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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#1151

Marquis de Sade

Marquis de Sade

1740 - 1814 (74 years)

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade , was a French writer, libertine, political activist and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. Some of these were published under his own name during his lifetime, but most appeared anonymously or posthumously.

#1152

Brian David Ellis

#7397

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Brian Ellis is an Australian philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor in the philosophy department at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and Professional Fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He was the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for twelve years. He is one of the major proponents of the New Essentialist school of philosophy of science. In later years he has brought his understanding of scientific realism to the Social Sciences, developing the philosophy of Social Humanism.

#1153

Isabelle Stengers

Isabelle Stengers

#2255

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour among others, and has written widely on the history of science as well as philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres.

#1154

Régis Debray

#1817

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jules Régis Debray is a French philosopher, journalist, former government official and academic. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society, and for associating with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and advancing Salvador Allende's presidency in Chile in the early 1970s. He returned to France in 1973 and later held various official posts in the French government.

#1155

Sydney Shoemaker

#8903

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Sydney Sharpless Shoemaker was an American philosopher. He was the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and is well known for his contributions to philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

#1156

Pavel Tichý

#16501

Overall Influence

1936 - 1994 (58 years)

Pavel Tichý was a Czech logician, philosopher and mathematician. He worked in the field of intensional logic and founded transparent intensional logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a book The Foundations of Frege's Logic, published by Walter de Gruyter in 1988.

#1157

Hippias

443 BC - 399 BC (44 years)

Hippias of Elis was a Greek sophist, and a contemporary of Socrates. With an assurance characteristic of the later sophists, he claimed to be regarded as an authority on all subjects, and lectured on poetry, grammar, history, politics, mathematics, and much else. Most of our knowledge of him is derived from Plato, who characterizes him as vain and arrogant.

#1158

Alenka Zupančič

#9848

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher who along with Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek have in large measure been responsible for the popularity in North America of a politically infused Lacanian psychoanalysis.

#1159

Gilbert Durand

#4383

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Gilbert Durand was a French academic known for his work on the imaginary, symbolic anthropology and mythology. According to Durand, Imagination and Reason can be complementary. He defended the status of the image, traditionally devalued in Western thought, particularly in French philosophy. He advocated a multidisciplinary approach.

#1160

Panaetius

185 BC - 110 BC (75 years)

Panaetius of Rhodes was an ancient Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in Athens, before moving to Rome where he did much to introduce Stoic doctrines to the city, thanks to the patronage of Scipio Aemilianus. After the death of Scipio in 129 BC, he returned to the Stoic school in Athens, and was its last undisputed scholarch. With Panaetius, Stoicism became much more eclectic. His most famous work was his On Duties, the principal source used by Cicero in his own work of the same name.

#1161

Albert Sabin

#1262

Overall Influence

1906 - 1993 (87 years)

Albert Bruce Sabin was a Polish-American medical researcher, best known for developing the oral polio vaccine, which has played a key role in nearly eradicating the disease. In 1969–72, he served as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

#1162

Jeremy Waldron

#2648

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

#1163

Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King

#145

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.

#1164

Benjamin Rush

1745 - 1813 (68 years)

Benjamin Rush was an American revolutionary, a Founding Father of the United States and signatory to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and a civic leader in Philadelphia, where he was a physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, and the founder of Dickinson College. Rush was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress. He later described his efforts in support of the American Revolution, saying: "He aimed right." He served as surgeon general of the Continental Army and became a professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice at the University of...

#1165

Jacques Bouveresse

Jacques Bouveresse

#8442

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Jacques Bouveresse was a French philosopher who wrote on subjects including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics and analytical philosophy. Bouveresse was called "an avis rara among the better known French philosophers in his championing of critical standards of thought."

#1166

George I. Mavrodes

#16614

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

George I. Mavrodes was an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Biography Mavrodes received his B.S. degree from Oregon State College, his B.D. degree from Western Baptist Theological Seminary, and his M.A. and PhD degrees in philosophy from the University of Michigan. He retired on March 31, 1995, being named professor emeritus of philosophy after thirty three years at the University of Michigan.

#1167

John Rajchman

#10707

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Rajchman is a philosopher working in the areas of art history, architecture, and continental philosophy. Son of Jan A. Rajchman, a Polish-American computer scientist. John Rajchman is an Adjunct Professor and Director of Modern Art M.A. Programs in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and The Cooper Union, among others.

#1168

Diogenes

412 BC - 323 BC (89 years)

Diogenes , also known as Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism. He was born in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC.

#1169

Linda Zagzebski

#14337

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.

#1170

Bogusław Wolniewicz

#11357

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Bogusław Wolniewicz was a Polish philosopher. He was a professor at University of Warsaw from 1963 to 1998. In scholarly circles, he is known as a translator and commentator of Ludwig Wittgenstein. From the 1990s, he became a publicist mostly affiliated with the Radio Maryja community. His controversial views were often regarded as anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.

#1171

Debendranath Tagore

Debendranath Tagore

1817 - 1905 (88 years)

Debendranath Tagore was an Indian philosopher and religious reformer, active in the Brahmo Samaj . He joined Brahmo samaj in 1842. He was the founder in 1848 of the Brahmo religion, which today is synonymous with Brahmoism. Born in Shilaidaha, his father was the industrialist Dwarakanath Tagore; he himself had 14 children, many of whom, including Nobel-prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, made significant artistic or literary contributions to society.

#1172

Émile Littré

1801 - 1881 (80 years)

Émile Maximilien Paul Littré was a French lexicographer, freemason and philosopher, best known for his , commonly called . Biography Littré was born in Paris. His father, Michel-François Littré, had been a gunner and, later, a sergeant-major of marine artillery in the French navy who was deeply imbued with revolutionary ideas of the day. Settling down as a tax collector, he married Sophie Johannot, a free-thinker like himself, and devoted himself to the education of his son Émile. The boy was sent to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Louis Hachette and Eugène Burnouf became his friends. After h...

#1173

Héctor-Neri Castañeda

#14709

Overall Influence

1924 - 1991 (67 years)

Héctor-Neri Castañeda was a Guatemalan-American philosopher and founder of the journal Noûs. Biography Born in San Vicente, Zacapa, Guatemala, he emigrated to the United States in 1948 and studied under Wilfrid Sellars at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a B.A. in 1950 and M.A. in 1952. Castañeda received his Ph.D. in June 1954 from the University of Minnesota for his dissertation The Logical Structure of Moral Reasoning. Sellars served as his doctoral advisor. He studied at Oxford University from 1955–1956, after which he once again returned to the U.S. to take a sabbatical-replacement position in philosophy at Duke University.

#1174

Mother Teresa

#172

Overall Influence

1910 - 1997 (87 years)

Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu MC , better known as Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun and the founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, at the age of 18 she moved to Ireland and later to India, where she lived most of her life. On 4 September 2016, she was canonised by the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The anniversary of her death, 5 September, is her feast day.

#1175

J. P. Moreland

#5428

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

James Porter Moreland , better known as J. P. Moreland, is an American philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

#1176

Marquis de Condorcet

Marquis de Condorcet

1743 - 1794 (51 years)

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet , known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal public instruction, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale — and the Jacobin faction in particular — voted to have Condorcet arrested.

#1177

Mike Alder

#7276

Overall Influence

Michael D. Alder is an Australian mathematician, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. Alder is known for his popular writing, such as sardonic articles about the lack of basic arithmetic skills in young adults.

#1178

Errol Harris

#12259

Overall Influence

1908 - 2009 (101 years)

Errol Eustace Harris , sometimes cited as E. E. Harris, was a South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.

#1179

James Hughes

#4338

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

James J. Hughes is an American sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at UMass Boston. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future and is currently writing a book about moral bioenhancement tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnology to Become Better People.

#1180

Paola Cavalieri

Paola Cavalieri

#7546

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Paola Cavalieri is an Italian philosopher, most known for her work arguing for extension of human rights to the other great apes and more broadly, "to mammals and birds, and probably vertebrates in general". In addition to her books, she was the editor of Etica & Animali, a quarterly international philosophy journal that published nine volumes from 1988 to 1998.

#1181

Robert B. Pippin

#10578

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert Buford Pippin is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.

#1182

Peter Barnes

#18535

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Sir Peter John Barnes, FRCP, FCCP, FMedSci, FRS is a British respiratory scientist and clinician, a specialist in the mechanisms and treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease . He was Margaret Turner-Warwick Professor of Thoracic Medicine at the National Heart & Lung Institute, previous head of respiratory medicine at Imperial College and honorary consultant physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital London. He is one of the most highly cited scientists in the world

#1183

Baháʼu'lláh

1817 - 1892 (75 years)

Baháʼu'lláh was the founder of the Baháʼí Faith. He was born to an aristocratic family in Persia and was exiled due to his adherence to the messianic Bábí Faith. In 1863, in Iraq, he first announced his claim to a revelation from God and spent the rest of his life in further imprisonment in the Ottoman Empire. His teachings revolved around the principles of unity and religious renewal, ranging from moral and spiritual progress to world governance.

#1184

Karl Raimund Sir Popper

#19238

Overall Influence

#1185

Evert Willem Beth

1908 - 1964 (56 years)

Evert Willem Beth was a Dutch philosopher and logician, whose work principally concerned the foundations of mathematics. He was a member of the Significs Group. Biography Beth was born in Almelo, a small town in the eastern Netherlands. His father had studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam, where he had been awarded a PhD. Evert Beth studied the same subjects at Utrecht University, but then also studied philosophy and psychology. His 1935 PhD was in philosophy.

#1186

Stanisław Lem

#899

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Stanisław Herman Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.

#1187

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger

1780 - 1819 (39 years)

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger was a German philosopher and academic. He is known as a theorist of Romanticism, and of irony. Biography Solger's extensive studies included attending Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie [Presentation of My System of Philosophy] lectures at the University of Jena in 1800–01 and Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" lectures in Berlin 1804. In 1811, Solger became professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin

#1188

Charles W. Mills

Charles W. Mills

#7135

Overall Influence

1951 - 2021 (70 years)

#1189

Kan'ichi Kuroda

#9981

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Kan'ichi Kuroda was a self-taught Japanese political philosopher and social theorist, associated with Trotskyism, who was deeply involved in far-left political movements. Nearly blind, Kuroda was affectionately nicknamed "The Blind Prophet" and "KuroKan" by his followers.

#1190

Susan Neiman

#11521

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

#1191

Joshua Knobe

#7712

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

#1192

Justin Clemens

#8720

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet. Background Clemens studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining his PhD on "Institution, aesthetics, nihilism : the Romanticism of contemporary theory" in 1999.

#1193

Costas Douzinas

#4213

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Costas Douzinas is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, the President of the Nikos Poulantzas Institute and a former politician.

#1194

Michael Slote

#9462

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael A. Slote is a professor of ethics at the University of Miami and an author of a number of books. He was previously professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, and at Trinity College Dublin. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

#1195

Samuel Weber

#6190

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Samuel M. Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, as well as a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Weber began PhD studies at Yale University. Partly through correspondence with Herbert Marcuse he became interested in emerging German and French theoretical debates. He later transferred to Cornell University where he wrote a dissertation under the tutelage of Paul de Man. Weber co-translated the first English-language collection of essays by German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Since that time he has held professorships ...

#1196

Ge Hong

284 - 364 (80 years)

Ge Hong , courtesy name Zhichuan , was a Chinese linguist, Taoist practitioner, philosopher, physician, politician, and writer during the Eastern Jin dynasty. He was the author of Essays on Chinese Characters, the Baopuzi, the Emergency Formulae at an Elbow's Length, among others. He was the originator of first aid in traditional Chinese medicine and influenced later generations.

#1197

T. K. Seung

#7896

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

T. K. Seung was a Korean American philosopher and literary critic. His academic interests cut across diverse philosophical and literary subjects, including ethics, political philosophy, Continental philosophy, cultural hermeneutics, and literary criticism.

#1198

Benson Mates

#11668

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Benson Mates was an American philosopher, noted for his work in logic, the history of philosophy, and skepticism. Mates studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Oregon, Cornell University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Some of his teachers included J. Barkley Rosser, Harold Cherniss, and Alfred Tarski. From 1948 until his retirement in 1989, he was a professor of philosophy at Berkeley. He remained Professor Emeritus of philosophy at University of California at Berkeley until his death.

#1199

James Fieser

#13040

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James Fieser is professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He received his B.A. from Berea College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Purdue University. He is founder and general editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is author, coauthor or editor of more than ten text books. Fieser is also known for being the guitarist in the hit band Oxford Street Band.

#1200

Tim Maudlin

#7768

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Tim William Eric Maudlin is an American philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic. Education and career Maudlin graduated from Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C. Later he studied physics and philosophy at Yale University, and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986. He taught for more than two decades at Rutgers University before joining the Department of Philosophy at New York University in 2010.

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