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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#1101

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek

#23441

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek is a Polish utilitarian philosopher and a university professor at the Institute of Philosophy at University of Łódź. She has also taught at a summer seminar on utilitarian ethics at the European Graduate School and Spring School for PhD students at the Dutch Research School of Philosophy. She is best known for her collaborations with the Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

#1102

Abdel Rahman Badawi

#17113

Overall Influence

1917 - 2002 (85 years)

Abdel Rahman Badawi was an Egyptian existentialist philosopher, professor of philosophy and poet. He has been called the "foremost master of Arab existentialism." He published more than 150 works, mostly rendering of Arabic philosophical manuscripts.

#1103

Quill Kukla

#28405

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Quill Kukla is a Canadian and American philosopher. They are a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and the Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. They are also Humboldt Research Scholar at Leibniz University Hannover for 2020 and 2021. They are known for their work in bioethics, analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.

#1104

Edward Kofler

#19510

Overall Influence

1911 - 2007 (96 years)

Edward Kofler was a mathematician who made important contributions to game theory and fuzzy logic by working out the theory of linear partial information. Biography Kofler was born in Brzeżany, Austrian-Hungarian empire and graduated as a disciple of among others Hugo Steinhaus and Stefan Banach from the University of Lwów Poland and the University of Cracow, having studied game theory. After graduation in 1939 Kofler returned to his family in Kolomyia , where he taught mathematics in a Polish high school. After German attack on the town 1 July 1941 he succeeded to escape to Kazakhstan together with his wife.

#1105

Robert Stainton

#20772

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Robert Stainton is a Canadian philosopher/linguist and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario. He is known for his works on the philosophy of language, cognitive science/philosophy of the mind, analytic metaphysics/philosophical logic, semantics and pragmatics. He is currently leading a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant-funded project on The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Languages with Christopher Viger. He is also “a fanatical carp fisher,” as he told Outdoor Canada.

#1106

James Tartaglia

#23365

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

James Phillip Frank Tartaglia is a British philosopher who defends metaphysical idealism and existential nihilism, as well as a jazz saxophonist whose "jazz-philosophy fusion" combines jazz music with philosophical ideas.

#1107

Domenico Losurdo

Domenico Losurdo

#11559

Overall Influence

1941 - 2018 (77 years)

Domenico Losurdo was an Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician. Life and career Born in Sannicandro di Bari, Losurdo obtained his doctorate in 1963 from the University of Urbino under the guidance of Pasquale Salvucci with a thesis on Johann Karl Rodbertus. During the sixties, he was radicalized and belonged to a small group of Italian communists which sided with the People's Republic of China in the Sino-Soviet split. Losurdo was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences.

#1108

Olaf Helmer

#9834

Overall Influence

1910 - 2011 (101 years)

Olaf Helmer was a German-American logician and futurologist. He was a researcher at the RAND Corporation from 1946 to 1968 and a co-founder of the Institute for the Future. Born in Berlin, Helmer studied mathematics and logic at the University of Berlin. He earned his doctorate there in 1934, under direction from philosopher Hans Reichenbach. That year he moved to London where he began a second doctorate study, on Russell's paradox, under direction from Susan Stebbing at the University of London. Russell himself was one of Helmer's examiners.

#1109

Sissela Bok

#9232

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Sissela Bok is a Swedish-born American philosopher and ethicist, the daughter of two Nobel Prize winners: Gunnar Myrdal who won the Economics prize with Friedrich Hayek in 1974, and Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She is considered one of the premier American women moral philosophers of the latter part of the 20th century.

#1110

John F. Kelly

#631

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

John Francis Kelly is an American former political advisor and retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as White House chief of staff for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019. He had previously served as Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration and was commander of United States Southern Command. He is now a board member at Caliburn International.

#1111

Jc Beall

#19571

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Jc Beall is an American philosopher, formerly the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. As of late 2020 Beall holds the O’Neill Family Chair of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

#1112

Zofia Zdybicka

#36202

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Zofia Józefa Zdybicka is a nun and philosopher. She has been a professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin since 1978. Her order name is Maria Józefa in the Congregation of the Ursulines of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus in Poland. She is a specialist in ontology and the philosophy of religion.

#1113

Nancey Murphy

#10977

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University in 1973, the Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in 1987.

#1114

Harold E. Varmus

Harold E. Varmus

#3798

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.

#1115

Robin Collins

#12141

Overall Influence

Robin Alan Collins is an American philosopher. He currently serves as the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. His main interests include philosophical issues related to the relationship between religion and science and philosophical theology.

#1116

Hans C. Clevers

#36369

Overall Influence

#1117

Joseph Fins

#18641

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Joseph J. Fins, M.D., D. Hum. Litt., M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P. is an American physician and medical ethicist. He is chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, where he serves as The E. William Davis Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics, and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry. Fins is also Director of Medical Ethics and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Fins is also a member of the adjunct faculty of Rockefeller University and has served as Associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center.

#1118

Sandra Laugier

#24491

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Sandra Laugier is a French philosopher, who works on moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, gender studies, and popular culture. She is a full professor of philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She currently serves as the deputy director of the Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne . In 2014, she received the title of the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In 2022, she was awarded the Grand Prix Moron by the Académie française.

#1119

Ernan McMullin

#12254

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Ernan McMullin was an Irish philosopher who last served as the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He was an internationally respected philosopher of science who has written and lectured extensively on subjects ranging from the relationship between cosmology and theology, to the role of values in understanding science, to the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. He is the only person to ever hold the presidency of four of the major US philosophical associations. He was an expert on the life of Galileo.

#1120

Jack Copeland

#8146

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Brian John Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and author of books on the computing pioneer Alan Turing. Education Copeland was educated at the University of Oxford, obtaining a Bachelor of Philosophy degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1978, where he undertook research on modal logic and non-classical logic supervised by Dana Scott.

#1121

Bron Taylor

#15835

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Bron Raymond Taylor is an American scholar and conservationist. He is professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida and has also been an affiliated scholar with the Center for Environment and Development at the University of Oslo. Taylor works principally in the areas of religion and ecology, environmental ethics and environmental philosophy. He is also a prominent historian and ethnographer of environmentalism and especially radical environmentalist movements, surfing culture and nature-based spiritualities. Taylor is also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion and N...

#1122

Hermann Lübbe

#10281

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Hermann Lübbe is a German philosopher. He is considered a member of the Ritter School. Biography Lübbe was born in Aurich. From 1947 to 1951, he studied philosophy, theology and sociology in Göttingen, Münster and Freiburg. Among his academic teachers were Joachim Ritter and Heinrich Scholz. From 1963 to 1969, Lübbe was professor in Bochum. Since 1966, he was also secretary of state in the education ministry of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1969, Lübbe became professor in Bielefeld and secretary of state with the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia. From 1971 to 1991, h...

#1123

Lewis C. Cantley

#10908

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lewis C. Cantley is an American cell biologist and biochemist who has made significant advances to the understanding of cancer metabolism. Among his most notable contributions are the discovery and study of the enzyme PI-3-kinase, now known to be important to understanding cancer and diabetes mellitus. He is currently Meyer Director and Professor of Cancer Biology at the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He was formerly a professor in the Departments of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Director of Cancer Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts.

#1124

Donald A. Martin

Donald A. Martin

#11483

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Donald Anthony Martin , also known as Tony Martin, is an American set theorist and philosopher of mathematics at UCLA, where he is an emeritus professor of mathematics and philosophy. Education and career Martin received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1965–67. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#1125

Bernhard Pörksen

Bernhard Pörksen

#11952

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Bernhard Pörksen is a German media scholar. Life Bernhard Pörksen studied German language and literature, journalism and biology in Hamburg. At the invitation of Ivan Illich he spent several research periods at Pennsylvania State University. Between 1996 and 1997, he worked both as a freelance journalist and as a voluntary editorial staff member of a newspaper. He has published essays, commentaries and critical contributions to debates in numerous German daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and online media.

#1126

David L. Norton

#24486

Overall Influence

1930 - 1995 (65 years)

David Lloyd Norton was an American philosopher. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, March 27, 1930, to Cecil V. Norton and Ruth Essick Norton. He was the brother of Douglas C. Norton of Norton's Fine Art in St. Louis.

#1127

Khalifa Haftar

#561

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Omar Haftar is a Libyan politician, military officer, and the commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army . On 2 March 2015, he was appointed commander of the armed forces loyal to the elected legislative body, the Libyan House of Representatives.

#1128

Georgy Shchedrovitsky

#6915

Overall Influence

1929 - 1994 (65 years)

Georgy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky was a Russian philosopher and methodologist, public and cultural figure. The creator of the system-thinking methodology, the founder and leader of the Moscow methodological circle, the ideological inspirer of the "methodological movement."

#1129

Pierre-André Taguieff

#5991

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Pierre-André Taguieff is a French philosopher who has specialised in the study of racism and antisemitism. He is the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in an Institut d'études politiques de Paris laboratory, the Centre for Political Research . He is also a member of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.

#1130

Karel Appel

#4672

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.

#1131

David Sidorsky

#26566

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

David Sidorsky was an American professor emeritus of philosophy, who joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1959. Background David Sidorsky was born on July 7, 1925, in Calgary, Alberta, after his Zionist parents emigrated from Lithuania. He received a BA in 1948 and MA in 1954 from New York University. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1962. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Nature of Disagreement in Social Philosophy: Four Criticisms of Liberalism."

#1132

Barbara Herman

#20415

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Philosophy. A well-known interpreter of Kant's ethics, Herman works on moral philosophy, the history of ethics, and social and political philosophy. Among her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences .

#1133

Steven H. Miles

#21140

Overall Influence

Steven H. Miles is an American doctor, author, and professor of medicine who has published on ethically topics relating to medicine and the use of torture. Miles is a practicing physician and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and is a member of its Center for Bioethics. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanistics. Miles is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

#1134

George Edward Hughes

George Edward Hughes

#22595

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

George Edward Hughes was an Irish-born New Zealand philosopher and logician whose principal scholarly works were concerned with modal logic and medieval philosophy. Biography Hughes was born on 8 June 1918 in Waterford city, Ireland. His English parents George James Hughes and Gertrude Sparks moved to Scotland in the early 1920s, as a result of the Irish War of Independence. George graduated MA with First Class Honours in Philosophy and English, and then in pure Philosophy, from the University of Glasgow. He then studied for a year at the University of Cambridge, before being called back to Glasgow as an assistant lecturer.

#1135

Andrew Benjamin

#14629

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Andrew Benjamin is an Australian philosopher. He holds a post as distinguished professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. Benjamin first came to critical attention with his writings in continental philosophy, writing articles and editing books on the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva and Jean-François Lyotard. Benjamin has become involved in the field of architecture, to the extent that he has also taught in various schools of architecture in UK, US and Australia.

#1136

Clément Rosset

#19119

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Clément Rosset was a French philosopher and writer. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, and the author of books on 20th-century philosophy and postmodern philosophy.

#1137

Paul Edwards

#14091

Overall Influence

1923 - 2004 (81 years)

Paul Edwards was an Austrian-American moral philosopher. He was the editor-in-chief of MacMillan's eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy from 1967, and lectured at New York University, Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research from the 1960s to the 1990s.

#1138

George Yancy

#14783

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#1139

Jacques Bidet

#26779

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jacques Bidet is a French philosopher and social theorist who is currently professor emeritus in the Philosophy Department at the Université de Paris X - Nanterre. His works are mainly devoted to the construction of a theory of modern society under the name of Meta/structural theory . Modern nation-states, as elements of world system, are structured on both market and organisation, supposedly rational mediations, as co-implied class factors. The philosophical, sociological, historical, legal-political and cultural aspects of this paradigm are developed in the sense of an Altermarxism, by cont...

#1140

Suzanne Bachelard

#15862

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Suzanne Bachelard was a French philosopher and academic. In 1958, she published La Conscience de la rationalité. She was the daughter of philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose posthumous book Fragments d'une Poétique du Feu she edited. She taught at the Sorbonne, where she also had Jacques Derrida as her assistant. She was the first translator to French of Edmund Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic.

#1141

Günter Figal

#34071

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Günter Figal is a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at University of Freiburg. He is a specialist in the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger. His research focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, German classical philosophy and the history of metaphysics. Figal was the president of the Martin-Heidegger-Society between 2003 and 2015.

#1142

Clark Glymour

#16467

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Clark N. Glymour is the Alumni University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

#1143

Charles Guignon

#25333

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Charles Burke Guignon was an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is known for his expertise on Martin Heidegger's philosophy and existentialism. He became a member of the Florida Philosophical Association in the early 2000s.

#1144

Terrell Ward Bynum

#14271

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Terrell Ward Bynum is an American philosopher, writer and editor. Bynum is currently director of the Research Center on Computing and Society at Southern Connecticut State University, where he is also a professor of philosophy, and visiting professor in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in De Montfort University, Leicester, England. He is best known as a pioneer and historian in the field of computer and information ethics; for his achievements in that field, he was awarded the Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association, the Weizenbaum Award of the International ...

#1145

Ronald Jensen

#17296

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Ronald Björn Jensen is an American mathematician who lives in Germany, primarily known for his work in mathematical logic and set theory. Career Jensen completed a BA in economics at American University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Bonn in 1964. His supervisor was Gisbert Hasenjaeger. Jensen taught at Rockefeller University, 1969–71, and the University of California, Berkeley, 1971–73. The balance of his academic career was spent in Europe at the University of Bonn, the University of Oslo, the University of Freiburg, the University of Oxford, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, from which he retired in 2001.

#1146

Susan R. Wolf

#25820

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Susan Rose Wolf is an American moral philosopher and philosopher of action who is currently the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught previously at Johns Hopkins University , the University of Maryland and Harvard University .

#1147

Adela Cortina

#21471

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Adela Cortina is a Spanish philosopher. Biography After studying philosophy and letters in the Universidad de Valencia, she was admitted into the department of metaphysics in 1969. In 1976, she defended her doctoral thesis on the notion of God in Kant's transcendental philosophy and during some time she taught at middle schools and highschools. A research scholarship allowed her to go to the University of Munich, where she got acquainted with critical rationalism, pragmatism and marxist ethics and, more concretely, with the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Upon coming back to the Spanish scholar scene, she devoted her research time to ethics.

#1148

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

#5747

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher, jurist and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics. In natural philosophy he is known for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. In social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. In legal theory he was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools.

#1149

James Luther Adams

#14628

Overall Influence

1901 - 1994 (93 years)

James Luther Adams , an American professor at Harvard Divinity School, Andover Newton Theological School, and Meadville Lombard Theological School, and a Unitarian parish minister, was the most influential theologian among American Unitarian Universalists in the 20th century.

#1150

Michael Bratman

#9671

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Michael E. Bratman is an American philosopher who is Durfee Professor in the School of Humanities & Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. Education and career Bratman graduated from Haverford College in 1967 and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Rockefeller University in 1974, where he worked with Donald Davidson. He joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1974, where he has taught ever since.

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