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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#1001

Nadia Maftouni

#11900

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Nadia Maftouni is an Iranian academic, philosophical author and artist. She is best known as a leading Researcher on Farabian, Avicennian and Suhrawardian philosophy with her modern reading of their works. She is also an established researcher in Jurisprudence and Islamic History. She is an associate professor at University of Tehran, where she is an alumna and a member of the department of Philosophy and Islamic Theology. She is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and she is on the board of History of Philosophy Quarterly. She is also famous for proposing to Iranian artist Hossein N...

#1002

Harald Holz

#30539

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Harald Holz is a German philosopher, logician, mathematician , poet and novelist. Life Holz studied philosophy from 1953 to 1957 in Pullach im Isartal/Germany and from 1959 until 1961 Catholic Theology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt/Germany . He continued his study of philosophy at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University Bonn/Germany. There he received his research doctorate in 1964 with Gottfried Martin with the thesis Transcendental philosophy and metaphysics.

#1003

Paulin J. Hountondji

#9770

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Paulin Jidenu Hountondji is a Beninese philosopher, politician and academic considered one of the most important figures in the history of African philosophy. Since the 1970s he has taught at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, where he is Professor of Philosophy. In the early 1990s he briefly served as Minister of Education and Minister for Culture and Communications in the Government of Benin.

#1004

David S. Oderberg

#18183

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Professor David Simon Oderberg is an Australian philosopher of metaphysics and ethics based in Britain since 1987. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He describes himself as a non-consequentialist or a traditionalist in his works. Broadly speaking, Oderberg places himself in opposition to Peter Singer and other utilitarian or consequentialist thinkers. He has published over thirty academic papers and has authored six books: The Metaphysics of Good and Evil, Opting Out: Conscience and Cooperation in a Pluralistic Society, Real Essentialism, Applied Ethics, Moral Theory, and The Metaphysics of Identity over Time.

#1005

Massimo Introvigne

Massimo Introvigne

#2682

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Massimo Introvigne is an Italian Roman Catholic sociologist of religion and intellectual property attorney. He is a founder and the managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions , a Turin-based organization which has been described as "the highest profile lobbying and information group for controversial religions".

#1006

Paul Ridker

#22886

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Paul M. Ridker is a cardiovascular epidemiologist and biomedical researcher. He is currently the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention. Ridker also holds an appointment as Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

#1007

Hidé Ishiguro

#29310

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Hidé Ishiguro is a Japanese analytic philosopher and emeritus professor at Keio University, Tokyo. She is considered an expert on the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on whom she has published many papers. She is also a Wittgenstein scholar.

#1008

Huw Price

#13887

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Huw Price is an Australian philosopher, formerly the Bertrand Russell Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was previously Challis Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, and before that Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He is also one of three founders and the Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

#1009

William L. Reese

#25893

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

William L. Reese was a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Albany. He was born in Jefferson City, Missouri. Reese gained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1947. From 1967 to 1999 he was Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany, and since 1999 has been professor emeritus and research professor in philosophy at the university.

#1010

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze

#15591

Overall Influence

1963 - 2007 (44 years)

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze was a Nigerian philosopher. Eze was a specialist in postcolonial philosophy. He wrote as well as edited influential postcolonial histories of philosophy in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He brought Immanuel Kant's racism to light among Western thinkers in the 1990s, an area of Kant's life that Western philosophers often gloss over. Influences in his own work include Paulin Hountondji, Richard Rorty, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.

#1011

Christopher Peacocke

#19962

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Christopher Arthur Bruce Peacocke is a British philosopher known for his work in philosophy of mind and epistemology. His recent publications, in the field of epistemology, have defended a version of rationalism. His daughter, Antonia Peacocke, is also a philosopher, now at Stanford University, specialising in philosophy of mind.

#1012

Michael F. Holick

Michael F. Holick

#22521

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michael F. Holick is an American adult endocrinologist, specializing in vitamin D, such as the identification of both calcidiol, the major circulating form of vitamin D, and calcitriol, the active form of vitamin D. His work has been the basis for diagnostic tests and therapies for vitamin D-related diseases. He is a professor of medicine at the Boston University Medical Center and editor-in-chief of the journal Clinical Laboratory.

#1013

Sadie Plant

#7218

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Sadie Plant is a British philosopher, cultural theorist, and author. Education She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Manchester in 1989 and subsequently taught at the University of Birmingham's Department of Cultural Studies before going on to found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit with colleague Nick Land at the University of Warwick, where she was a faculty member. Her original research was related to the Situationist International before turning to the social and political potential of cyber-technology. Her writing in the 1990s would prove influential in the developm...

#1014

Takis Fotopoulos

Takis Fotopoulos

#3961

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Takis Fotopoulos is a Greek political philosopher, economist and writer who founded the Inclusive Democracy movement, aiming at a synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He is an academic, and has written many books and over 900 articles,. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy and is the author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy in which the foundations of the Inclusive Democracy project were set. His latest book is The New World Order in Action: Volume 1: Globalization, the Brexit Revolution and the "Left"- Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations .

#1015

Gary Gutting

#12058

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

Gary Michael Gutting was an American philosopher and holder of an endowed chair in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His daughter is writer Tasha Alexander. Work Gutting was an expert on the philosopher Michel Foucault and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Through his publications in such media outlets as The New York Times and The Stone, he adopted the role of a public intellectual. He dealt with both continental and analytic philosophy and had written on bridging the analytic-continental divide.

#1016

Richard Joyce

#21810

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Richard Joyce is a British-Australian-New Zealand philosopher, known for his contributions to the fields of meta-ethics and moral psychology. He is Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington.

#1017

Dirk Verhofstadt

#10420

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Dirk Verhofstadt is a Belgian social liberal theorist and younger brother of former Belgian Prime Minister and former ALDE European Parliament Leader Guy Verhofstadt. He has a keen interest in political philosophy, and his philosophical outlook is influenced by Karl Popper, John Stuart Mill, Cesare Beccaria, Thomas Paine, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

#1018

Jody Azzouni

#25116

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jody Azzouni is an American philosopher, poet, and writer. He currently is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Education He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from New York University and his PhD from the City University of New York.

#1019

Gabriel Rockhill

#16272

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Gabriel Rockhill is a French-American philosopher, writer, cultural critic, and activist. He is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, and former Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie.

#1020

François Jullien

François Jullien

#16360

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

François Jullien is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist. Biography An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure and holder of the agrégation, France's professorial degree, François Jullien studied Chinese language and thought at Peking University and Shanghai University from 1975 to 1977. He received his French university doctorate in 1978 and his French research doctorate in Far East studies in 1983.

#1021

Barry Smith

#19447

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Barry Smith is an academic working in the fields of ontology and biomedical informatics. Smith is the author of more than 700 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books, and he is one of the most widely cited living philosophers.

#1022

Theodore Schick

#12766

Overall Influence

Theodore Schick is an American author in the field of philosophy. His articles have appeared in numerous publications and include topics such as functionalism and its effect on immortality, the logic behind the criteria of adequacy, and applying a scientific approach to the paranormal. In 1994, Schick published How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, which is designed to teach the reader how to think critically about extraordinary claims.

#1023

Stephen Yablo

#22030

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Yablo is a Canadian-born American philosopher. He is David W. Skinner Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught previously at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He specializes in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics.

#1024

Mark Johnson

#10142

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mark L. Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as Metaphors We Live By. However, he has also published on philosophical topics such as John Dewey, Immanuel Kant and ethics.

#1025

Gerhard Vollmer

#16257

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gerhard Vollmer is a German physicist and philosopher. He is perhaps best known for his development of an evolutionary theory of knowledge. Life Vollmer was born in Speyer. He studied in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Freiburg. After finishing his degree in physics in 1968 he studied philosophy and linguistics in Freiburg. He worked as a trainee in Deutschen Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg. In Freiburg he attained a doctorate in theoretical physics. He stayed here after completing a year's stint as a research assistant in Montreal in 1975. In 1974, Vollmer attained an additional doctorate in...

#1026

Richard Taylor

#21278

Overall Influence

1919 - 2003 (84 years)

Richard Clyde Taylor was an American philosopher renowned for his contributions to metaphysics. He was also an internationally known beekeeper. Biography Taylor received his PhD at Brown University, where his supervisor was Roderick Chisholm. He taught at Brown University, Columbia and the University of Rochester, and had visiting appointments at about a dozen other institutions. His best-known book was Metaphysics . Other works included Action and Purpose , Good and Evil and Virtue Ethics . Professor Taylor was also the editor of The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. He was an enthusiastic advocate of virtue ethics.

#1027

Sheila Sherlock

Sheila Sherlock

#12289

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

Dame Sheila Patricia Violet Sherlock DBE, FRCP FRCPE FRS HFRSE FMGA FCRGA was a British physician and medical educator who is considered the major 20th-century contributor to the field of hepatology .

#1028

Stephen David Ross

#15168

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Stephen David Ross is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. He has published over 30 books in interdisciplinary philosophy, especially on art, literature, ethics, and metaphysics, from American pragmatism through poststructuralism, from human beings to animals and things.

#1029

Leo Apostel

#11529

Overall Influence

1925 - 1995 (70 years)

Leo Apostel was a Belgian philosopher and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Apostel was an advocate of interdisciplinary research and the bridging of the gap between exact science and humanities.

#1030

Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit

#6433

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Avishai Margalit is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

#1031

Elisabeth Lloyd

#2767

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of science specialising in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine - as well as Adjunct Professor of biology - at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.

#1032

Jack Silver

#16053

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Jack Howard Silver was a set theorist and logician at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Montana, he earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Berkeley in 1966 under Robert Vaught before taking a position at the same institution the following year. He held an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship from 1970 to 1972. Silver made several contributions to set theory in the areas of large cardinals and the constructible universe L.

#1033

Julián Marías

#12503

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

Julián Marías Aguilera was a Spanish philosopher associated with the Generation of '36 movement. He was a pupil of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and member of the Madrid School. Life and work Marías was born in the city of Valladolid, and moved to Madrid at the age of five. He went on to study philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, graduating in 1936. Within months of his graduation the Spanish Civil War broke out. During the conflict Marías sided with the Republicans, although his actual contributions were limited to propaganda articles and broadcasts.

#1034

Norman P. Barry

Norman P. Barry

#13428

Overall Influence

1944 - 2008 (64 years)

Norman Patrick Barry was an English political philosopher best known as an exponent of classical liberalism. For much of his career he was a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham.

#1035

Hartmut Rosa

#6353

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Hartmut Rosa is a German sociologist and political scientist, most well known for his theory of resonance and temporal sociology of social acceleration. Life Hartmut Rosa was born in Lörrach. He grew up in Grafenhausen in the Black Forest, where he spoke the local Alemannic dialect and played the organ in the Protestant parish. After graduating from high school in 1985 and completing his civilian service, he began studying political science, philosophy and German studies at the University of Freiburg in 1986, which he graduated with honours in 1993. In 1997, he graduated summa cum laude from the Humboldt University of Berlin and received his Ph.D.

#1036

Klaus Heinrich

#11374

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Klaus Heinrich was a German philosopher of religion. Career In 2002, he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. In 1948 he was a founding student member of the Free University of Berlin and from 1971 to 1995 he was a full professor for "Religious Studies on the Philosophy of Religion" at the Institute for Religious Studies. After training in psychoanalysis and studying law, philosophy, Protestant theology, sociology, art history and literary studies, first at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Unter den Linden in Berlin and then at the FU, he received his doctorate from the FU in 1952.

#1037

Lewis White Beck

#21779

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Lewis White Beck was an American philosopher and scholar of German philosophy. Beck was Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Rochester and served as the Philosophy Department chair there from 1949 to 1966. He translated several of Immanuel Kant's works, such as the Critique of Practical Reason, and was the author of Studies in the Philosophy of Kant .

#1038

Terence Parsons

#24797

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Terence Dwight Parsons was an American philosopher, specializing in philosophy of language and metaphysics. He was emeritus professor of philosophy at UCLA. Life and career Parsons was born in Endicott, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester with a BA in physics. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1966. He was a full-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1965 to 1972, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1972 to 1979, at the University of California at Irvine from 1979 to 2000, and at the University of California at Los Angeles from 2000 to 2012.

#1039

Jennifer Saul

#23159

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

#1040

Paul Draper

#24065

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Paul Robert Draper is an American philosopher, most known for his work in the philosophy of religion. His work on the evidential argument from evil has been widely influential. He is currently a professor at Purdue University. He is co-editor of topics in the philosophy of religion for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

#1041

Irving Weissman

#5640

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Irving Lerner "Irv" Weissman is a Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University where he is the Director of the Stanford Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine along with Michael Longaker.

#1042

Douglas Groothuis

Douglas Groothuis

#10362

Overall Influence

1957 - 2018 (61 years)

Douglas R. Groothuis is professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. Groothuis was a campus pastor for twelve years prior to obtaining a position as an associate professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary in 1993. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon. He was married to Rebecca Merrill Groothuis until her death on July 6, 2018.

#1043

Paul Levinson

#4955

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paul Levinson is an American author, singer-songwriter, and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. His novels, short fiction, and non-fiction works have been translated into sixteen languages. He is frequently quoted in news articles and appears as a guest commentator on major news outlets.

#1044

Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson

#2538

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, ordained minister, and radio host. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.

#1045

Jeffrey Bub

#7365

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jeffrey Bub is a physicist and philosopher of physics, and Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy, the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

#1046

Ole Thyssen

#11896

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ole Thyssen is a Danish philosopher and sociologist, and Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Biography Thyssen is a MA from the University of Copenhagen from 1971, and he became a Doctor of Philosophy from that same university in 1976.

#1047

Kim Sterelny

#5953

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kim Sterelny is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and was previously editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology .

#1048

Pierre Manent

#8461

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Pierre Manent is a French political scientist and academic. He teaches political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. Every autumn, he is also a visiting teacher in Boston College at the Department of Political Science.

#1049

Ramin Jahanbegloo

#8111

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian philosopher and academic based in Toronto, Canada. Biography Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran, Iran. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, where he lived for twenty years. He was a post-doctorate fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is married to Azin Moalej and has a daughter named Afarin Jahanbegloo.

#1050

David Kalupahana

#10369

Overall Influence

1936 - 2014 (78 years)

David J. Kalupahana was a Buddhist scholar from Sri Lanka. He was a student of the late K.N. Jayatilleke, who was a student of Wittgenstein. He wrote mainly about epistemology, theory of language, and compared later Buddhist philosophical texts against the earliest texts and tried to present interpretations that were both historically contextualised and also compatible with the earliest texts, and in doing so, he encouraged Theravada Buddhists and scholars to reevaluate the legitimacy of later, Mahayana texts and consider them more sympathetically.

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