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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

Fred Sommers

#16872

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Frederic Tamler Sommers , better known as Fred Sommers, was an American philosopher who, after an initial focus on ontology generally, turned his attention specifically to a revival of classical logic. He is the father of the philosopher Tamler Sommers.

#1352

Byung-Chul Han

#6088

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there. Biography Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy at Korea University in Seoul before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. In 1994 he received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Stimmung, or mood, in Martin Heidegger.

#1353

David Makinson

#13647

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Clement Makinson , is an Australian mathematical logician living in London, England. Career Makinson began his studies at Sydney University in 1958 and was an associate of the Libertarian Society and Sydney Push. He is a Visiting Professor in the London School of Economics, University of London, and an associate member of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée , École Polytechnique, Paris. He has held professorial rank positions in King's College London, University of London and in the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. From 1980 till 2001 he worked for UNESCO, Paris.

#1354

Naomi Klein

#365

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofeminism, organized labour, leftism and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. As of 2021 she is Associate Professor, and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, co-directing a Centre for Climate Justice.

#1355

Daniel Dombrowski

#17531

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Daniel A. Dombrowski is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at Seattle University. Since 2009 he has served as Editor of the journal Process Studies, and is a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America .

#1356

Margaret Gilbert

#4895

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Margaret Gilbert is a British philosopher best known for her founding contributions to the analytic philosophy of social phenomena. She has also made substantial contributions to other philosophical fields including political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and ethics. She is currently a Distinguished Professor and the Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.

#1357

Rose Rand

1903 - 1980 (77 years)

Rose Rand was an Austrian-American logician and philosopher. She was a member of the Vienna Circle. Life and work Rose Rand was born in Lemberg in the Austrian crown land of Galicia . After her family moved to Austria she studied at the Polish Gymnasium in Vienna. In 1924 she enrolled in Vienna University, her teachers included Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap. She graduated with her first degree in 1928. During her post-graduation years, she remained in contact with Vienna Circle colleagues such as Schlick.

#1358

Genevieve Lloyd

#15192

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Genevieve Mary Lloyd , is an Australian philosopher and feminist. Biography Lloyd studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s and then at Somerville College, Oxford. Her D.Phil, awarded in 1973, was on "Time and Tense". From 1967 until 1987 she lectured at the Australian National University, during which period she developed her most influential ideas and wrote The Man of Reason, which was published in 1984. In 1987 she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, being the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia. On r...

#1359

Paul of Venice

1369 - 1429 (60 years)

Paul of Venice was a Catholic philosopher, theologian, logician and metaphysician of the Order of Saint Augustine. Life Paul was born, according to the chroniclers of his order, at Udine, about 1369 and died at Venice on 15 June 1429, as Paolo Nicoletti. He joined the Augustinian Order at the age of 14, at the convent of Santo Stefano in Venice. In 1390 he is said to have been sent to Oxford for his studies in theology, but returned to Italy, and finished his course at the University of Padua, becoming a Doctor of Arts and Theology in 1405. He lectured in the Universities of Padua, Siena, Perugia, and Bologna during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.

#1360

Claudia Card

#11365

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Claudia Falconer Card was the Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with teaching affiliations in Women's Studies, Jewish Studies, Environmental Studies, and LGBT Studies.

#1361

J. L. Schellenberg

#12579

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

John L. Schellenberg is a Canadian philosopher, best known for his work in philosophy of religion. He has earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

#1362

Arius Didymus

83 BC - 100 (183 years)

Arius Didymus was a Stoic philosopher and teacher of Augustus. Fragments of his handbooks summarizing Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines are preserved by Stobaeus and Eusebius. Life Arius was a citizen of Alexandria. Augustus esteemed him so highly, that after the conquest of Alexandria, he declared that he spared the city chiefly for the sake of Arius. According to Plutarch, Arius advised Augustus to execute Caesarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, with the words "ouk agathon polukaisarie" , a pun on a line in Homer.

#1363

Harry V. Jaffa

#5439

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist, and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont Graduate University, and was a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times".

#1364

Aleksey Khomyakov

Aleksey Khomyakov

1804 - 1860 (56 years)

Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov was a Russian theologian, philosopher, poet and amateur artist. He co-founded the Slavophile movement along with Ivan Kireyevsky, and he became one of its most distinguished theoreticians. His son Nikolay Khomyakov was a speaker of the State Duma.

#1365

Rachel Carson

1907 - 1964 (57 years)

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

#1366

Abner Shimony

#5436

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Abner Eliezer Shimony was an American physicist and philosopher. He specialized in quantum theory and philosophy of science. As a physicist, he concentrated on the interaction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He authored many works and research on complementarity in quantum entanglement as well as multiparticle quantum interferometry, both relating to quantum coherence. He authored research articles and books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. He received the 1996 Lakatos Prize for his work in philosophy of science. Shimony is also the author of Tibaldo and the Hole in ...

#1367

Seiichi Hatano

1877 - 1950 (73 years)

Seiichi Hatano was a Japanese philosopher, best known for his work in the philosophy of religion dealing mostly with western religion and also western philosophical thoughts in theological aspects of Christianity.

#1368

Christine Ladd-Franklin

Christine Ladd-Franklin

1847 - 1930 (83 years)

Christine Ladd-Franklin was an American psychologist, logician, and mathematician. Early life and education Christine Ladd, sometimes known by the nickname "Kitty", was born on December 1, 1847, in Windsor, Connecticut, to Eliphalet, a merchant, and Augusta Ladd. During her early childhood, she lived with her parents and younger brother Henry in New York City. In 1853 the family moved back to Windsor, Connecticut, where her sister Jane Augusta Ladd McCordia was born the following year. Family correspondence shows that Augusta and one of her sisters were both staunch supporters of women's rights.

#1369

William Osler

1849 - 1919 (70 years)

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, was a Canadian physician and one of the "Big Four" founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope". In addition to being a physician he was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker. He was passionate about medical libraries and ...

#1370

Seth Benardete

#8950

Overall Influence

1930 - 2001 (71 years)

Seth Benardete was an American classicist and philosopher, long a member of the faculties of New York University and The New School. In addition to teaching positions at Harvard, Brandeis, St. John's College, Annapolis and NYU, Benardete was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.

#1371

James G. Lennox

#14103

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

James G. Lennox is an emeritus professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, United States, with secondary appointments in the departments of Classics and Philosophy. He is a leader in the study of Aristotelian science in light of his groundbreaking work on Aristotle's biology and philosophy of biology. In particular, Lennox's work in the 1980s catalyzed a renewed interest in Aristotle's biology by arguing that his natural historical works are consistent with and even demonstrative of the scientific methodology he lays out in the Posterior Analytics.

#1372

Isaac Israeli ben Solomon

Isaac Israeli ben Solomon

832 - 932 (100 years)

Isaac Israeli ben Solomon , also known as Isaac Israeli the Elder and Isaac Judaeus, was one of the foremost Jewish physicians and philosophers living in the Arab world of his time. He is regarded as the father of medieval Jewish Neoplatonism. His works, all written in Arabic and subsequently translated into Hebrew, Latin and Spanish, entered the medical curriculum of the early thirteenth-century universities in Medieval Europe and remained popular throughout the Middle Ages.

#1373

Makkhali Gosala

Makkhali Gosala

484 BC - Present (2508 years)

Makkhali Gosala or Manthaliputra Goshalak was an ascetic ajivika teacher of ancient India. He was a contemporary of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, and of Mahavira, the last and 24th Tirthankara of Jainism.

#1374

Leonard Nelson

1882 - 1927 (45 years)

Leonard Nelson , sometimes spelt Leonhard, was a German mathematician, critical philosopher, and socialist. He was part of the neo-Friesian school of neo-Kantianism and a friend of the mathematician David Hilbert. He devised the Grelling–Nelson paradox in 1908 and the related idea of autological words with Kurt Grelling.

#1375

Roy Wood Sellars

1880 - 1973 (93 years)

Roy Wood Sellars was a Canadian-born American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of naturalistic emergent evolution . Sellars received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he taught for over 40 years. He is the father of Wilfrid Sellars.

#1376

Eli Hirsch

#17822

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Eli Hirsch is an American philosopher and the Charles Goldman Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He is best known for his work in meta-ontology. He coined the phrase "soft ontology" and has authored over 70 books and papers. Many of his books deal with objections to ontology based upon common sense and that most disputes involving metaphysical objects revolve around linguistics and are merely verbal in nature. Among his books are "Against Revisionary Ontology" and "Physical-Object Ontology, Verbal Disputes, and Common Sense" .

#1377

Christia Mercer

#12030

Overall Influence

Christia Mercer is an American philosopher and the Gustave M. Berne Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is known for her work on the history of early modern philosophy, the history of Platonism, and the history of gender. She has received national attention for her work teaching in prisons and advocating for educational opportunities for incarcerated people. She is the Director and Founder of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University, which "supports innovative research in the history of philosophy and promotes diversity in the teachin...

#1378

Alexander Piatigorsky

Alexander Piatigorsky

#5658

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

Alexander Moiseyevich Piatigorsky was a Soviet dissident, Russian philosopher, scholar of Indian philosophy and culture, historian, philologist, semiotician, writer. Well-versed in the study of language, he knew Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali, Tibetan, German, Russian, French, Italian and English. In an obituary appearing in the English-language newspaper The Guardian, he was cited as "a man who was widely considered to be one of the more significant thinkers of the age and Russia's greatest philosopher." On Russian television stations he was mourned as "the greatest Russian philosopher."

#1379

Irving Copi

#15379

Overall Influence

1917 - 2002 (85 years)

Irving Marmer Copi was an American philosopher, logician, and university textbook author. Biography Copi studied under Bertrand Russell while at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he contributed to the calculus of relations with his article using logical matrices.

#1380

Maurice O'Connor Drury

1907 - 1976 (69 years)

Maurice O'Connor Drury was a psychiatrist and follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England of Irish parents. He grew up in Exeter, Devon, England, where his father, Henry D'Olier Drury, who had been a teacher in Marlborough college, retired.

#1381

Thupten Jinpa

#3267

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Thupten Jinpa Langri is a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, former monk and an academic of religious studies and both Eastern and Western philosophy. He has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than ten books by the Dalai Lama including The World of Tibetan Buddhism , A Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus , and the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium .

#1382

Paul Moser

#15452

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Paul K. Moser is an American philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and a former editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.

#1383

Werner Hamacher

#8781

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Werner Hamacher was a German literary critic and theorist influenced by deconstruction. Hamacher studied philosophy, comparative literature and religious studies at the Free University of Berlin and the École Normale Supérieure , where he met and came to know Jacques Derrida. From 1998 to 2013 he was a Professor in the University of Frankfurt's Institute for General and Comparative Literature , and since 2003 he was on the faculty of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

#1384

Hans Kamp

#11366

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp is a Dutch philosopher and linguist, responsible for introducing discourse representation theory in 1981. Kamp was born in Den Burg. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at Cornell University, University of London, University of Texas, Austin, and University of Stuttgart. His dissertation, Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order was devoted to functional completeness in tense logic, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until", provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous linear ordering.

#1385

Ilkka Niiniluoto

Ilkka Niiniluoto

#13214

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ilkka Maunu Olavi Niiniluoto is a Finnish philosopher and mathematician, serving as a professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki since 1981. He is currently on leave from his position, having been appointed as rector of the University of Helsinki on 1 August 2003, for a five-year period. On 25 April 2008 he was chosen to succeed Kari Raivio as chancellor of the University of Helsinki, beginning 1 June 2008.

#1386

François Châtelet

François Châtelet

1925 - 1985 (60 years)

François Châtelet was a historian of philosophy, political philosophy and professor in the socratic tradition. He was the husband of philosopher Noëlle Châtelet, the sister of Lionel Jospin. Biography Châtelet was born and died in Paris. Along with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, he is at the origin of the department of philosophy at the University of Vincennes, and co-founded the Collège international de philosophie . In 1971 he was professor at the University of São Paulo. This was an act of protest that he made with Jean-Pierre Vernant against the Brazilian military government. Châtel...

#1387

Philodemus

110 BC - 35 BC (75 years)

Philodemus of Gadara was an Epicurean philosopher and poet. He studied under Zeno of Sidon in Athens, before moving to Rome, and then to Herculaneum. He was once known chiefly for his poetry preserved in the Greek Anthology, but since the 18th century, many writings of his have been discovered among the charred papyrus rolls at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. The task of excavating and deciphering these rolls is difficult, and work continues to this day. The works of Philodemus so far discovered include writings on ethics, theology, rhetoric, music, poetry, and the history of various philosophical schools.

#1388

Gian-Carlo Rota

Gian-Carlo Rota

#590

Overall Influence

1932 - 1999 (67 years)

Gian-Carlo Rota was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, probability theory, and phenomenology.

#1389

Diotima of Mantinea

Diotima of Mantinea

450 BC - 300 BC (150 years)

Diotima of Mantinea is the name or pseudonym of an ancient Greek character in Plato's dialogue Symposium, possibly an actual historical figure, indicated as having lived circa 440 B.C. Her ideas and doctrine of Eros as reported by the character of Socrates in the dialogue are the origin of the concept today known as Platonic love.

#1390

Douglas Moggach

#10976

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Douglas Moggach is a professor at the University of Ottawa and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and has held visiting appointments at Sidney Sussex College and King's College, Cambridge, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa., and the Fondazione San Carlo di Modena,where he taught a graduate seminar in Italian on German Idealism. Moggach has also held the University Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, he won the Killam Research Fellowship awarded by the Canada Council for the arts.

#1391

Michael Krausz

#12573

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Krausz is a Swiss-born American philosopher as well as an artist and orchestral conductor. His philosophical works focus on the theory of interpretation, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and philosophy of art and music. Krausz is Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, and he teaches Aesthetics at the Curtis Institute of Music. He has taught at University of Toronto and has been visiting professor at American University, Georgetown University, Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, American University in Cairo, University of Nairobi, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and University of Ulm, among others.

#1392

Raimon Panikkar

Raimon Panikkar

#4835

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Raimon Panikkar Alemany, also known as Raimundo Panikkar and Raymond Panikkar , was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and a proponent of Interfaith dialogue. As a scholar, he specialized in comparative religion.

#1393

Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton

#3909

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love , which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life , Status Anxiety , and The Architecture of Happiness .

#1394

Wolfgang Smith

#4748

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic and member of the Traditionalist School. He has written extensively in the field of differential geometry, as a critic of scientism and as a proponent of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that draws heavily from premodern ontology and realism.

#1395

Eugen Herrigel

1884 - 1955 (71 years)

Eugen Herrigel was a German philosopher who taught philosophy at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, Japan, from 1924 to 1929 and introduced Zen to large parts of Europe through his writings. While living in Japan from 1924 to 1929, he studied kyūdō, traditional Japanese archery, under Awa Kenzō , a master of archery and founder of his own new religious movement called "The Great Doctrine of the Way of Shooting." Herrigel pursued archery in the hope of better understanding Zen. Although Herrigel claims to have studied archery for six years, he was only in Japan for just over five years and probably only studied archery for three of those years.

#1396

Herbert Spiegelberg

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Herbert Spiegelberg was an American philosopher who played a prominent role in the advancement of phenomenogical philosophy in the United States. Life Spiegelberg was born in Strasbourg, in the Alsatian region of northeastern France. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Munich, where he encountered Edmund Husserl and many others in the vanguard of the European phenomenological movement. He received his Ph.D. in 1928 from the University of Munich. His doctoral dissertation was written under the direction of the phenomenologist Alexander Pfänder and was titled Gesetz u...

#1397

A. J. Baker

#14987

Overall Influence

1922 - 2017 (95 years)

Allan James "Jim" Baker , usually cited as A. J. Baker, was an Australian philosopher who was best known for having systematised the realist philosophy of John Anderson. He studied under Anderson at Sydney University and had taught philosophy in Scotland, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia. He was a prominent member of the Sydney Libertarians and the Sydney Push. He instigated, and was a prolific contributor to, several journals, compilations and newsletters that addressed issues, philosophical and otherwise, associated with Sydney Libertarianism. Among these were Libertarian , Broa...

#1398

Wolfe Mays

#9999

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Wolfe Mays was a British philosopher. He was the founder of British Society for Phenomenology and the editor of its journal. Mays is known for his efforts for introducing phenomenology in England. He taught at the University of Manchester from 1946 until his retirement in 1979. His students included Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith.

#1399

Edmund Pellegrino

Edmund Pellegrino

#13029

Overall Influence

1920 - 2013 (93 years)

Edmund Daniel Pellegrino was an American bioethicist and academic who served as the 11th president of The Catholic University of America from 1978 to 1982. For 35 years, Pellegrino was a distinguished professor of medicine and medical ethics and the Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. Pellegrino was an expert both in clinical bioethics, and in the field of medicine and the humanities, specifically, the teaching of humanities in medical school, which he helped pioneer

#1400

Sylvain Lazarus

#7238

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Sylvain Lazarus is a French sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist. He has also written under the pseudonym Paul Sandevince. Lazarus is a professor at the Paris 8 University. Life and work Sylvain Lazarus worked out a theory of the social function of political categorizations , exploring in the anthropological field what his Lacanianian friends Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner worked out, respectively, in the fields of philosophy, of linguistics and of psychoanalytic theory.

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