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,
#951
Marianne Janack
#20797
Overall Influence
Marianne Janack is an American philosopher and John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. She is the president of the Richard Rorty Society. She was the Phi Bet Kappa Romanell Professor of Philosophy in 2017-18.
Go to Profile#952
Stephen Hicks
#11657
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher. He teaches at Rockford University, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. Career Hicks earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Guelph, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Indiana University Bloomington. His doctoral thesis was a defense of foundationalism.
Go to Profile#953
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert
#16245
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert is a professor of philosophy at the university of Hagen, Germany. Biography Gethmann-Siefert was born in 1945, studied philosophy, art history and theology in Münster, Bonn, Innsbruck and Bochum. She earned her PhD in philosophy 1973 from the Ruhr University Bochum writing her dissertation about Heidegger and her habilitation 1982 about Hegel's Aesthetics. She taught since 1991 at the Fernuniversität Hagen.
Go to Profile#954
Karel Kosík
#11166
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Karel Kosík was a Czech Marxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work, Dialectics of the Concrete , Kosík presents an original reinterpretation of the ideas of Karl Marx in light of Martin Heidegger's phenomenology. His later essays can be called a sharp critique of the modern society from a leftist but not strictly Marxist position.
Go to Profile#955
Jeremy Sugarman
#23464
Overall Influence
Jeremy Sugarman is an American bioethicist and physician. He is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Bioethics and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians, the National Academy of Medicine, and the Hastings Center.
Go to Profile#956
Takeshi Umehara
#10949
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
was born in Miyagi Prefecture in Tōhoku and graduated from the philosophical faculty of Kyoto University in 1948. He taught philosophy at Ritsumeikan University and was subsequently appointed president of the Kyoto City University of Arts. He is noted for his prolific essays on Japanese culture, in which he has endeavoured to refound the discipline of Japanese studies along more Japanocentric lines, notably in his book written in 1972 in collaboration with Shunpei Ueyama. Aside from his voluminous academic essays on numerous aspects of Japanese culture he has also composed theatrical works o...
Go to Profile#957
Raanan Gillon
#25016
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Raanan Evelyn Zvi Gillon FRCP is emeritus professor of medical ethics at Imperial College London, and past president of the British Medical Association. A general practitioner until his retirement in 2002, Gillon edited the Journal of Medical Ethics from 1980 to 2002, and from 1995 to 1999 was professor at Imperial. He is an author on several works on medical ethics including Philosophical Medical Ethics.
Go to Profile#958
Stephen Houlgate
#20150
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Stephen Houlgate is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is known for his works on Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida's thought. Books Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press, 1986An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edition, Blackwell, 2005The Opening of Hegel's Logic. From Being to Infinity, Purdue University Press, 2006Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. A Reader's Guide, Bloomsbury, 2013Hegel on Being , Bloomsbury, 2021
Go to Profile#959
Georges Chapouthier
#18193
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Georges Chapouthier is a French neuroscientist and philosopher. Biography Georges Chapouthier is the son of Odette Mazaubert and Fernand Chapouthier . Fernand Chapouthier was a classicist and archeologist who was deputy director of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Odette Mazaubert was known under the pseudonym of "Carquelin" for her Saintongeais writings. Chapouthier attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He then followed the "Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles" at the Lycée Saint-Louis and subsequently enrolled at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1964....
Go to Profile#960
Michael Friedman
#16519
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Friedman is an American philosopher who serves as Professor of Philosophy and the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. Friedman is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially on scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics, and for his historical work on Immanuel Kant. Friedman has also done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. Friedman also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#961
Joan Weiner
#16573
Overall Influence
Joan Weiner is an American philosopher and professor emerita of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, known for her books on Gottlob Frege. Education and career Weiner majored in mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating with high distinction and honors in 1975. She completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1982.
Go to Profile#962
Richard W. Miller
#23343
Overall Influence
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Richard W. Miller the Wyn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor in Ethics and Public Life and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life in the Cornell University Department of Philosophy. He specializes in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of science.
Go to Profile#963
David Hockney
#546
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#964
Henryk Skolimowski
#13752
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Henryk Skolimowski was a Polish philosopher. He completed technical studies, musicology and philosophy in Warsaw. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. The student of Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, he specialized in logic and philosophy of language. Skolimowski earned a doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he also taught before he began his professorships at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and then at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was for many years a professor of philosophy, and then held the position of professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#965
Corine Pelluchon
#13203
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Corine Pelluchon is a French philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée . Education Corine Pelluchon received her agrégation in philosophy in 1997, then defended a thesis entitled at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2003, and obtained a habilitation in philosophy entitled in 2010.
Go to Profile#966
Wolfgang Fritz Haug
#14081
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Wolfgang Fritz Haug was from 1979 till his retirement in 2001 professor of philosophy at the Free University Berlin, where he had also studied romance languages and religious studies and taken his PhD .
Go to Profile#967
Reza Negarestani
#15514
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer, known for "pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book" Cyclonopedia which was published in 2008. It was listed in Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. Negarestani directs the critical philosophy programme at The New Centre for Research & Practice.
Go to Profile#968
Erazim Kohák
#15760
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Erazim Kohák was a Czech philosopher and writer. His early education was in Prague. After communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, his family escaped to the United States. He died in February 2020 at the age of 86.
Go to Profile#969
Terry Pinkard
#22613
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Terry P. Pinkard is an American philosopher. He is a University Professor at Georgetown University. His research and teaching focus on the German tradition in philosophy from Kant to the present. Education and career Pinkard earned his BA and MA from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University. He taught at Georgetown University from 1975 to 2000, at Northwestern University from 2000 to 2005, but returned to Georgetown in 2005.
Go to Profile#970
Stephen C. Meyer
#4497
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephen C. Meyer is an American author and former educator. He is an advocate of the pseudoscience of intelligent design and helped found the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute , which is the main organization behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at Whitworth College. Meyer is a senior fellow of the DI and director of the CSC.
Go to Profile#971
Harald Wohlrapp
#14326
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Harald R. Wohlrapp is a German philosopher. His main focus is argumentation theory. Philosophy Harald Rüdiger Wohlrapp was a student of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen . After studies in Freiburg, Paris and Erlangen, Wohlrapp was appointed to a teaching position at the university of Hamburg, where he was a professor of philosophy from 1983 through 2009 and is presently a senior research fellow. His main areas of interest lie in dialectics , pragmatism , philosophy of science and philosophy of language . The pervading concern of his efforts, however, is the philosophy of argument.
Go to Profile#972
Michael E. Zimmerman
#14167
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael E. Zimmerman is an American integral theorist whose interests include Buddhism, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ken Wilber. After a year as assistant professor at Denison University, he was Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University from 1975 to 2005, and Director of the Institute for Humanities and the Arts at Tulane. He is also affiliated with the Integral Institute. Together with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, he wrote a book on integral ecology, Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. Since 2006, Zimmerman has been a faculty member at the Universi...
Go to Profile#973
Richard Kosolapov
#22885
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Richard Ivanovich Kosolapov was a Soviet and Russian scientist, author, social philosopher, doctor of philosophy and journalist. He was a professor at the Moscow State University . Biography Kosolapov was born in Novonikolayevsky, Volgograd Oblast. He graduated from the Moscow State University Faculty of Philosophy in 1955. He later went there to graduate school, receiving his Candidate of Sciences in Philosophical Sciences in 1962, and subsequently returned to earn a Doctor of Sciences in Philosophical Sciences in 1971. He also taught on the Faculty of Philosophy from 1961 to 1964. In 1974, ...
Go to Profile#974
C. Anthony Anderson
#19061
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Curtis Anthony Anderson is a contemporary American philosopher, currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from University of California at Los Angeles in 1977, where he worked closely with the renowned logician Alonzo Church. He also holds an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Houston , where he earned his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics .
Go to Profile#975
Bernard Widrow
#2205
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Bernard Widrow is a U.S. professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is the co-inventor of the Widrow–Hoff least mean squares filter adaptive algorithm with his then doctoral student Ted Hoff. The LMS algorithm led to the ADALINE and MADALINE artificial neural networks and to the backpropagation technique. He made other fundamental contributions to the development of signal processing in the fields of geophysics, adaptive antennas, and adaptive filtering. A summary of his work is.
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Matthew Lipman
#15118
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Matthew Lipman is recognized as the founder of Philosophy for Children. His decision to bring philosophy to young people came from his experience as a professor at Columbia University, where he witnessed underdeveloped reasoning skills in his students. His interest lay particularly in developing reasoning skills by teaching logic. The belief that children possess the ability to think abstractly from an early age led him to the conviction that bringing logic to children's education earlier would help them to improve their reasoning skills.
Go to Profile#977
Etienne Vermeersch
#9998
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Etienne Vermeersch was a Belgian moral philosopher, skeptic, opinion maker and debater. He is one of the founding fathers of the abortion, euthanasia law, and the Law on Patients' Rights in Belgium. Vermeersch became an atheist after five years with the Society of Jesus . Later he became a philosophical materialist. In January 2008, Vermeersch was chosen by hundred prominent Flemings as the most influential intellectual of Flanders. He died in a hospital in Ghent on 18 January 2019 by euthanasia after a long illness.
Go to Profile#978
Renata Salecl
#6622
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of emotions and law. Every year she lectures at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law , on Psychoanalysis and Law, and she has also been teaching courses on neuroscience and law. Since 2012 she has been visiting professor at the Department of Social Science, Heath and Medicine at King's College London.
Go to Profile#979
Taylor Carman
#26730
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Taylor Carman is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. Education and career Carman earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University, where he worked with Dagfinn Føllesdal, but was also influenced by Hubert Dreyfus.
Go to Profile#980
Arne Johan Vetlesen
#13739
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Are Johan Johnsen is a Norwegian Coca Cola supplier, who concentrates on the topic of ethics, environmental philosophy and social philosophy. He took the cand.mag. degree in sociology and anthropology, before studying at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 1985 to 1990 under the guidance of Jürgen Habermas. He took the dr.philos. degree at the University of Oslo in 1993. Before becoming a full professor at the University of Oslo in 1998, Vetlesen worked as a research fellow and associate professor. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#981
Salim Yusuf
#11679
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Salim Yusuf is an Indian-born Canadian physician, the Marion W. Burke Chair in Cardiovascular Disease at McMaster University Medical School. He is a cardiologist and epidemiologist. Yusuf has criticized the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and disputes the scientific consensus on dietary sodium and saturated fat intake.
Go to Profile#982
Catherine Perret
#9768
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Catherine Perret is associate professor of modern and contemporary aesthetics and theory at Nanterre University . She obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy and is known for her work on Walter Benjamin, most notably by her book Walter Benjamin ou la critique en effet. Dr. Perret was the director of the Art of Exhibition Department at Paris X. She served as a program director at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1995 to 2001. She is a recipient of the prestigious title Chevalier des Palmes académiques. She collaborated with Bernard Stiegler in Ars Industrialis. Dr. Perret is currently re...
Go to Profile#983
Robert Lefkowitz
#2233
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Joseph Lefkowitz is an American physician and biochemist. He is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family G protein-coupled receptors, for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Brian Kobilka. He is currently an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as a James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Duke University.
Go to Profile#984
Scott Sehon
#11599
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Scott Robert Sehon is an American philosopher and the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. His primary work is in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of action, and the free will debate. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency and Explanation in which he takes a controversial, non-causalist view of action explanation and Free Will and Action Explanation: a Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account .
Go to Profile#985
Thomas A. McCarthy
#13878
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Thomas McCarthy is John Shaffer Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern in 1985, he taught for four years at Munich University and for thirteen years at Boston University. After retiring from Northwestern in 2006, he served for three years as William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University. Over the course of his academic career, McCarthy's work was supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Go to Profile#986
Giovanna Borradori
#23251
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Giovanna Borradori is Professor of Philosophy and Media Studies at Vassar College. Borradori is a specialist in Social and political theory, Aesthetics, and the philosophy of terrorism. A crucial focus of her work is fostering new avenues of communication between rival philosophical lineages, including the analytical and Continental traditions, liberalism and communitarianism, as well as deconstruction and Critical Theory.
Go to Profile#987
J. David Velleman
#22514
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
J. David Velleman is an American philosopher. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at New York University and Miller Research Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He primarily works in the areas of ethics, moral psychology, and related areas such as the philosophy of action, and practical reasoning.
Go to Profile#988
Harvey Friedman
#6701
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Harvey Friedman is an American mathematical logician at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He has worked on reverse mathematics, a project intended to derive the axioms of mathematics from the theorems considered to be necessary. In recent years, this has advanced to a study of Boolean relation theory, which attempts to justify large cardinal axioms by demonstrating their necessity for deriving certain propositions considered "concrete".
Go to Profile#989
Abraham Edel
#16711
Overall Influence
1908 - 2007 (99 years)
Abraham Edel was a North American philosopher and ethicist. He was the younger brother of the North American literary critic and biographer Leon Edel, and the uncle of the composer Joel Mandelbaum. He was married three times; his first two wives were fellow academics and co-authors, the anthropologist May Mandelbaum Edel, the philosopher Elizabeth Flower, and Sima Szaluta respectively.
Go to Profile#990
Christian Jambet
#15232
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christian Jambet is a French philosopher and Islamologist. He was a student of Henry Corbin. His work has engaged with Nizari Isma'ilism and has explored the thought of Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi among others. In his treatment of these thinkers, he notes the lasting influence of figures associated with Neoplatonism such as Plotinus and Proclus.
Go to Profile#991
Burton Dreben
#23240
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
Burton Spencer Dreben was an American philosopher specializing in mathematical logic. A Harvard graduate who taught at his alma mater for most of his career , he published little but was a teacher and a critic of the work of his colleagues .
Go to Profile#992
L. W. Sumner
#22825
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Leonard Wayne Sumner is a Canadian philosopher notable for his work on normative and applied ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. Sumner is University Professor Emeritus of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#993
Robert B. Talisse
#22708
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Robert B. Talisse is an American philosopher and political theorist. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is also a Professor of Political Science. Talisse is a former editor of the academic journal Public Affairs Quarterly, and a regular contributor to the blog 3 Quarks Daily, where he posts a monthly column with his frequent co-author and fellow Vanderbilt philosopher Scott Aikin. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001. His princi...
Go to Profile#994
Gary Habermas
#10066
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gary Robert Habermas is an American New Testament scholar and theologian who frequently writes and lectures on the resurrection of Jesus. He has specialized in cataloging and communicating trends among scholars in the field of historical Jesus and New Testament studies. He is distinguished research professor and chair of the department of philosophy and theology at Liberty University.
Go to Profile#995
David Gorski
#962
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He specializes in breast cancer surgery at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski is an outspoken skeptic and critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. A prolific blogger, he writes as Orac at Respectful Insolence, and as himself at Science-Based Medicine where he is the managing editor.
Go to Profile#996
Zhao Tingyang
#10306
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Zhao Tingyang is a political philosopher credited with modernising the ancient Chinese concept of Tianxia. Biography Zhao Tingyang graduated from Renmin University of China and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and is now a professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and is a senior fellow of Peking University Berggruen Research Institute. He was also a Pusey Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard–Yenching Institute in 2013.
Go to Profile#997
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi
#3750
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi is a Pakistani philosopher, educationist, and a scholar of Islam. He is also the founding President of Al-Mawrid Institute of Islamic Sciences and its sister organisation Danish Sara.
Go to Profile#998
M. M. McCabe
#17146
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Mary Margaret Anne McCabe , known as M. M. McCabe, is emerita professor of ancient philosophy at King's College London. She has written books on Plato and other ancient philosophers, including the pre-Socratics, Socrates and Aristotle.
Go to Profile#999
Raymond Klibansky
#17542
Overall Influence
1905 - 2005 (100 years)
Raymond Klibansky, was a German-Canadian historian of philosophy and art. Biography Born in Paris, to Rosa Scheidt and Hermann Klibansky, he was educated at the University of Kiel, University of Hamburg and Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, where he received a Ph.D. in 1928. From 1927 to 1933 he was an assistant at the Heidelberg Academy and from 1931 until 1933 he was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. In 1933 he was no longer able to teach since he was a Jew.
Go to Profile#1000
Ellis Sandoz
#9317
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Ellis Sandoz is the Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies at Louisiana State University. Sandoz is also the former chairman of that department.
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