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,

#1301

Derk Pereboom

#20236

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Cornell University. He specializes in free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and the work of Immanuel Kant.

#1302

R. Jay Wallace

#26335

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

R. Jay Wallace is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and William and Trudy Ausfahl Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specialization include moral philosophy and philosophy of action. He is most noted for his work on practical reason, moral psychology, and meta-ethics.

#1303

Quassim Cassam

#21870

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Quassim Cassam, is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He writes on self-knowledge, perception, epistemic vices and topics in Kantian epistemology. As blurbed for his book, Vices of the Mind , Cassam defines epistemic vice as "character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that prevent us from gaining, keeping or sharing knowledge".

#1304

Isaac Passy

#24670

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Isaac Passy was a Bulgarian Jewish philosopher specializing in history, literature and aesthetics. He was a prominent professor at Sofia University from 1952 until 1993. He published over 40 monographs and edited some 80 volumes with philosophical texts and in history of philosophy from various epochs. He is the father of the Bulgarian politician and diplomat Solomon Passy.

#1305

Nancy Sherman

#28172

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Nancy Sherman is a distinguished university professor and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. She was also the inaugural Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy. Sherman is the author of several books, and her views on military ethics have been influential.

#1306

Juliane Rebentisch

#32502

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Juliane Rebentisch is a German philosopher and art historian whose research focuses on the history and politics of aesthetics. She is the author of three books: Aesthetics of Installation Art , The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence , and Theorien der Gegenwartskunst , and has edited numerous volumes on aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy in both German and English. Josef Chytry, in the academic journal Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, called Aesthetics of Installation Art a "formidable work." In 2017, she received the Lessing Prize from the city of Ha...

#1307

Hannes Leitgeb

#22350

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Hannes Leitgeb is an Austrian philosopher and mathematician. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and has received a Humboldt Professorship in 2010. His areas of research include logic , epistemology , philosophy of mathematics , philosophy of language , cognitive science , philosophy of science , and history of philosophy .

#1308

Yasuo Yuasa

#25990

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

was a Japanese philosopher of religion. Yuasa is known for his works on the theory of the body in Western and Asian philosophy and for his teaching. He has been referred to as "one of the most provocative and far-reaching" among Japan's contemporary philosophers.

#1309

Cheryl Misak

#25850

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Cheryl J. Misak is a Canadian philosopher who works in pragmatism, the history of analytic philosophy, and bioethics. She is a University Professor at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in intellectual and cultural history. In 2011, Misak served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society. In December 2020, Misak became the interim director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

#1310

Jennifer Lackey

Jennifer Lackey

#33379

Overall Influence

Jennifer Lackey is an American academic; she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Lackey is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of The Epistemology of Testimony and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays.

#1311

Thomas Sheehan

#30977

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Thomas Sheehan is an American philosopher who is the current professor at the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago. He is known for his books on Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His philosophical specialties are in philosophy of religion, twentieth-century European philosophy, and classical metaphysics. He is the author of The First Coming, a controversial account of Easter.

#1312

Jorge J. E. Gracia

#24352

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jorge J. E. Gracia was a Cuban-born American philosopher who was the Samuel P. Capen Chair, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Department of Comparative Literature in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gracia was educated in Cuba, the United States, Canada, and Spain, and received his Ph.D. in Medieval Philosophy from the University of Toronto.

#1313

Russ Shafer-Landau

Russ Shafer-Landau

#33083

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Russ Shafer-Landau is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Education and career Shafer-Landau is a graduate of Brown University and completed his PhD work at the University of Arizona under the supervision of Joel Feinberg. He has been teaching philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 2002, where he became chair of the department. From 1992 to 2002 Shafer-Landau taught at the University of Kansas.

#1314

Madsen Pirie

#4791

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Duncan Madsen Pirie is a British researcher and author. He is a co-founder and current President of the Adam Smith Institute, a UK neoliberal think tank which has been in operation since 1977. Early life and education Born in Hull, Pirie is the son of Douglas Pirie and Eva Madsen. As a child he attended the Humberstone Foundation School in Old Clee, Lincolnshire.

#1315

Donald Metcalf

#21088

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Donald Metcalf AC FRS FAA was an Australian medical researcher who spent most of his career at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. In 1954 he received the Carden Fellowship from the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria; while he officially retired in 1996, he continued working and held his fellowship until his death in December 2014.

#1316

Lucian Freud

#1191

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the Briti...

#1317

Antonio Escohotado

Antonio Escohotado

#15575

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Antonio Escohotado Espinosa , commonly called Antonio Escohotado, was a Spanish philosopher, jurist, essayist and university professor. His life's work primarily focused on law, philosophy and sociology, yet extended to many other disciplines. Escohotado gained public renown for his research on drugs and for his well-known anti-prohibitionist positions. His crown jewel The General History of Drugs, is the most comprehensive book ever written regarding drugs, in any language, in all of academia . The leitmotif of his work is, in the same way, an affirmation of freedom as an antidote to fear or the constraints that push the human being towards all kinds of servitude.

#1318

Jean Tinguely

#2680

Overall Influence

1925 - 1991 (66 years)

Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.

#1319

Jack Balkin

#3577

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jack M. Balkin is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project , a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society." He also directs the Knight Law and Media Program and the Abrams Institute for Free Expression at Yale Law School.

#1320

Victor Reppert

#19143

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Victor Reppert is an American philosopher best known for his development of the "argument from reason". He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo, and Philosophia Christi. He is also a philosophy blogger, with two blogs.

#1321

Jacek Salij

#28394

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jacek Salij OP is a Polish theologian and Thomist, philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, Dominican, translator, writer and publicist. Biography During the years 1960-1967 he studied theology at The Dominican Philosophical-Theological College in Cracow, followed by studies during the years 1968-1970 at The Academy of Catholic Theology in Warsaw. In 1971, he obtained the title Doctor of Law and obtained a post-doctorate diploma in 1979. In 1984, he worked at The Catholic University of Leuven . In 1990, he was appointed extraordinary professor of The Academy of Catholic Theology, Warsaw and in 19...

#1322

Rogers Albritton

#38650

Overall Influence

1923 - 2002 (79 years)

Rogers Garland Albritton was an American philosopher who served as chair of the Harvard and UCLA philosophy departments. He published little and inspired the entry "albritton" - a contraction of "all but written" - in the Philosophical Lexicon begun by Daniel Dennett . Albritton's specialties included ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind, free will, skepticism, metaphysics and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

#1323

Anthony J. Lisska

#22958

Overall Influence

Anthony J. Lisska was Maria Theresa Barney professor of philosophy at Denison University. He was a specialist in Thomism and analytic philosophy and the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas. He described his "intellectual avocation" as regional history and wrote several books on the history of Ohio. In 2016, the Denison University Gilpatrick Center was rededicated as the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement in honor of Anthony Lisska and his contributions to the university. These contributions include serving as dean, chairing the philosophy department, and founding and chairing the Honors Program...

#1324

Jeremy Butterfield

#19540

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jeremy Nicholas Butterfield FBA is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, noted particularly for his work on philosophical aspects of quantum theory, relativity theory and classical mechanics.

#1325

Daniel N. Robinson

Daniel N. Robinson

#8890

Overall Influence

1937 - 2018 (81 years)

Daniel Nicholas Robinson was an American psychologist who was a professor of psychology at Georgetown University and later in his life became a fellow of the faculty of philosophy at Oxford University.

#1326

Zdeněk Neubauer

Zdeněk Neubauer

#13689

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Zdeněk Neubauer was a Czech philosopher and biologist, remarkable especially for original interpretations in science history and epistemology. Biography Born in Brno to family of the Brno normative legal school representative Zdeněk Neubauer , Neubauer graduated from Charles University in Prague . During his activity in Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Naples he made several discoveries in genetics. In 1982 left the university because of nonconformist attitudes . After that, he was mainly a philosopher , publishing underground. Since 1990, he has been a member of the dep...

#1327

Mihailo Đurić

#16840

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Mihailo Đurić was one of Serbia's most prominent philosophers. He was a professor at the University of Belgrade's Law School and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Within the frame of ancient Greek culture, he studied philosophy, law, politics and history, but also modern political theory and ethics. A majority of his works are within the field of philosophy and method of sociology, history of political theories and political science. In the past two decades, his work was mainly devoted to the study of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

#1328

Bolívar Echeverría

Bolívar Echeverría

#14215

Overall Influence

1941 - 2010 (69 years)

Bolívar Echeverría was a philosopher, economist and cultural critic, born in Ecuador and later nationalized Mexican. He was professor emeritus on the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico .

#1329

Dorothy Edgington

#28325

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Dorothy Margaret Doig Edgington FBA is a philosopher active in metaphysics and philosophical logic. She is particularly known for her work on the logic of conditionals and vagueness. Life and education Dorothy Edgington was born on 29 April 1941 to Edward Milne and his wife Rhoda née Blair. She attended St Leonards School before going to St Hilda's College, Oxford to read PPE. She obtained her BA in 1964, followed in 1967 by a BPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford.

#1330

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

#27903

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is an American philosopher specializing in ethics, epistemology, neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is the Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

#1331

David Barker

#16755

Overall Influence

1938 - 2013 (75 years)

David James Purslove Barker was an English physician and epidemiologist and originator of the Barker Hypothesis that foetal and early infant conditions have a permanent conditioning effect on the body's metabolism and chronic conditions later in life.

#1332

Jean Mayer

#12394

Overall Influence

1920 - 1993 (73 years)

Jean Mayer was a French-American scientist best known for his research on the physiological bases of hunger and the metabolism of essential nutrients, and for his role in shaping policy on world hunger at both the national and international levels. As a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayer directed a laboratory that did groundbreaking work on the hypothalamic regulation of obesity and various metabolic disorders. In 1968-69, having worked as an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, he was appointed principal organizer and chair of the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health.

#1333

Henry Odera Oruka

#24871

Overall Influence

1944 - 1995 (51 years)

Henry Odera Oruka was a Kenyan philosopher who is best known for "Sage Philosophy". It was a project started in the 1970s in an attempt to preserve the knowledge of the indigenous thinkers in traditional African communities.

#1334

John Oulton Wisdom

#21190

Overall Influence

1908 - 1993 (85 years)

John Oulton Wisdom , cousin of Cambridge professor John Wisdom was "an important contributor to philosophy and to psychoanalysis" who made "original contributions to the mind-body problem, to philosophy of science, to cybernetics, to the theory of psychosomatic disorder, and to psychoanalytic theory".

#1335

Harriet Baber

#21464

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Harriet Baber is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego. She holds a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University, 1980. Her research interests are in analytic metaphysics, philosophical theology, feminism and philosophy of economics. In addition, Baber writes for The Guardian and is a regular columnist for Church Times . She is an Episcopalian.

#1336

Ron McClamrock

#19114

Overall Influence

Ronald Albert McClamrock is an associate professor of philosophy at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. His primary areas of research are the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science.

#1337

Nasrollah Pourjavady

Nasrollah Pourjavady

#20377

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Nasrollah Pourjavady is an Iranian philosopher, Sufi scholar and a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran in Tehran, Iran. He is the founder and former head of the Iran University Press and a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.

#1338

C. Robert Mesle

#15095

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Charles Robert Mesle is an American process theologian and was professor of philosophy and religion at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, until his retirement in 2016. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion at Graceland University and a Master of Arts degree in Christian theology at University of Chicago Divinity School , Mesle received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in philosophy and religion from Northwestern University .

#1339

Gilles Lipovetsky

Gilles Lipovetsky

#10802

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Gilles Lipovetsky is a French philosopher, writer, and sociologist, professor at Stendhal University in Grenoble, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France. Life and career Lipovetsky was born in Millau in 1944. He studied philosophy at University of Grenoble, and participated in the 1968 student uprising in Paris to change the French educational model. However he criticizes the model that came from that as producing alienated individuals with fragile personalities prone to emotional disorder due to hedonism and immediate gratification.

#1340

C. J. F. Williams

#29245

Overall Influence

1930 - 1997 (67 years)

Christopher John Fardo Williams was a British philosopher. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, on which topic he did most of his original work, and ancient philosophy, as an editor and translator.

#1341

Mylan Engel

#30205

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Mylan Engel Jr. is a full professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Biography Born in Alabama and educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of Arizona, he was hired by Northern Illinois University in 1988. Engel has also served as guest professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and University of Maribor, Slovenia .

#1342

Hassan Hanafi

#19370

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Hassan Hanafi was a professor and chaired the philosophy department at Cairo University. He was a leading authority on modern Islam. As a young man motivated by a revolutionary political activism, Hanafi associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Later Hanafi studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1967, he was a professor of philosophy in Cairo, as well as a visiting professor at universities in France, the United States, Belgium, Kuwait and Germany. He has been categorized as among "the big names" of the post-1967 Arab intellectual tradition.

#1343

C. Ronald Kahn

#23010

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Carl Ronald Kahn is an American physician and scientist, best known for his work with insulin receptors and insulin resistance in diabetes and obesity. He is the Chief Academic Officer at Joslin Diabetes Center, the Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1999.

#1344

John M. Cooper

#26855

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

John Madison Cooper was an American philosopher who was the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and an expert on ancient philosophy. Education and career Cooper earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1967 and taught there until 1971, when he accepted a tenured position in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until he moved to Princeton in 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001.

#1345

Michel Bitbol

#18855

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Michel Bitbol is a French researcher in philosophy of science. He is "Directeur de recherche" at CNRS, previously in the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée of École polytechnique . He is now a member of Archives Husserl, École Normale Superieure .

#1346

John Macquarrie

#10441

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

John Macquarrie was a Scottish-born theologian, philosopher and Anglican priest. He was the author of Principles of Christian Theology and Jesus Christ in Modern Thought . Timothy Bradshaw, writing in the Handbook of Anglican Theologians, described Macquarrie as "unquestionably Anglicanism's most distinguished systematic theologian in the second half of the 20th century."

#1347

James Griffin

#27539

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

James Patrick Griffin was an American-born philosopher, who was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2019. Education Griffin was educated at Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and Yale University, obtaining a BA in 1955. He was then a Rhodes Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford , then a senior scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford , obtaining his doctorate under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle in 1960.

#1348

Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff

#4187

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Douglas Mark Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open-source solutions to social problems.

#1349

Jean Houston

#3955

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Jean Houston is an American author involved in the human potential movement. Along with her husband, Robert Masters, she co-founded the Foundation for Mind Research. Biography Early life and education Houston was born in New York City to Mary Todaro Houston who was of Sicilian descent, and Jack Houston who was related to Sam Houston of Texas. Her father was a comedy writer who developed material for stage, television and the movies, including for comedians Bob Hope and George Burns. His work required him, and the family, to move frequently. After the breakup of her parents' marriage, she spe...

#1350

Richard Sorabji

#21826

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Sir Richard Rustom Kharsedji Sorabji, is a British historian of ancient Western philosophy, and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at King's College London. He has written his 'Intellectual Autobiography' in his Festschrift: R. Salles ed., Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought , 1–36. He is the nephew of Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to practice law in Britain and India.

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