The Most Influential People Across History
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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#1201
Paul Cliteur
#5649
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paul Bernard Cliteur is a Dutch professor of jurisprudence at Leiden University, as well as a politician, philosopher, writer, publicist and columnist. He is known for his conservative perspective, his atheism, his republicanism, and his dislike of Islam. He is a member of De Vrije Gedachte. Since 2015, Cliteur is a member of the Dutch political party Forum voor Democratie, where he is chairman of the advisory board and the party's official think tank. In 2019 he was elected to be parliamentary group leader for Forum voor Democratie in the Dutch Senate.
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Stephan Hartmann
#13279
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Stephan Hartmann is a German philosopher and Professor of Philosophy of Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, known for his contributions to formal epistemology. Biography Hartmann received his PhD from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany in 1995. He started his academic career at the University of Washington and the University of Pittsburgh. Back in Germany in 2002 at the University of Konstanz he headed the research group Philosophy, Probability and Modelling together with Luc Bovens.
Go to Profile#1203
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Alfred Sohn-Rethel was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. His main intellectual achievement was the publication of Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship between German industry and National Socialism.
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Nichiren
1222 - 1282 (60 years)
Nichiren was a Japanese Buddhist priest and philosopher of the Kamakura period. Nichiren declared that the Lotus Sutra alone contains the highest truth of Buddhist teachings suited for the Third Age of Buddhism, insisting that the Sovereign of Japan and its people should support only this form of Buddhism and eradicate all others. He advocated the repeated recitation of its title, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as the only path to Buddhahood and held that Shakyamuni Buddha and all other Buddhist deities were extraordinary manifestations of a particular Buddha-nature termed Myoho-Renge that is equally accessible to all.
Go to Profile#1205
Gerhart Husserl
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Gerhart Adolf Husserl was a German legal scholar and philosopher. He was the eldest son of philosopher Edmund Husserl . Born in Halle, Saxony, in 1893. He was on active duty during the Great war, and suffered a serious wound in 1917 and again in 1918, losing the sight of his left eye. Gerhart Husserl nonetheless managed to finish his University studies and habilitated in 1924. In two years, on 18 November 1926 he became a Professor of Law at the University of Kiel. He was dismissed due to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in 1933, and eventually emigrated to the United States.
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Theodore Drange
#14087
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Theodore "Ted" Michael Drange is a philosopher of religion and Professor Emeritus at West Virginia University, where he taught philosophy from 1966 to 2001. Life After graduating from Fort Hamilton High School, he received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1955 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1963, where he moved to after one year of graduate school at Yale.
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Cesare Burali-Forti
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Cesare Burali-Forti was an Italian mathematician, after whom the Burali-Forti paradox is named. Biography Burali-Forti was born in Arezzo, and was an assistant of Giuseppe Peano in Turin from 1894 to 1896, during which time he discovered a theorem which Bertrand Russell later realised contradicted a previously proved result by Georg Cantor. The contradiction came to be called the Burali-Forti paradox of Cantorian set theory. He died in Turin.
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Julia Driver
#14327
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Julia Driver is professor of philosophy and holder of the Darrell K. Royal Chair in Ethics and American Society at the University of Texas, Austin. She is a specialist in moral philosophy. Education and career She received her Ph.D. in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1990 under the supervision of Susan R. Wolf. She received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.
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John W. N. Watkins
#9956
Overall Influence
1924 - 1999 (75 years)
John William Nevill Watkins was an English philosopher, a professor at the London School of Economics from 1966 until his retirement in 1989 and a prominent proponent of critical rationalism. Life In 1952, Watkins married Micky Roe .
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Louis Pojman
#14145
Overall Influence
1935 - 2005 (70 years)
Louis Paul Pojman was an American philosopher and professor, whose name is most recognized as the author of dozens of philosophy texts and anthologies, which continue to be used widely for educational purposes, and more than one-hundred papers, which he read at some sixty universities around the world. Pojman was known for his work in applied ethics and philosophy of religion.
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Thomas V. Morris
#11644
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Thomas V. Morris , is an American philosopher. He is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is a founder of the Morris Institute for Human Values, and author of several books. He is also a business and motivational speaker, applying philosophical themes and concepts to business and professional life.
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Alois Riehl
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
Alois Adolf Riehl was an Austrian neo-Kantian philosopher. He was born in Bozen in the Austrian Empire . He was the brother of . Biography Riehl studied at Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck and Graz. He earned his PhD from Innsbruck in 1868. He habilitated at Graz at 1870.
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Jesús Mosterín
#5869
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Jesús Mosterín was a leading Spanish philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy. Biography He was born in Bilbao in 1941. He studied in Spain, Germany, and the USA. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Barcelona since 1983, he founded there an active Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science. Since 1996, he has been Research Professor at the National Research Council of Spain . He is a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and a member of several international academies. He ...
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Michael of Ephesus
1070 - 1129 (59 years)
Michael of Ephesus or Michael Ephesius wrote important commentaries on Aristotle, including the first full commentary on the Sophistical Refutations, which established the regular study of that text.
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Johan van Benthem
#10405
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Johannes Franciscus Abraham Karel van Benthem is a University Professor of logic at the University of Amsterdam at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and professor of philosophy at Stanford University . He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 1996 and elected a Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.
Go to Profile#1216
Chandrakirti
600 - 650 (50 years)
Chandrakirti or "Chandra" was a Buddhist scholar of the Madhyamaka school and a noted commentator on the works of Nagarjuna and those of his main disciple, Aryadeva. He wrote two influential works on madhyamaka, the Prasannapadā and the Madhyamakāvatāra.
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Georges Politzer
1903 - 1942 (39 years)
Georges Politzer was a French philosopher and Marxist theoretician of Hungarian Jewish origin, affectionately referred to by some as the "red-headed philosopher" . He was a native of Oradea, a city in present-day Romania . He was murdered in the Holocaust.
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Gustave Courbet
1819 - 1877 (58 years)
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.
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Chaïm Perelman
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique , with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver .
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Diogenes of Apollonia
460 BC - 500 BC (-40 years)
Diogenes of Apollonia was an ancient Greek philosopher, and was a native of the Milesian colony Apollonia in Thrace. He lived for some time in Athens. He believed air to be the one source of all being from which all other substances were derived, and, as a primal force, to be both divine and intelligent. He also wrote a description of the organization of blood vessels in the human body. His ideas were parodied by the dramatist Aristophanes, and may have influenced the Orphic philosophical commentary preserved in the Derveni papyrus. His philosophical work has not survived in a complete form,...
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Costanzo Preve
#13805
Overall Influence
1943 - 2013 (70 years)
Costanzo Preve was an Italian philosopher and a political theoretician. Preve is widely considered one of the most important anti-capitalist European thinkers and a renowned expert in the history of Marxism. His thought is based on the Ancient Greek and idealistic tradition philosophy under the influence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. He is author of many essays and volumes about philosophical interpretation, communitarianism and universalism.
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John Toland
1670 - 1722 (52 years)
John Toland was an Irish rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. Born in Ireland, he was educated at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leiden and Oxford and was influenced by the philosophy of John Locke.
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Brian Davies
#14037
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Brian Evan Anthony Davies is a British philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and friar. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University , and author of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, now in its fourth English edition, which has been translated into five languages.
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Gajo Petrović
#14378
Overall Influence
1927 - 1993 (66 years)
Gajo Petrović was one of the main theorists in the Marxist humanist Praxis School in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He was the only one among the editors of the Praxis journal to stay in this position throughout the journal's publication. He is credited by Milan Kangrga to be the mastermind behind the Korčula Summer School, which was a meeting place for Marxists and other philosophers from the East and the West in the 1960s and 1970s.
Go to Profile#1225
Sengzhao
384 - 414 (30 years)
Sengzhao was a Chinese Buddhist philosopher from Later Qin. Born to a poor family in Jingzhao, he acquired literary skills, apparently including the capacity to read Pali, and became a scribe. This exposed him to a variety of uncommon documents. He was influenced by Taoists, Laozi and Zhuangzi, and although we are told he enjoyed Lao Tzu’s Daodejing , he was overjoyed when he discovered the Vimalakirti Sutra. This encounter transformed his life and he became a Buddhist. He was known as being among the ablest of the disciples of Kumārajīva.
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Richard Stanley Peters
#6015
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Richard Stanley Peters was an English philosopher. His work belongs mainly to the areas of political theory, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of education. Earlier life Peters was born in 1919 in Mussoorie, India. He spent his childhood with his grandmother in England. He was a pupil at Sidcot School, Winscombe, Somerset, 1933–1938. As a young man, his private tutor was Eric Blair . As a conscientious objector in the Second World War, he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit and with the Friends Relief Service in 1940–1944.
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Johannes Volkelt
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Johannes Immanuel Volkelt was a German philosopher. Biography He was educated at Vienna, Jena, and Leipzig. He became professor of philosophy at Basel in 1883 and at Würzburg in 1889, and in 1894 was made professor of philosophy and pedagogy in Leipzig.
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Jean Cavaillès
1903 - 1944 (41 years)
Jean Cavaillès was a French philosopher and logician who specialized in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. He took part in the French Resistance within the Libération movement and was arrested by the Gestapo on 17 February 1944 and shot on 4 April 1944.
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Hajime Nakamura
#6841
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Hajime Nakamura was a Japanese Orientalist, Indologist, philosopher and academic of Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. Biography Nakamura was born in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, Japan. In 1943 he graduated from the Department of Literature at Tokyo Imperial University on a study on "The History of Early Vedanta Philosophy" under the supervision of Prof. Hakuju Ui. In 1943 he succeeded Prof. Ui and was appointed Associate Professor of Tokyo Imperial University.
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Terence Irwin
#12782
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Terence Henry Irwin FBA , usually cited as T. H. Irwin, is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics . He was the Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, from 2007 until 2017.
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Kojin Karatani
#4522
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kōjin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic. Biography Karatani entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, where he joined the radical Marxist Communist League, better known as "The Bund," and participated in the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which he would later come to view as a formative political experience.
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Dov Gabbay
#7477
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Dov M. Gabbay is an Israeli logician. He is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Group of Logic, Language and Computation, Department of Computer Science, King's College London. Work Gabbay has authored over four hundred and fifty research papers and over thirty research monographs. He is editor of several international journals, and of many reference works and handbooks of logic, including the Handbook of Philosophical Logic , the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science] , and the Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming .
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Albert of Saxony
1316 - 1390 (74 years)
Albert of Saxony was a German philosopher and mathematician known for his contributions to logic and physics. He was bishop of Halberstadt from 1366 until his death. Life Albert was born at Rickensdorf near Helmstedt, the son of a farmer in a small village; but because of his talent, he was sent to study at the University of Prague and the University of Paris.
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Leonard Lawlor
#8819
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Leonard "Len" Lawlor is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy. Career Lawlor received his doctorate from SUNY Stony Brook in 1988 and taught at the University of Memphis from 1989–2008, where he held the position of Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy from 2004 to 2008 before joining the faculty at Penn State, as Sparks Professor of Philosophy. He is known for his writings on phenomenology and on the figures Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Jean Hippolyte.
Go to Profile#1235
Prabhākara
#14435
Overall Influence
Prabhākara was an Indian philosopher-grammarian in the Mīmāṃsā tradition of Kerala. Probable date Hariswamin's commentary on Shatapatha Brahmana which dates to 638 CE discusses the doctrine of Prabhākara's followers. Prabhākara in his book Bṛhati quotes only Bhartṛhari and Bharavi . Thus his probable time can be assigned to the latter half of the 6th century.
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Gilbert Simondon
1924 - 1989 (65 years)
Gilbert Simondon was a French philosopher best known for his theory of individuation, a major source of inspiration for Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Bernard Stiegler. Career Born in Saint-Étienne, Simondon was a student of philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem, philosopher Martial Guéroult, and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. He defended his doctoral dissertations in 1958 at the University of Paris. His main thesis, L'individuation à la lumière des notions de Forme et d'Information , was published in two parts, the fi...
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Shaun Gallagher
#5672
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#1238
Vittorio Hösle
#8891
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Vittorio Hösle is an Italian-born German philosopher. He has authored works including Hegels System , Moral und Politik , and Der philosophische Dialog . He has been in the United States since 1999, at the University of Notre Dame where he is the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters . Since 2008, he has also served as the founding Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
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Fred Rosner
#6756
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Fred Rosner is a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the director of the Department of Medicine at Queens Hospital Center. He is also the chairman of the Medical Ethics Committee of the State of New York. He is, moreover, an expert on Jewish medical ethics and on the medical writings of Moses Maimonides.
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Helena Roerich
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Helena Ivanovna Roerich was a Russian theosophist, writer, and public figure. In the early 20th century, she created, in cooperation with the Teachers of the East, a philosophic teaching of Living Ethics . She was an organizer and participant of cultural activity in the U.S., conducted under the guidance of her husband, Nicholas Roerich. Along with her husband, she took part in expeditions of hard-to-reach and little-investigated regions of Central Asia. She was an Honorary President-Founder of the Institute of Himalayan Studies "Urusvati" in India and co-author of the idea of the International Treaty for Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historical Monuments .
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Benjamin Constant
1767 - 1830 (63 years)
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque , or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Franco-Swiss political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion. A committed republican from 1795, he backed the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor and the following one on 18 Brumaire . During the Consulat, in 1800 he became the leader of the Liberal Opposition. Having upset Napoleon and left France to go to Switzerland then to the Kingdom of Saxony, Constant nonetheless sided with him during the Hundred Days and became politically active again during the French Restoration. He was elected Député in 1818 and remained in post until his death in 1830.
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Tom Rockmore
#12562
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Tom Rockmore is an American philosopher. Although he denies the usual distinction between philosophy and the history of philosophy, he has strong interests throughout the history of philosophy and defends a constructivist view of epistemology. The philosophers whom he has studied extensively are Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, and Heidegger. He received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1974 and his Habilitation à diriger des recherches from the Université de Poitiers in 1994. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University, as well as Distinguished Humanities Chair Pro...
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Salomon Maimon
1754 - 1800 (46 years)
Salomon Maimon was a philosopher born of Lithuanian Jewish parentage in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, present-day Belarus. Some of his work was written in the German language. Biography Early years Salomon Maimon was born Shlomo ben Joshua in the town of Zhukov Borok near Mir in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , where his grandfather leased an estate from a Prince Karol Stanisław "Panie Kochanku" Radziwiłł. He was taught Torah and Talmud, first by his father, and later by instructors in Mir. He was recognized as a prodigy in Talmudic studies. His parents fell on hard times, and betrothed him to two separate girls in order to take advantage of their dowries, leading to a bitter rivalry.
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Sergei Rubinstein
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.
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Shannon Vallor
#12756
Overall Influence
Shannon Vallor is an American philosopher of technology. She is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She was at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California where she was the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor of Philosophy at SCU.
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Walter J. Ong
#1668
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Walter Jackson Ong was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association.
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Shizuteru Ueda
#11281
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Shizuteru Ueda was a Japanese philosopher specialized in philosophy of religion, especially in philosophy of Buddhism and Zen. He was a professor at Kyoto University and considered a third generation member of Kyoto School .
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Alexander Pruss
#13914
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Alexander Robert Pruss is a Canadian philosopher and mathematician. He is currently a professor of philosophy and the co-director of graduate studies in philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
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Vladimir Bazarov
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, journalist, philosopher, and economist. Born as Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev, Bazarov is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of economic planning in the Soviet Union. He was one of the Russian Machists, as Lenin dubbed the term, and was a close friend to Alexander Bogdanov.
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Henri Gouhier
1898 - 1994 (96 years)
Henri Gouhier was a French philosopher, a historian of philosophy, and a literary critic. Biography Born in Auxerre, Yonne, Gouhier's studies led to a doctorate in 1926. He served as the Professor of philosophy at a lycée in Troyes from 1925 to 1928. Then he taught at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lille between 1929 and 1940; subsequently, he taught at the University of Bordeaux during 1940 and 1941.
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