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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,

#1101

Isaac Watts

1674 - 1748 (74 years)

Isaac Watts was an English Congregational minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician. He was a prolific and popular hymn writer and is credited with some 750 hymns. His works include "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross", "Joy to the World", and "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past". He is recognised as the "Godfather of English Hymnody"; many of his hymns remain in use today and have been translated into numerous languages.

#1102

Cicely Saunders

Cicely Saunders

#1132

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, physician and writer. She is noted for her work in terminal care research and her role in the birth of the hospice movement, emphasising the importance of palliative care in modern medicine, and opposing the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia.

#1103

Chung-ying Cheng

#11318

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Chung-Ying Cheng is a distinguished scholar of Chinese philosophy and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is considered one of the pioneers who formalized the field of Chinese philosophy in the United States in the 1960s.

#1104

Ibn Taymiyyah

1263 - 1328 (65 years)

#1105

Sahotra Sarkar

#6030

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sahotra Sarkar is an Indian-American professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the philosophy of biology. Education and career Sarkar is originally from India where he lived in Darjeeling until 1975. He earned a BA from Columbia University, where he won a Van Amringe Mathematical Prize, and a MA and PhD from the University of Chicago where he worked with William_C._Wimsatt. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology , and the Edelstein Centre for the Philosophy of Science . He was a visiting schol...

#1106

Max Jammer

#2470

Overall Influence

1915 - 2010 (95 years)

Max Jammer , was an Israeli physicist and philosopher of physics. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He was Rector and Acting President at Bar-Ilan University from 1967 to 1977. Biography Jammer studied physics, philosophy and history of science, first at the University of Vienna, and then from 1935 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a PhD in experimental physics in 1942. He served in the British Army for the rest of the war.

#1107

Germain Grisez

#5962

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Germain Gabriel Grisez was a French-American philosopher. Grisez's development of ideas from Thomas Aquinas has redirected Catholic thought and changed the way it has engaged with secular moral philosophy. In 'The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 94, A. 2' Grisez attacked the neo-scholastic interpretation of Aquinas as holding that moral norms are derived from methodologically antecedent knowledge of human nature. Grisez defended the idea of metaphysical free choice, and proposed a natural law theory of practical reasoning and moral judgeme...

#1108

Raghunatha Siromani

1477 - 1547 (70 years)

Raghunatha Shiromani was an Indian philosopher and logician. He was the head of the Ancient Mithila University also known as Mithila Vidyapeeth. He was born in a brahmin family at Nabadwip in present-day Nadia district of West Bengal state. He was the grandson of , a noted writer on from his mother's side. He was a pupil of Vāsudeva Sārvabhauma. He brought the new school of Nyaya, Navya Nyāya, representing the final development of Indian formal logic, to its zenith of analytic power.

#1109

Emanuele Severino

Emanuele Severino

#11074

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Emanuele Severino was an Italian philosopher. Biography Severino studied at the University of Brescia and graduated at the University of Pavia under Gustavo Bontadini with the first Italian dissertation on Martin Heidegger and the Metaphysics. Subsequently, Severino broke publicly from Bontadini in 1970 while both were members of faculty of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. A student of his as a young man at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore was Cardinal Angelo Scola, who later served as Archbishop of Milan.

#1110

Alphonso Lingis

#11621

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Alphonso Lingis is an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complements the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography.

#1111

Frithjof Bergmann

Frithjof Bergmann

#10743

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Frithjof Harold Bergmann was a German professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses on existentialism, continental philosophy, Hegel, and Marx. He was known for the concept of New Work.

#1112

Posidonius

135 BC - 51 BC (84 years)

Posidonius "of Apameia" or "of Rhodes" , was a Greek politician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, historian, mathematician, and teacher native to Apamea, Syria. He was considered the most learned man of his time and, possibly, of the entire Stoic school. After a period learning Stoic philosophy from Panaetius in Athens, he spent many years in travel and scientific researches in Spain, Africa, Italy, Gaul, Liguria, Sicily and on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. He settled as a teacher at Rhodes where his fame attracted numerous scholars. Next to Panaetius he did most, by writings and ...

#1113

Stewart Shapiro

#9860

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stewart Shapiro is O'Donnell Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Connecticut. He is a leading figure in the philosophy of mathematics where he defends the abstract variety of structuralism.

#1114

Jerrold Levinson

#12534

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jerrold Levinson is distinguished university professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is particularly noted for his work on defining art, the aesthetics of music, ontology of art, philosophy of film, interpretation, aesthetics experience, and humour.

#1115

Per Martin-Löf

#2937

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Per Erik Rutger Martin-Löf is a Swedish logician, philosopher, and mathematical statistician. He is internationally renowned for his work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic, and computer science. Since the late 1970s, Martin-Löf's publications have been mainly in logic. In philosophical logic, Martin-Löf has wrestled with the philosophy of logical consequence and judgment, partly inspired by the work of Brentano, Frege, and Husserl. In mathematical logic, Martin-Löf has been active in developing intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathema...

#1116

Per Lindström

#12131

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Per "Pelle" Lindström was a Swedish logician, after whom Lindström's theorem and the Lindström quantifier are named. He was one of the key followers of Lars Svenonius. Lindström was awarded a PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 1966. His thesis was titled Some Results in the Theory of Models of First Order Languages. A festschrift for Lindström was published in 1986.

#1117

André Glucksmann

André Glucksmann

#4273

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

André Glucksmann was a French philosopher, activist and writer. He was a leading figure of the new philosophers. Glucksmann began his career as a Marxist, but went on to reject communism in the popular book La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d'Hommes , and later became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. He was a strong supporter of human rights. In later years he opposed the claim that Islamic terrorism is the product of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.

#1118

Edward Conze

1904 - 1979 (75 years)

Edward Conze, born Eberhard Julius Dietrich Conze was a scholar of Marxism and Buddhism, known primarily for his commentaries and translations of the Prajñāpāramitā literature. Biography Conze's parents, Dr. Ernst Conze and Adele Louise Charlotte Köttgen , both came from families involved in the textile industry in the region of Langenberg, Germany. Ernst had a doctorate in Law and served in the Foreign Office and later as a judge. Conze was born in London while his father was Vice Consul and thus entitled to British citizenship.

#1119

John Penn Mayberry

#6344

Overall Influence

1939 - 2016 (77 years)

John Penn Mayberry was an American mathematical philosopher and creator of a distinctive Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics to which he gave expression in his book The Foundations of Mathematics in the Theory of Sets. Following completion of a Ph.D. at Illinois under the supervision of Gaisi Takeuti, he took up, in 1966, a position in the mathematics department of the University of Bristol. He remained there until his retirement in 2004 as a Reader in Mathematics.

#1120

Richard Kearney

#6009

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Richard Kearney is an Irish philosopher and public intellectual specializing in contemporary continental philosophy. He is the Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy at Boston College and has taught at University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, the University of Nice, and the Australian Catholic University. He is the author of 23 books on European philosophy and literature and has edited or co-edited over 20 more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. He is also a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

#1121

Merab Mamardashvili

1930 - 1990 (60 years)

Merab Mamardashvili was a Georgian philosopher. Biography He was born in Gori . In 1955 he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Moscow State University. From 1968 to 1987 he was a deputy editor of the scientific journal "Voprosi Filosofii" . He became a professor of the Moscow State University and a senior research fellow of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science. From 1987 to 1990 Mamardashvili was head of the Department of the Tsereteli Institute of Philosophy of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and Professor of the Tbilisi State University.

#1122

Shūzō Kuki

1888 - 1941 (53 years)

Shūzō Kuki was a Japanese art critic, philosopher, and poet. Early life Kuki was the fourth child of Baron Kuki Ryūichi a high bureaucrat in the Meiji Ministry for Culture and Education . Since it appears that Kuki's mother, Hatsu, was already pregnant when she fell in love with Okakura Kakuzō , otherwise known as Okakura Tenshin , a protégé of her husband's , the rumour that Okakura was Kuki's father would appear to be groundless. It is true, however, that Shūzō as a child, after his mother had separated and then divorced his father, thought of Okakura, who often visited, as his real father, and later certainly hailed him as his spiritual father.

#1123

Hans Köchler

#1068

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Hans Köchler is a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and president of the International Progress Organization, a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations. In his general philosophical outlook he is influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, his legal thinking has been shaped by the approach of Kelsen. Köchler has made contributions to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology and has developed a hermeneutics of trans-cultural understanding that has influenced the discourse on the relations between Islam and the West.

#1124

Luc Bovens

#8331

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Luc Bovens is a Belgian professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bovens is a former editor of Economics and Philosophy. His main areas of research are moral and political philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of public policy, Bayesian epistemology, rational choice theory, and voting theory. He has also published work, of some controversy to the anti-abortion movement, on issues regarding abortion and natural family planning methods of contraception.

#1125

Bimal Krishna Matilal

#13606

Overall Influence

1935 - 1991 (56 years)

Bimal Krishna Matilal was an eminent philosopher whose writings presented the Indian philosophical tradition as a comprehensive system of logic incorporating most issues addressed by themes in Western philosophy. Born in Calcutta, he lived and worked in Calcutta, Harvard, Toronto and Oxford, where, from 1977 to 1991, he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford.

#1126

Tetsuro Watsuji

Tetsuro Watsuji

1889 - 1960 (71 years)

Tetsuro Watsuji was a Japanese historian and moral philosopher. Early life Watsuji was born in Himeji, Hyōgo Prefecture to a physician. During his youth he enjoyed poetry and had a passion for Western literature. For a short time he was the coeditor of a literary magazine and was involved in writing poems and plays. His interests in philosophy came to light while he was a student at First Higher School in Tokyo, although his interest in literature would always remain strong throughout his life.

#1127

Rosi Braidotti

#3674

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. Born in Italy, she studied in Australia and France and works in the Netherlands. Biography Career Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and moved to Australia when she was 16, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at th...

#1128

Akira Yamada

#11969

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Akira Yamada was a Japanese scholar and philosopher of the West European Medieval philosophy. Member of the Japan Academy since 1998. Yamada graduated from the Kyoto Imperial University, Philosophy section of the Department of Literature in 1944.1951, Instructor of the Osaka City University, Department of Literature1955, Assistant professor of the Osaka City University1965, Assistant professor of the Kyoto University, Department of Literature1968, Professor of the Kyoto University1976, Director of Department of Literature in the Kyoto University1985, Professor emeritus of the Kyoto University1...

#1129

Denis Dutton

#6151

Overall Influence

1944 - 2010 (66 years)

Denis Laurence Dutton was an American philosopher of art, web entrepreneur, and media activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was also a co-founder and co-editor of the websites Arts & Letters Daily, ClimateDebateDaily.com, and cybereditions.com.

#1130

Henry Nelson Wieman

1884 - 1975 (91 years)

Henry Nelson Wieman was an American philosopher and theologian. He became the most famous proponent of theocentric naturalism and the empirical method in American theology and catalyzed the emergence of religious naturalism in the latter part of the 20th century. His grandson Carl Wieman is a Nobel laureate, and his son-in-law Huston Smith was a prominent scholar in religious studies.

#1131

Stephen Pepper

1891 - 1972 (81 years)

Stephen C. Pepper was an American pragmatism philosopher, the Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He may be best known for World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence but was also a respected authority on aesthetics, philosophy of art, and ethics.

#1132

Kit Fine

#6859

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kit Fine is a British philosopher, currently university professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. Prior to joining the philosophy department of NYU in 1997, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan and UCLA. The author of several books and dozens of articles in international academic journals, he has made notable contributions to the fields of philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language and also has written on ancient philosophy, in particular on Aristotle's account of log...

#1133

Leonardo Bruni

1370 - 1444 (74 years)

Leonardo Bruni or Leonardo Aretino was an Italian humanist, historian and statesman, often recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. He has been called the first modern historian. He was the earliest person to write using the three-period view of history: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern. The dates Bruni used to define the periods are not exactly what modern historians use today, but he laid the conceptual groundwork for a tripartite division of history.

#1134

John Vattanky

#16917

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Rev. John Vattanky SJ was a Jesuit priest, belonging to Kerala province, in India. An Indian philosopher, specializing in Gangesa's Navya-Nyāya, he resided at De Nobili College, Pune. Vattanky was a Professor Emeritus of Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India. He has contributed significantly to the growth of Indian philosophy and Indian Christian Theology.

#1135

Dimitri Uznadze

1886 - 1950 (64 years)

Dimitri Uznadze was a Georgian psychologist and professor of psychology, co-founder of the Tbilisi State University and of the Georgian Academy of Sciences . Life and works Dimitri Uznadze was born in 1886 to a peasant family, in the small village of Sakara in the province of Kutaisi . He was expelled from Kutaisi high school for taking part in the 1905 revolution. That year he went to Switzerland and then to Germany, where he entered the philosophy faculty of Leipzig University, graduating in 1909. In 1910 he received a PhD degree at the University of Wittenberg for his work Vladimir Solovev: His Epistemology and Metaphysics .

#1136

Friedrich Kittler

#6176

Overall Influence

1943 - 2011 (68 years)

Friedrich A. Kittler was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military. Biography Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony. His family fled with him to West Germany in 1958, where from 1958 to 1963 he went to a natural sciences and modern languages Gymnasium in Lahr in the Black Forest, and thereafter, until 1972, he studied German studies, Romance philology and philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau.

#1137

Avrum Stroll

#15173

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Avrum Stroll was a research professor at the University of California, San Diego. Born in Oakland, California, he was a distinguished philosopher and a noted scholar in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of language, and twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

#1138

Tu Weiming

#5334

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Tu Weiming is a Chinese-born American philosopher. He is Chair Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. He is also Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University.

#1139

Alfred Schmidt

#7048

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Alfred Schmidt was a German philosopher. Biography Schmidt studied history and English as well as classical philology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and later philosophy and sociology. He was a student of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer and gained his doctorate with his The Concept of Nature in Marx.

#1140

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

1857 - 1939 (82 years)

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was a French scholar trained in philosophy who furthered anthropology with his contributions to the budding fields of sociology and ethnology. His primary field interest was ways of thinking.

#1141

David Bordwell

#2848

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David Jay Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the History of Film Style .

#1142

Baltasar Gracián

Baltasar Gracián

1601 - 1658 (57 years)

Baltasar Gracián y Morales, S.J. , better known as Baltasar Gracián, was a Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud . His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

#1143

Max Bill

#1160

Overall Influence

1908 - 1994 (86 years)

Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer. Early life and education Bill was born in Winterthur. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith during 1924–1927, Bill took up studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau under many teachers including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer from 1927 to 1929, after which he moved to Zurich.

#1144

Lev Lopatin

1855 - 1920 (65 years)

Lev Mikhailovich Lopatin was a Russian philosopher and former head of the Moscow Psychological Society until the formal liquidation of the society by the Soviet after the Revolution of 1917. Lopatin fell victim to the policies of Soviet reform, which caused widespread famine, and in 1920 he died due to malnourishment and exhaustion.

#1145

Oskar Negt

#3261

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Oskar Reinhard Negt is a philosopher and critical social theorist. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at Leibniz University Hannover, and one of Germany's most prominent social scientists. Little of his work has been translated into English.

#1146

Johann Georg Heinrich Feder

Johann Georg Heinrich Feder

1740 - 1821 (81 years)

Johann Georg Heinrich Feder was a German philosopher. Life Feder was born on 15 May 1740 in the village of Schornweisach in the Principality of Bayreuth, the son of Martin Heinrich Feder , the village pastor. Feder studied theology and pedagogy at Erlangen. From 1768 to 1782 he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. At the time of his death, in Hanover, he was Director of the Pageninstitut.

#1147

Aristoxenus

360 BC - 300 BC (60 years)

Aristoxenus of Tarentum was a Greek Peripatetic philosopher, and a pupil of Aristotle. Most of his writings, which dealt with philosophy, ethics and music, have been lost, but one musical treatise, Elements of Harmony , survives incomplete, as well as some fragments concerning rhythm and meter. The Elements is the chief source of our knowledge of ancient Greek music.

#1148

Israel Scheffler

#4935

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Israel Scheffler was an American philosopher of science and of education. Career Scheffler held B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology from Brooklyn College, an M.H.L. and a D.H.L. from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He defended his doctoral thesis, On Quotation, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952, where he studied with Nelson Goodman and began teaching that year at Harvard University, where he spent his career. He retired in 1992. His main interests lay in the philosophical interpretation of language, symbolism, science and education. He was a Fellow of the American Academy ...

#1149

Horace Kallen

1882 - 1974 (92 years)

Horace Meyer Kallen was a German-born American philosopher who supported pluralism and Zionism. Biography Horace Meyer Kallen was born on August 11, 1882, in the town of Bernstadt, Prussian Silesia . His parents were Jacob David Kallen, an Orthodox rabbi, and Esther Rebecca Glazier. In 1887, the family emigrated to the United States. Kallen studied philosophy at Harvard University under George Santayana; in 1903, he received a BA magna cum laude.

#1150

Odo Marquard

#7381

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Odo Marquard was a German philosopher. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Giessen from 1965 to 1993. In 1984 he received the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose. Early life and education Odo Marquard was born in Stolp, Farther Pomerania. He studied philosophy, German literature and theology, obtaining his doctorate at the University of Münster and his habilitation at the University of Freiburg. In Münster he studied under Joachim Ritter, whose Ritter School he sometimes is considered a member of. An even greater influence was Max Müller, whom Marquard studied under in ...

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