

#10509

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Lorraine Code is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her principal area of research is feminist epistemology and the politics of knowledge.

#947

J. B. Schneewind

#18818

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Jerome Borges Schneewind is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Life He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Schneewind taught at the University of Chicago, Princeton, Yale University, the University of Pittsburgh and Hunter College CUNY where he was also Provost before coming to Hopkins as chair of the philosophy department in 1981. He has also taught at Leicester, Stanford, and Helsinki. He taught courses on the history of ethics, types of ethical theory, the British empiricists, Kant's ethics, and utopian t...

#948

Keith Ansell-Pearson

#15777

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Keith Ansell-Pearson is a British philosopher specialising in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University. Ansell-Pearson is the author of numerous books including Germinal Life, Viroid Life and Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual.

#949

Simon Frith

#2610

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Simon Webster Frith is a British sociomusicologist and former rock critic who specializes in popular music culture. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at University of Edinburgh. Career As a student, he read PPE at Oxford and earned a doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley. He is the author of many influential books, including The Sociology of Rock , Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll , Art into Pop , Music for Pleasure: Essays on the Sociology of Pop , and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music . He has also co-edited key anthologies in the interdiscip...

#950

Andrew Wakefield

Andrew Wakefield

#716

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around the 1998 study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world. He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London and b...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions