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,
#1451
William F. Vallicella
#35914
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
William F. Vallicella is an American philosopher. Biography Vallicella has a Ph.D. , taught for a number of years at University of Dayton and Case Western Reserve University , and retired to Gold Canyon, Arizona from where he now contributes to philosophy mainly online. He is the author of many published articles, primarily on the subjects of metaphysics and philosophy of religion.
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Marilena de Souza Chaui
#27543
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Marilena de Souza Chaui is a Brazilian philosopher and Professor of Modern Philosophy in the University of São Paulo. She is a scholar of Baruch Spinoza and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Chaui is one of the founding members of Workers' Party and an assiduous critic of the capitalist model.
Go to Profile#1453
Karim Mojtahedi
#46193
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Karim Mojtahedi is an Iranian philosophy professor at Tehran University. He has published over 20 books on philosophy. He was awarded UNESCO's Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science at the 4th International Farabi Festival and received a plaque of honor from Iran's Cultural Luminaries Association.
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Tamar Ross
#19424
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Tamar Ross is a professor of Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and a specialist of religious feminist philosophy. Work Ross makes a vital contribution to philosophical questions around gender in Judaism by arguing that feminism is not external to Torah but rather integral to it. She argues for the concept of evolving revelation, that is, that people learn more as history evolves and societies develop and mature, and argues against the concept of Yeridat ha-dorot, the idea that knowledge of Torah diminishes with time. She also argues against approaches of more liberal movements which a...
Go to Profile#1455
Gary Peller
#14792
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gary Peller is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a prominent member of the critical legal studies and critical race theory movements. Education and early career Peller received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University in 1977 and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School where he served as a member of the Harvard Law Review. Peller then clerked for Morris Lasker, a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He is currently a member of the Maryland state bar.
Go to Profile#1456
William W. Tait
#33151
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
William Walker Tait is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he served as a faculty member from 1972 to 1996, and as department chair from 1981 to 1987. Education and career Tait received his B.A. from Lehigh University in 1952, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1958. Frederic Fitch served as his doctoral advisor.
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Ronald H. Nash
#18027
Overall Influence
1936 - 2006 (70 years)
Ronald H. Nash was a philosophy professor at Reformed Theological Seminary. Nash served as a professor for over 40 years, teaching and writing in the areas of worldview, apologetics, ethics, theology, and history. He is known for his advocacy of Austrian economics, and his criticism of the evangelical left.
Go to Profile#1458
Patrick C. Walsh
#23761
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Patrick C. Walsh is an American urologist, researcher and writer, best known for developing "the anatomic approach to radical prostatectomy", involving nerve-sparing techniques which reduced the likelihood of impotence and urinary incontinence. He authored The Prostate: A Guide for Men and the Women Who Love Them and Dr. Patrick Walsh's Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer.
Go to Profile#1459
Mary Tiles
#17460
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mary Tiles is a philosopher and historian of mathematics and science. From 2006 until 2009, she served as chair of the philosophy department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She retired in 2009.
Go to Profile#1460
Amos Oz
#1658
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Amos Oz was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual. He was also a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onwards, Oz was a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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Ezekiel Emanuel
#6324
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ezekiel Jonathan "Zeke" Emanuel is an American oncologist, bioethicist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is the current Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Previously, Emanuel served as the Diane and Robert Levy University Professor at Penn. He holds a joint appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton School and was formerly an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School until 1998 when he joined the National Institutes of Health...
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Michael C. Rea
#39438
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Michael Cannon Rea is an American analytic philosopher and, since 2017, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He delivered the 2017 Gifford Lecture on divine hiddenness.
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Hugh Mellor
#29009
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
David Hugh Mellor was a British philosopher. He was a Professor of Philosophy and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, later Professor Emeritus, of Cambridge University. Biography Mellor was born in London on 10 July 1938, and educated at Manchester Grammar School. He studied chemical engineering at Pembroke College, Cambridge . His first formal study of philosophy was at the University of Minnesota where he took a minor in Philosophy of Science under Herbert Feigl. From Minnesota he obtained an MSc in 1962. He obtained his PhD in philosophy, with a thesis written under the supervision of Mary Hesse, at Pembroke in 1968.
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Stephen Schiffer
#29968
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stephen Schiffer is an American philosopher and currently Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is a specialist in the philosophy of language. Education and career Schiffer was awarded a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1970. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Arizona, and City University of New York before moving to NYU. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
Go to Profile#1465
Mark C. Taylor
#9474
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Mark C. Taylor is a postmodern religious and cultural critic. He has published more than twenty books on theology, metaphysics, art and architecture, media, technology, economics, and postmodernity. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1968, he received his doctorate in the study of religion from Harvard University and began teaching at Williams College in 1973. In 2007, Taylor moved from Williams College to Columbia University, where he chaired the Department of Religion until 2015.
Go to Profile#1466
Ferdinand Ulrich
#34067
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Ferdinand Ulrich was a German Catholic philosopher and professor at the University of Regensburg from 1960 to 1996. Life Ulrich studied philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, and fundamental theology at the Freising College and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1956 he completed his doctorate in philosophy in Munich. In 1959 he completed his Habilitation in philosophy at the University of Salzburg. He worked as a private lecturer in 1960, and in 1961 as associate professor at the Pedagogical College of Regensburg, which would later be integrated into the University of Regensburg. In 1967 he was appointed ordinary Professor of Philosophy.
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François Zourabichvili
#30286
Overall Influence
1965 - 2006 (41 years)
François Zourabichvili was a French philosopher who specialized in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza. Biography François Zourabichvili was the son of composer Nicolas Zourabichvili, nephew of historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, and cousin of author Emmanuel Carrère. He became agrégé in 1989 and earned his PhD in Philosophy in 1999. He taught at a lycée already from 1988 to 2001, was docent at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, and a director at the Collège international de philosophie from 1998 to 2004. He committed suicide in 2006 and is buried in the Russian Church of th...
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Marjorie Grene
#19634
Overall Influence
1910 - 2009 (99 years)
Marjorie Glicksman Grene was an American philosopher. She wrote on existentialism and the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of biology. She taught at the University of California at Davis from 1965 to 1978. From 1988 until her death, she was Honorary University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Tech.
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Nancy Pearcey
#14450
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nancy Randolph Pearcey is an American evangelical author on the Christian worldview. Education Pearcey earned a BA from Iowa State University, an MA in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. She also did additional non-degree study in philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada and received an honorary doctorate from Cairn University in 2007.
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Richard Hamilton
#4049
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern in 2014.
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Arindam Chakrabarti
#26681
Overall Influence
Arindam Chakrabarti is, currently, a visiting professor of philosophy at Ashoka University, India. He is, also, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University, where he has been since 2018. Prior to moving to Stony Brook, Chakrabarti taught at the University of Hawaii, where he was the director of the EPOCH Project .
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Reiner Schürmann
#21841
Overall Influence
1941 - 1993 (52 years)
Father Reiner Schürmann, O.P., Ph.D. was a German Dominican priest and philosopher. From 1975 to his death, he was Professor in the department of philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City. He wrote all his major published work in French.
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Theodore Kisiel
#42818
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Theodore Joseph Kisiel was an American philosopher. He was Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Northern Illinois University, as well as a well-known translator of and commentator on the works of Martin Heidegger.,
Go to Profile#1474
Ralph Weissleder
#20734
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ralph Weissleder is an American clinician scientist. Biography Ralph Weissleder is a professor at Harvard Medical School, director of the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an attending interventional radiologist at MGH.
Go to Profile#1475
Ferid Muhić
#21173
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ferid Muhić is President of the Bosniak Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a professor of Philosophy at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, North Macedonia. He started his academic career as Assistant at the Institute for Sociological Research in Skopje in 1970. He entered the Department of Philosophy as Assistant in 1974; Associate Professor 1976-1980; Full-time Professor 1980–present. Visiting Professor at Sorbonne, New York's Syracuse University, Florida State University, International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation, and several universities in Southern-East Europe.
Go to Profile#1476
Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
#15867
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, was an English philosopher of morality, education, and mind, and a writer on existentialism. She is best known for chairing an inquiry whose report formed the basis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. She served as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
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Kurt Baier
#28732
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Kurt Baier was an Austrian moral philosopher who taught for most of his career in Australia and the United States. Life and career Born in Vienna, Austria, Baier studied law at the University of Vienna. In 1938, after the Anschluss he had to abandon his studies, and went to the United Kingdom as a refugee, where he was interned as a "friendly enemy alien" and sent to Australia on the Dunera. There he began studying philosophy. Baier received his B.A. from the University of Melbourne in 1944, and his M.A. in 1947. In 1952, he received his DPhil at Oxford University.
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Jean Vanier
#6473
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Jean Vanier was a Canadian Catholic philosopher and theologian. In 1964, he founded L'Arche, an international federation of communities spread over 37 countries for people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them. In 1971, he co-founded Faith and Light with Marie-Hélène Mathieu, which also works for people with developmental disabilities, their families, and friends in over 80 countries. He continued to live as a member of the original L'Arche community in Trosly-Breuil, France, until his death.
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John E. Hare
#30886
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Edmund Hare is a British classicist, philosopher, ethicist, and currently the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. Biography He received a Bachelor of Arts honours in Literae Humaniores in 1971 from Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD in classical philosophy from Princeton University in 1975. He was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan in 1975, a professor of philosophy at Lehigh University from 1975 to 1989, and Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College from 1989 to 2003. Hare served on the staff of the United States House Committee ...
Go to Profile#1480
Rupert Read
#14794
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Rupert Read is an academic and a Green Party campaigner, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, and the current director of the Climate Majority Project. He is the author of several books on Wittgenstein, philosophy, and/or climate change, most recently Why Climate Breakdown Matters, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, and Do You Want to Know the Truth? Until 2023, Read was a reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia where he was awarded – as Principal Investigator – Arts and Humanities Research Council funding for two projects on "natural capital".
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Thomas E. Hill
#29599
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Thomas English Hill Jr. is Emeritus Kenan Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a specialist in ethics, political philosophy, history of ethics and the work of Immanuel Kant. He has also a Past-President of the American Philosophical Association.
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Martin Hägglund
#28287
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Martin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher and scholar of modernist literature. He is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, serving as a Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2012. Hägglund is the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom , Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov , Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life , and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet . He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and won the René Wellek Prize in 2020.
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Ted Nelson
#530
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."
Go to Profile#1484
Herman Philipse
#30007
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Herman Philipse is a professor of philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Philipse taught at Leiden University from 1986 until 2003 where he obtained his doctorate in 1983. Work Philipse has written many philosophical works in Dutch, including books on Husserl's early philosophy of logic, the role of certainty in Descartes' moral theory, and a widely read Atheist Manifesto . In English, he has written over a dozen articles in philosophical journals, as well as a detailed assessment of Heidegger, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. He has also written man...
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Egon Bondy
#21703
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Egon Bondy, born Zbyněk Fišer , was a Czech philosopher, writer, and poet, one of the leading personalities of the Prague underground. In the late 1940s, Bondy was active in a surrealistic group. From 1957 to 1961, he studied philosophy and psychology at Charles University in Prague. From the 1960s he was considered to be one of the main figures of the Prague underground, particularly once his texts were set to music by The Plastic People of the Universe in the 1970s. His non-conformism brought him into conflict with the totalitarian communist regime in Czechoslovakia. His works were circulate...
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Paavo Pylkkänen
#8733
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Paavo Pylkkänen is a Finnish philosopher of mind. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Skövde and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He is known for his work on mind-body studies, building on David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular Bohm's view of the cosmos as an enfolding and unfolding whole including mind and matter.
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Wang Hui
#20358
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Wang Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor of the influential magazine Dushu from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. Wang Hui has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna , Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, among others. In March 2010, he appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual...
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Shango
#2132
Overall Influence
Shango is an Orisha in Yoruba religion. Genealogically speaking, Shango is a royal ancestor of the Yoruba as he was the third Alaafin of the Oyo Kingdom prior to his posthumous deification. Shango has numerous manifestations, including Airá, Agodo, Afonja, Lubé, and Obomin. He is known for his powerful double axe . He is considered to be one of the most powerful rulers that Yorubaland has ever produced.
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Leonid Stolovich
#29062
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Leonid Naumovich Stolovich was a Russian-Estonian philosopher, Doctor of Philosophy and professor . Stolovich graduated from the Leningrad University in 1952, from 1953 on he worked at Tartu University, Estonia, from 1994 on as a professor emeritus. Above all, Stolovich studied esthetics: its history, theories of esthetics and axiology. He is the author of more than forty books and 400 publications in 20 languages.
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John Haldane
#37851
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Joseph Haldane is a British philosopher, commentator and broadcaster. He is a former papal adviser to the Vatican. He is credited with coining the term 'analytical Thomism' and is himself a Thomist in the analytic tradition. Haldane is associated with The Veritas Forum and is the current chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
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Nicholas Talley
#27714
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nicholas "Nick" Talley FRACP, FAFPHM, FRCP , FRCP , FACP, FACG, AGAF, FAHMS is an Australian gastroenterologist, epidemiologist, researcher, and clinical educator. Early life Talley grew up in Sydney, Australia. He is a first-generation Australian and the son of a Hungarian gastroenterologist, also known as Nicholas Talley OAM FRACP.
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Frank Van Dun
#21352
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Frank Van Dun is a Belgian philosopher of law and classical liberal natural law theorist. He is associated with the law faculty of the University of Ghent. In 2013 he was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think tank Libera!.
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Agostinho da Silva
#9683
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
George Agostinho Baptista da Silva, GCSE was a Portuguese philosopher, essayist, and writer. His thought combines elements of pantheism and millenarism, an ethic of renunciation , and a belief in freedom as the most important feature of man. Anti-dogmatic, he asserts that truth is only found in the sum of all conflicting hypothesis . He may be considered a practical philosopher, living and working for a change in society, according to his beliefs.
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Donald Livingston
#15368
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Donald Livingston is a former Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a David Hume scholar. In 2003 he founded the Abbeville Institute, which is devoted to the study of Southern culture and political ideas.
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Victor J. Stenger
#6517
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Victor John Stenger was an American particle physicist, philosopher, author, and religious skeptic. Following a career as a research scientist in the field of particle physics, Stenger was associated with New Atheism and he authored popular science books. He published twelve books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, including the 2007 best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. His final book was God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos . He was a regular...
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David Edmonds
#28733
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
David Edmonds is a British philosopher, and a radio feature maker at the BBC World Service. He studied at Oxford University, has a PhD in philosophy from the Open University and has held fellowships at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Edmonds is the author of Caste Wars: A Philosophy of Discrimination and co-author with John Eidinow of Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers and Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time.
Go to Profile#1497
Michael B. Sporn
#47534
Overall Influence
#1498
Étienne Borne
#20731
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Étienne Vincent Borne was born in Manduel . He was a professor of philosophy Hypokhâgne at Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Étienne Borne founded the Mouvement republicain populaire , and the French Christian Democratic Party. He was a columnist in the newspaper La Croix. Jacques Derrida was one of his students.
Go to Profile#1499
Sebastiano Maffettone
#35762
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sebastiano Maffettone is a political philosopher and University Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome, where he teaches Political Philosophy and Theories of Globalization. He has taught in several Italian universities as well as International universities . Maffettone graduated summa cum laude from the University of Naples in 1970, and he completed his graduate studies in social philosophy LSE in 1976, under the supervision of philosophers such as Karl Popper and Amartya K. Sen.
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Ursula Wolf
#36873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ursula Wolf is a German philosophy professor and writer. Biography She has been philosophy teacher at the Free University of Berlin, at the University of Frankfurt, and, now, at the University of Mannheim, where she holds a full professorship in that specialty.
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