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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,

#1351

William Shaw

#29559

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

William H. Shaw was born on July 31, 1948. He is a professor and former Chair of the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University. He is the author of Marx's Theory of History, Business Ethics, 4th ed., Moral Issues in Business, 8th ed. , and Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism.

#1352

Giuseppe Lippi

#43887

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

#1353

Timothy J. McGrew

#22370

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Timothy Joel McGrew is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, and the chair of the department of philosophy there. His research interests include epistemology, the history and philosophy of science, and the philosophy of religion. He is a specialist in the philosophical applications of probability theory.

#1354

Mikael Stenmark

#32372

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Mikael Stenmark is a Swedish philosopher who is Dean of the Faculty of Theology since 2008 and Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published papers in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and environmental ethics and on science-religion issues. Stenmark is the author of "Rationality in Science, Religion and Everyday Life" , for which he was awarded The John Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences in 1996.

#1355

Ira Shor

#4541

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Ira Shor is a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. He is also doctoral faculty in the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

#1356

Thomas Baldwin

#21124

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Thomas R. Baldwin is a British philosopher and has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York since 1995. He has written generally on 20th century analytic and Continental philosophy, as well as bioethics, the philosophy of language and of mind, particularly with regard to G. E. Moore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bertrand Russell.

#1357

Ruth Anna Putnam

#29979

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Ruth Anna Putnam was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. Biography Ruth Anna Jacobs was born in Berlin on 20 September 1927. Her father, born Karl Adolf Rudolf Hermann Jacobs in 1901 in Gotha, was Hermann Jacobs, the great great grandson of the German scholar Friedrich Jacobs. Her mother Marie Jacobs, born Marie Kohn in 1901, was the daughter of Hans Nathan Kohn, the German physician after whom the "Pores of Kohn" were named. Ruth was the couple's only child.

#1358

Kerry S. Walters

#15866

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kerry S. Walters is Professor emeritus of Philosophy at Gettysburg College and author of numerous books on philosophy, religion, and American history as well as over 200 articles in academic journals, trade magazines, and newspapers. His special fields of interests include Christian mysticism, atheism, the ethics of diet, Christian pacifism, critical thinking, deism in early America, and the history of the early republic.

#1359

Philip L. Quinn

#30097

Overall Influence

1940 - 2004 (64 years)

Philip L. Quinn was a philosopher and theologian. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1962 and went on to earn a master's degree in physics from the University of Delaware in 1966. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy. Quinn joined the faculty of Brown University. At Brown, he was very popular and taught courses in the philosophy of physics, ethics, and related fields. In 1985, he assumed a position as the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Quinn served in 1994–1995 a...

#1360

Jan Faye

#30882

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jan Faye is a Danish philosopher of science and metaphysics. He is currently associate professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. Faye has contributed to a number of areas in philosophy including explanation, interpretation, philosophy of the humanities and the natural sciences, evolutionary naturalism, philosophy of Niels Bohr, and topics concerning time, causation, and backward causation .

#1361

G. Spencer-Brown

#9216

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

George Spencer-Brown was an English polymath best known as the author of Laws of Form. He described himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet".

#1362

Grace Jantzen

#41983

Overall Influence

1948 - 2006 (58 years)

Grace Marion Jantzen was a Canadian feminist philosopher and theologian. She was professor of religion, culture and gender at Manchester University from 1996 until her death from cancer at the age of 57.

#1363

Howard Robinson

#25214

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Howard Robinson is a British philosopher, specialising in various areas of philosophy of mind and metaphysics, best known for his work in the philosophy of perception. His contributions to philosophy include a defense of sense-datum theories of perception and a variety of arguments against physicalism about the mind. He published an alternative version of the popular Knowledge Argument in his book Matter and Sense independently and in the same year as Frank Jackson, but Robinson's thought experiment involves sounds rather than colors. He is Professor of Philosophy at Central European Universi...

#1364

Vincent Brümmer

#31000

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Vincent Brümmer was a South African-born Christian theologian who worked for most of his career in the Netherlands. From 1967 to 1997 he was the Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Utrecht.

#1365

Abraham Moles

#7145

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

Abraham Moles was a pioneer in information science and communication studies in France, He was a professor at Ulm school of design and University of Strasbourg. He is known for his work on kitsch. Biography Moles studied electrical and acoustics engineering at the University of Grenoble while preparing a bachelor in sciences of nature. He became a research assistant at the Laboratory of metal physics, under the direction of Félix Esclangon, then of Louis Néel. There he learned techniques of metal work, then electric and electronic tools. He wrote reports on material properties or technical analysis.

#1366

William J. Abraham

#20871

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

William James Abraham was a Northern Irish theologian, analytic philosopher, and Methodist pastor known for his contributions to the philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, evangelism, and church renewal. Abraham spent most of his career in the United States and was the Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He previously taught at Seattle Pacific University and was a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. Abraham was associated with the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church and was a propone...

#1367

Peter-Paul Verbeek

#14737

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Peter-Paul Verbeek is Rector Magnificus of the University of Amsterdam and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Science and Technology in a Changing World since 1 October 2022. Prior to his appointment in Amsterdam, Verbeek, a Dutch philosopher of technology, has been chair of the philosophy department at the University of Twente. He was a member of the Dutch council for the Humanities and chair of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. Since 2018, he has also been University Professor of Philosophy of Humans and Technology and scientific codirector of the DesignLab at the University of Twente.

#1368

Keith Frankish

#18520

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Keith Frankish is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science. He is an Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. He is known for his "illusionist" stance in the theory of consciousness. He holds that the conscious mind is a virtual system, a trick of the biological mind. In other words, phenomenality is an introspective illusion. This position is in opposition to dualist theo...

#1369

Arthur Fine

#21255

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Arthur Isadore Fine is an American philosopher of science now emeritus at the University of Washington. Education and career Having studied physics, philosophy, and mathematics, Fine graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958 with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. He then, in 1960, earned a Master of Science in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a thesis supervised by Karl Menger,

#1370

Herbert Y. Meltzer

#44389

Overall Influence

Herbert Y. Meltzer is an American scientist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, pharmacology and physiology and director of the Translational Neuropharmacology Program at Northwestern University, best known for his research on the treatment of schizophrenia. He is the author of over 1,000 publications.

#1371

William C. Dement

#9095

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

William Charles Dement was an American sleep researcher and founder of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University. He was a leading authority on sleep, sleep deprivation and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy. For this pioneering work in a previously uncharted field in the United States, he is sometimes referred to as the American father of sleep medicine.

#1372

Michael Williams

#35279

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Michael Williams is a British philosopher who is currently Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, noted especially for his work in epistemology. Education and career He received his BA from the University of Oxford and his PhD from Princeton University under the direction of Richard Rorty. He taught at Yale University, the University of Maryland, and Northwestern University prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins.

#1373

George Woodcock

George Woodcock

#22409

Overall Influence

1912 - 1995 (83 years)

George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, a philosopher, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements .

#1374

Michael R. Ayers

#36770

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Michael Richard Ayers is a British philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and was a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1965 until 2002. Among his students are Colin McGinn and William Child.

#1375

Henry E. Kyburg Jr.

#29691

Overall Influence

1928 - 2007 (79 years)

Henry E. Kyburg Jr. was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida. His first faculty posts were at Rockefeller Institute, University of Denver, Wesleyan College, and Wayne State University.

#1376

Gilbert Shelton

Gilbert Shelton

#4759

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Gilbert Shelton is an American cartoonist and a key member of the underground comix movement. He is the creator of the iconic underground characters The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog.

#1377

Gail Fine

#38634

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Gail Fine is a professor of philosophy emerita at Cornell University. She was also a visiting professor of ancient philosophy at Oxford University, and a senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford University.

#1378

Frederick Mayer

Frederick Mayer

#20191

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Frederick Mayer was an educational scientist and philosopher of the University of Redlands, California and one of the leading creativity experts. One of his most important aims was a global humanism. Until the very last days of his life he was active as an author. More than sixty books deal with creativity, education and humanism. Internationally recognized creativity researcher Frederick Mayer in Vienna died. Mayer was particularly affected by the quote "Pride is not for him who loves his country, but for him who loves the whole world."

#1379

Kristo Ivanov

#5582

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Kristo Ivanov is a Swedish-Brazilian information scientist and systems scientist of ethnic Bulgarian origin. He is professor emeritus at the Department of informatics of Umeå University in Sweden. Biography Ivanov was born in Belgrade in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but grew up and was educated in Italy and later in Brazil where he graduated in electronic engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica. In 1961 he moved to Sweden, where he worked as an electronic engineer in the telecommunications and computer industries, with assignments in France and the USA. In 1972 he obtained a PhD...

#1380

Rainer Forst

#18243

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Rainer Forst is a German philosopher and political theorist, and was called the "most important political philosopher of his generation" in 2012, when he won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. Currently he is Professor of Political Theory at the Department for Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt. He is often identified with the newest generation of scholars associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He received his doctorate under the supervision of Jürgen Habermas in 1993, with additional supervision by John Rawls from 1991 to 1992.

#1381

Marc Sautet

#26533

Overall Influence

1947 - 1998 (51 years)

Marc Sautet was a French writer, teacher, translator , and philosopher. He was a Doctor of Philosophy at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Sautet was a former Trotskyist who however edited two books on the German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche. Marc Sautet emphasised that Nietzsche was a precursor of his time.

#1382

Mikael Rothstein

#5711

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Mikael Rothstein is an associate professor of religious history at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rothstein earned his PhD in 1993 and became a Lector at the University of Copenhagen in 2001. He has been on the board of the Danish Association for the History of Religions and the editorial boards of the publications Renner Studies on New Religions and Nye Religioner .

#1383

Christopher Phillips

Christopher Phillips

#13964

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Christopher Phillips is an American author, educator, consultant, lecturer, and pro-democracy advocate. He is best known for his 2001 book Socrates Café. Public Radio International called Phillips the "Johnny Appleseed of Philosophy."

#1384

Berit Brogaard

#27013

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Berit Oskar Brogaard is a Danish–American philosopher specializing in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Her recent work concerns synesthesia, savant syndrome, blindsight and perceptual reports. She is professor of philosophy and runs a perception lab at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She was also co-editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report until 2021.

#1385

Debra Nails

#34708

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Debra Nails is an American philosophy professor who taught at Michigan State University. Nails earned her M.A. in philosophy and classical Greek from Louisiana State University before going on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1993. Previously, she taught in the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion at Mary Washington College. Nails taught courses on the history of philosophy, continental rationalism, metaphysics, and modern philosophy.

#1386

Pieranna Garavaso

#9864

Overall Influence

Pieranna Garavaso is an analytic philosopher and professor emerita at the University of Minnesota Morris. Her areas of interest include epistemological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and feminist epistemology. She received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is the recipient of two distinguished teaching awards: the University of Minnesota, Morris Alumni Association Teaching Award in 2003 and the Horace T. Morse University of Minnesota Alumni in 2004.

#1387

Joseph Murray

#1398

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Joseph Edward Murray was an American plastic surgeon who performed the first successful human kidney transplant on identical twins Richard and Ronald Herrick on December 23, 1954. Murray shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 with E. Donnall Thomas for "their discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease."

#1388

Martin J. Blaser

#27376

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Martin J. Blaser is the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

#1389

Robert Kurz

#13799

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Robert Kurz was a German philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal Exit! He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of value criticism. Life and work Robert Kurz was born on 24 December 1943 in Nuremberg to a German working-class family. During his military service he was involved in pacifist propaganda and participated in the "Ostermärschen," protest marches against atomic weapons in the 1960s. Kurz studied philosophy, history and paedagogy at the university of Erlangen without taking a degree. He participated in the "student revolt" in 1968 and took part in the intense discussions within the New Left.

#1390

Anita L. Allen

#17090

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

#1391

Paul Copan

#21043

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Paul Copan is a Christian theologian, analytic philosopher, apologist, and author. He is currently a professor at the Palm Beach Atlantic University and holds the endowed Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics. He has written and edited over 40 books in the area of philosophy of religion, apologetics, theology, and ethics in the Bible. He has contributed a great number of articles to various professional journals and has written many essays for edited books. For six years he served as the president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

#1392

Peter Goldie

#20353

Overall Influence

1946 - 2011 (65 years)

Peter Goldie was a British businessman and then academic philosopher with interests in ethics and aesthetics. He was the Samuel Hall Chair in Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Discipline Area of the School of Social Sciences at University of Manchester. He was educated at Felsted.

#1393

Alberto Jori

#25004

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Alberto Jori is an Italian neo-Aristotelian philosopher. Born in Mantua, on his father's side he is the descendant of an old noble Swiss family of barons from Ticino and patricians from Zurich. On his mother's side he is related to a long Jewish line of Mantuan rabbis, from which the kabbalists Moses ben Mordecai Zacuto , Solomon Aviad Sar Shalom Basilea and the mathematician Gino Fano were also members. He studied in Padua, Cambridge and Heidelberg and received a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2003, with his book on Aristotle, he won the prize of the International Academy of the History of Science .

#1394

Ghosha

#13725

Overall Influence

Ghosha was an ancient Vedic period Indian philosopher and seer. From a young age she suffered from a skin ailment which had disfigured her. Ashvini Kumars cured her and restored her youthfulness, health and beauty. As a result, she got married and had a son. She was proficient in the Vedas and had even scripted two hymns in the Rigveda. She was called as mantradrika meaning well versed in mantras. She was also known as a Brahmavadini or speaker or proclaimer of Brahmana and led a purposeful spiritual life.

#1395

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke

#37433

Overall Influence

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke is a Professor of Philosophy at Gallaudet University. She is the first signing deaf woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the world, as well as the first deaf person to receive a PhD in philosophy at the University of New Mexico.

#1396

George Pappas

#38427

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

George Sotiros Pappas is a professor of philosophy at Ohio State University. Pappas specializes in epistemology, the history of early modern philosophy, philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He is of Greek and English origin.

#1397

Stanisław Krajewski

Stanisław Krajewski

#15526

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Stanisław Krajewski is a Polish philosopher, mathematician and writer, activist of the Jewish minority in Poland. Biography He is professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw, author, leader of the Jewish community in Poland and co-chairman of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.

#1398

Judith Miller

#11822

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Judith Miller was a French psychoanalyst, born in Antibes. She was the daughter of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille. Her spouse was Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller. Work As a Maoist philosophy lecturer at Vincennes in Paris, Miller's radicalism was used as a reason for her philosophy department to be decertified. This occurred after she handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus, and subsequently publicly declared in a radio interview that the university is a capitalist institution, and that she would do everything she could to make it run as badly as possible. Afte...

#1399

Alice Dreger

#3694

Overall Influence

Alice Domurat Dreger is an American historian, bioethicist, author, and former professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois.

#1400

Quentin Lauer

#42001

Overall Influence

1917 - 1997 (80 years)

Quentin Lauer, S.J. was an American Jesuit priest, philosopher and Hegel scholar. Lauer’s academic work helped introduce Hegel's thought to the American philosophical community. He was President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division from 1985–1986, and a President of the Hegel Society of America. Quentin Lauer was also a scholar of Edmund Husserl. He was a professor of philosophy at Fordham University from 1954 to 1990. Important works by Lauer which helped disseminate the ideas of Hegel and Husserl in the United States include: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spi...

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