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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,

#1051

Nikolay Chernyshevsky

Nikolay Chernyshevsky

1828 - 1889 (61 years)

Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian literary and social critic, journalist, novelist, democrat, and socialist philosopher, often identified as a utopian socialist and leading theoretician of Russian nihilism and Narodniks. He was the dominant intellectual figure of the 1860s revolutionary democratic movement in Russia, despite spending much of his later life in exile to Siberia, and was later highly praised by Karl Marx, Georgi Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin.

#1052

Nikolay Lossky

1870 - 1965 (95 years)

Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky , also known as N. O. Lossky, was a Russian philosopher, representative of Russian idealism, intuitionist epistemology, personalism, libertarianism, ethics and axiology . He gave his philosophical system the name intuitive-personalism. Born in Latvia, he spent his working life in St. Petersburg, New York, and Paris. He was the father of the influential Christian theologian Vladimir Lossky.

#1053

Richard Kirkham

#11803

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Richard Ladd Kirkham is an American philosopher. Among his published works are Theories of Truth , "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" Mind , and "On Paradoxes and a Surprise Exam" Philosophia .

#1054

Paul Carus

1852 - 1919 (67 years)

Paul Carus was a German-American author, editor, a student of comparative religion and philosopher. Life and education Carus was born in Ilsenburg, Germany, and educated at the universities of Strassburg and Tübingen, Germany. After obtaining his PhD from Tübingen in 1876 he served in the army and then taught school. He had been raised in a pious and orthodox Protestant home, but gradually moved away from this tradition.

#1055

Andrew Feenberg

Andrew Feenberg

#5186

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Andrew Feenberg is an American philosopher. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His main interests are philosophy of technology, continental philosophy, critique of technology and science and technology studies.

#1056

Ivan Illich

#757

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Ivan Dominic Illich was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.

#1057

Edgar Zilsel

1891 - 1944 (53 years)

Edgar Zilsel was an Austrian-American historian and philosopher of science. He is best known for the Zilsel Thesis, a scientific proposal which traces the origins of western science to the interactions between scholars and skilled artisans. The proposal melded practical experimentation with analytical thought. As part of the left wing of the Vienna Circle he endorsed historical materialism, and sought to establish empirical laws in history and in society.

#1058

Jim Holt

#6412

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jim Holt is an American journalist, popular-science author, and essayist. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Slate. In 1997 he was editor of The New Leader, a political magazine. His book Why Does the World Exist? was a 2013 New York Times bestseller.

#1059

Brian Skyrms

#3717

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Brian Skyrms is an American philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He has worked on problems in the philosophy of science, causation, decision theory, game theory, and the foundations of probability.

#1060

John L. Pollock

#8543

Overall Influence

1940 - 2009 (69 years)

John L. Pollock was an American philosopher known for influential work in epistemology, philosophical logic, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Life and career Born John Leslie Pollock in Atchison, Kansas, on January 28, 1940, Pollock earned a triple-major physics, mathematics, and philosophy degree at the University of Minnesota in 1961. In 1965, his doctoral dissertation Analyticity and Implication at the University of California, Berkeley was advised by Ernest Adams . This dissertation contained an appendix on defeasible reasoning that would eventually blossom into his main ...

#1061

Albert Borgmann

#7252

Overall Influence

1937 - 2023 (86 years)

Albert Borgmann was a German-born American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. In 2013 Borgmann received the Golden Eurydice Award for his contributions to philosophy. Borgmann died in Missoula, Montana on May 7, 2023, at the age of 85.

#1062

Martin Knutzen

1713 - 1751 (38 years)

Martin Knutzen was a German philosopher, a follower of Christian Wolff and teacher of Immanuel Kant, to whom he introduced the physics of Isaac Newton. Biography Martin Knutzen was born in Königsberg in 1713.

#1063

Ernst Tugendhat

#10782

Overall Influence

1930 - 2023 (93 years)

Ernst Tugendhat was a Czechoslovakian-born German philosopher. He was a scion of the wealthy and influential Jewish Tugendhat family. They lived in Venezuela during the Nazi regime, and he studied first in Stanford University, then in Freiburg. He taught internationally in Europa and South America, with a focus on language analysis.

#1064

Sarah Kofman

#6715

Overall Influence

1934 - 1994 (60 years)

Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher . Biography Kofman began her teaching career in Toulouse in 1960 at the Lycée Saint-Sernin, and worked with both Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze. Her abandoned primary thesis for her State doctorate, later published as Nietzsche et la métaphore, was supervised by Deleuze. In 1969 Kofman met Jacques Derrida and began attending his seminars at the École Normale Supérieure.

#1065

Mark Lilla

#3835

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas, journalist, and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. A self-described liberal, he frequently, though not always, presents views from that perspective.

#1066

Lon L. Fuller

1902 - 1978 (76 years)

Lon Luvois Fuller was an American legal philosopher best known as a proponent of a secular and procedural form of natural law theory. Fuller was a professor of law at Harvard Law School for many years, and is noted in American law for his contributions to both jurisprudence and the law of contracts. His debate in 1958 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and natural law theory. In his widely discussed 1964 book The Morality of Law, Fuller argues that all systems of law contain an "internal morality" that imposes on individuals a presumptive obligation of obedience.

#1067

Alva Noë

#7607

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Alva Noë is an American philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in analytic phenomenology, the theory of art, Ludwig Wittgenstein, enactivism, and the origins of analytic philosophy.

#1068

H. H. Price

1899 - 1984 (85 years)

Henry Habberley Price , usually cited as H. H. Price, was a Welsh philosopher, known for his work on the philosophy of perception. He also wrote on parapsychology. Biography Born in Neath, Glamorganshire, Wales, Price was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He obtained first-class honours in Literae Humaniores in 1921. He was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1922–4, Assistant Lecturer in philosophy at the university of Liverpool , Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford , Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford and Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College . Price was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1943 to 1944.

#1069

David Wood

#7742

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

David Wood was Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, at Vanderbilt University. Wood has taught philosophy in Europe and the United States for over thirty years, and is the author of 16 books. In addition to teaching at Vanderbilt University, he also co-directed a research programme in ecology and spirituality for the Centre for the Study of Religion and Culture.

#1070

Henry E. Allison

#12055

Overall Influence

1937 - 2023 (86 years)

Henry Edward Allison was an American scholar of Immanuel Kant, widely considered to be one of the most eminent English-language Kant scholars of the postwar era. He was a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego and a professor at Boston University.

#1071

Kathleen Higgins

Kathleen Higgins

#11265

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kathleen Marie Higgins is an American Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where she has been teaching for over thirty years. She specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of music, nineteenth and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion.

#1072

Gareth Matthews

#12310

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Gareth B. Matthews was an American philosopher who specialized in ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, philosophy of childhood and philosophy for children. Biography Gareth Matthews was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on July 8, 1929. He grew up near Memphis, Tennessee. As a Boy Scout, he earned the rank of Eagle Scout. Matthews moved with his family to Franklin, Indiana, in 1945. He was valedictorian of the Class of 1947, at Franklin High School. He went on to earn his A.B. at Franklin College , where his father was a professor. Matthews began his graduate work at Harvard University, where he earned an A.M.

#1073

Bernard Gert

#14647

Overall Influence

1934 - 2011 (77 years)

Bernard Gert was a moral philosopher known primarily for his work in normative ethics, as well as in medical ethics, especially pertaining to psychology. His work has been called "among the clearest and most comprehensive on the contemporary scene", "far more detailed and more concretely worked out" and "systematic" than competing comprehensive ethical theories. Because it avoids pitfalls associated with other dominant ethical theoretical approaches , Gert's moral theory "provides what many people are looking for".

#1074

Markus Gabriel

#14389

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and author at the University of Bonn. In addition to his more specialized work, he has also written popular books about philosophical issues. Career Gabriel was educated in philosophy and Ancient Greek in Germany. After completing his doctorate and habilitation at Heidelberg University, he held a faculty position at New School for Social Research. He then came to the University of Bonn, where he holds the chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and is Director of the International Centre for Philosophy. Gabriel has also been a visiting...

#1075

Samuel Gompers

1850 - 1924 (74 years)

Samuel Gompers was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.

#1076

Penelope Maddy

#6554

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Penelope Maddy is UCI Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Maddy specializes and is known for her influential work in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical realism. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979. Maddy’s early work was largely a defense of the position known as mathematical realism or Platonism, in which mathematical objects (like, say, numbers) are real objects in the universe (though abstract). This position resembles that of famous mathematical realists like the great logician Kurt Gödel, though importantly Maddy also considers sets of objects real, as well.

#1077

Theodorus the Atheist

340 BC - 250 BC (90 years)

Theodorus the Atheist , of Cyrene, was a Greek philosopher of the Cyrenaic school. He lived in both Greece and Alexandria, before ending his days in his native city of Cyrene. As a Cyrenaic philosopher, he taught that the goal of life was to obtain joy and avoid grief, and that the former resulted from knowledge, and the latter from ignorance. However, his principal claim to fame was his alleged atheism. He was usually designated by ancient writers ho atheos , "the atheist."

#1078

George Dickie

#9212

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

George Thomas Dickie was an American philosopher. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Illinois at Chicago. His specialities included aesthetics, philosophy of art, and Eighteenth Century theories of taste.

#1079

Amie Thomasson

#14154

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Amie Lynn Thomasson is an American philosopher, currently Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. Thomasson specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the philosophy of art. She is the author of Fiction and Metaphysics , Ordinary Objects , Ontology Made Easy , and Norms and Necessity .

#1080

Dieter Henrich

#9965

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Dieter Henrich was a German philosopher. A contemporary thinker in the tradition of German idealism, Henrich is considered "one of the most respected and frequently cited philosophers in Germany today", whose "extensive and highly innovative studies of German Idealism and his systematic analyses of subjectivity have significantly impacted on advanced German philosophical and theological debates."

#1081

Otto Friedrich Bollnow

#6329

Overall Influence

1903 - 1991 (88 years)

Otto Friedrich Bollnow was a German philosopher and teacher. Biography He was born the son of a rector in Stettin in what was then northwest Germany and went to school in the town of Anklam. After gaining his Abitur he studied mathematics and physics at Göttingen University, where he was influenced by the philosopher Herman Nohl. Bollnow received a doctorate in physics in 1925 and successfully completed his habilitation with Georg Misch at Göttingen in 1931. He taught at Göttingen for some years without being appointed to the faculty. Bollnow was a member of the Militant League for German C...

#1082

Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young

#3336

Overall Influence

1949 - 2006 (57 years)

Iris Marion Young was an American political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference. She served as Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and was affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and the Human Rights program there. Her research covered contemporary political theory, feminist social theory, and normative analysis of public policy. She believed in the importance of political activism and encouraged her students to involve themselves in their communities.

#1083

Apollonius of Tyana

Apollonius of Tyana

15 - 100 (85 years)

Apollonius of Tyana was a first-century Greek philosopher and religious leader from the town of Tyana, Cappadocia in Roman Anatolia, who spent his life travelling and teaching in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. He is a central figure in Neopythagoreanism and was one of the most famous "miracle workers" of his day.

#1084

Erasmus Darwin

1731 - 1802 (71 years)

Erasmus Robert Darwin was an English physician. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, and poet.

#1085

Priscilla Cohn

#14523

Overall Influence

2000 - 2019 (19 years)

Priscilla T. Neuman Cohn Ferrater Mora was an American philosopher and animal rights activist. She was Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, associate director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and co-editor of the centre's Journal of Animal Ethics.

#1086

Julian Savulescu

Julian Savulescu

#7725

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins. He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore. He was previously Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017.

#1087

Neleus of Scepsis

350 BC - Present (2374 years)

Neleus of Scepsis , was the son of Coriscus of Scepsis. He was a disciple of Aristotle and Theophrastus, the latter of whom bequeathed to him his library, and appointed him one of his executors. Neleus supposedly took the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus from Athens to Scepsis, where his heirs let them languish in a cellar until the 1st century BC, when Apellicon of Teos discovered and purchased the manuscripts, bringing them back to Athens.

#1088

Giuseppe Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini

1805 - 1872 (67 years)

Giuseppe Mazzini was an Italian politician, journalist, and activist for the unification of Italy and spearhead of the Italian revolutionary movement. His efforts helped bring about the independent and unified Italy in place of the several separate states, many dominated by foreign powers, that existed until the 19th century. An Italian nationalist in the historical radical tradition and a proponent of a republicanism of social-democratic inspiration, Mazzini helped define the modern European movement for popular democracy in a republican state.

#1089

Lawrence C. Becker

#13877

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Lawrence C. Becker was an American philosopher working mainly in the areas of ethics and social, political, and legal philosophy. Work Becker is the author of books and journal articles on justice, Stoicism and Modern Stoicism, reciprocity, property rights, and metaethics. He was an associate editor of the journal Ethics from 1985–2000, and the editor, with the librarian Charlotte B. Becker, of two editions of the Encyclopedia of Ethics.

#1090

John Dupré

#5667

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Dupré, together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison, are often grouped together as the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

#1091

Žarko Puhovski

#8911

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Žarko Puhovski is a Croatian professor, political analyst, philosopher and intellectual, former president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee. Biography Puhovski was born in Zagreb on 15 December 1946. He was born to a Jewish mother although he has never been an active Jew. Puhovski became well-known public figure at a very early age, for almost a trivial reason: When he became the president of his gymnasium committee of the Alliance of Socialist Youth a directive arrived to revitalise the political work with more vivacious subjects. Having discovered an article on contraception in the magazin...

#1092

Marilyn McCord Adams

Marilyn McCord Adams

#11063

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Marilyn McCord Adams was an American philosopher and Episcopal priest. She specialized in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and medieval philosophy. She was Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale Divinity School from 1998 to 2003 and Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009.

#1093

Yirmiyahu Yovel

Yirmiyahu Yovel

#11329

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Yirmiyahu Yovel was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual. He was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Yovel had also been a political columnist in Israel, cultural and political critic and a frequent presence in the media. Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme académique. His books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. Yovel was married to Shoshana Yovel, novelist an...

#1094

Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko

1814 - 1861 (47 years)

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko , also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar , was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language, though this is different from the language of his poems. Due to prosecution of the Ukrainian language, he also wrote selective works in "Great Russian" language . Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

#1095

William Chittick

William Chittick

#3661

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

William Clark Chittick is an American philosopher, writer, translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his work on Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.

#1096

Vladimir Lossky

Vladimir Lossky

1903 - 1958 (55 years)

Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky was a Russian Eastern Orthodox theologian exiled in Paris. He emphasized theosis as the main principle of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Biography Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky was born on 8 June 1903 in Göttingen, Germany. His father, Nikolai Lossky, was professor of philosophy in Saint Petersburg. Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky enrolled as a student at the faculty of Arts at Petrograd University in 1919, and, in the spring of 1922, was profoundly struck when he witnessed the trial which led to the execution of Metropolitan Benjamin of St Petersburg by the Soviets....

#1097

Boris Groys

#7585

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Boris Efimovich Groys is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a global distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of aesthetics, art history, and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern ...

#1098

Giovanni Reale

#9811

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Giovanni Reale was an Italian historian of philosophy. Biography Reale was born in Candia Lomellina, Pavia. He attended the Gymnasium and the Liceo classico of Casale Monferrato, and was then educated at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan, where he graduated. He later continued his studies in Marburg an der Lahn and Munich.

#1099

Marshall Berman

Marshall Berman

#4370

Overall Influence

1940 - 2013 (73 years)

Marshall Howard Berman was an American philosopher and Marxist humanist writer. He was a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching political philosophy and urbanism.

#1100

John Deely

#5732

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

John Deely was an American philosopher and semiotician. He was a professor of philosophy at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas .

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