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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,

#1501

Andrew Conway Ivy

1893 - 1978 (85 years)

Andrew Conway Ivy was an American physician. He was appointed by the American Medical Association as its representative at the 1946 Nuremberg Medical Trial for Nazi doctors, but later fell into disrepute for advocating the fraudulent drug Krebiozen.

#1502

Gregg L. Semenza

#5679

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gregg Leonard Semenza is a pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had ten research papers r...

#1503

Julius Frauenstädt

1813 - 1879 (66 years)

Christian Martin Julius Frauenstädt was a German philosopher and editor. He was educated at the house of his uncle at Neisse, and converted from Judaism to protestant Christianity in 1833. He studied theology and, later, philosophy at Berlin, where he came under the sway of the philosophies of Hegel and Schelling. He worked as a private tutor for the Sayn-Wittgenstein family during this period.

#1504

Robert Koch

1843 - 1910 (67 years)

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. As the discoverer of the specific causative agents of deadly infectious diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax, he is regarded as one of the main founders of modern bacteriology. As such he is popularly nicknamed the father of microbiology , and as the father of medical bacteriology. His discovery of the anthrax bacterium in 1876 is considered as the birth of modern bacteriology. Koch used his discoveries to establish that germs "could cause a specific disease" and directly provided proofs for that germ theory of diseases, therefore creating the scientific basis of public health, saving millions of lives.

#1505

Carlos Santiago Nino

#11597

Overall Influence

1943 - 1993 (50 years)

Carlos Santiago Nino was an Argentine moral, legal and political philosopher. Biography Nino studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and at the University of Oxford, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 with a thesis directed by John Finnis and Tony Honoré.

#1506

Anthony Quinton

#13773

Overall Influence

1925 - 2010 (85 years)

Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton, FBA was a British political and moral philosopher, metaphysician, and materialist philosopher of mind. He served as President of Trinity College, Oxford from 1978 to 1987; and as chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990. He is also remembered as a presenter of the BBC Radio programme, Round Britain Quiz.

#1507

David Prall

1886 - 1940 (54 years)

David Wight Prall was a philosopher of art and an academic. His interests include aesthetics, value theory, abstract ideas, truth and the history of philosophy. He is noted for his notion of aesthetic surfaces.

#1508

Ilya Repin

1844 - 1930 (86 years)

Ilya Yefimovich Repin was a Ukrainian-born Russian painter. He became one of the most renowned artists in Russia in the 19th century. His major works include Barge Haulers on the Volga , Religious Procession in Kursk Province , Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan ; and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks . He is also known for the revealing portraits he made of the leading Russian literary and artistic figures of his time, including Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Pavel Tretyakov, and especially Leo Tolstoy, with whom he had a long friendship.

#1509

William J. Richardson

#17548

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

William John Richardson, S.J. was an American philosopher, who was among the first to write a comprehensive study of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, featuring an important preface by Heidegger himself. In addition to his specialization in Heidegger, Richardson was also, as a trained psychoanalyst, a specialist in the thought of Jacques Lacan. He was a Jesuit priest . He taught philosophy at Fordham University and, beginning in 1981, at Boston College, where he was, at the time of his death, emeritus professor of philosophy. He died in December 2016 in Weston, Massachusetts at the age of 9...

#1510

Karen Neander

#14601

Overall Influence

1954 - 2020 (66 years)

Karen Neander was a philosopher and professor at Duke University. She was known for her work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of action, philosophy of biology, philosophy of neuroscience and cognitive science.

#1511

Michael Tooley

#16892

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael Tooley is an American philosopher, now emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, best known for his contributions to metaphysics. Education and career He has a BA from the University of Toronto and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1968. He taught at Stanford University and the Australian National University and since 1992 at the University of Colorado Boulder.

#1512

Kevin Mulligan

#13729

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Kevin Mulligan is a British philosopher, working on ontology, the philosophy of mind, and Austrian philosophy. He is currently Honorary Professor at the University of Geneva, Full Professor at the University of Italian Switzerland, Director of Research at the Institute of Philosophy of Lugano, and member of the Academia Europaea and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. He is also known for his work with Peter Simons and Barry Smith on metaphysics and the history of Austrian philosophy.

#1513

Leonardo Polo

#11288

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Leonardo Polo was a renowned Spanish philosopher best known for his philosophical method called abandonment of the mental limit and the profound philosophical implications and results of the application of this method.

#1514

Roberto Esposito

Roberto Esposito

#8004

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Roberto Esposito is an Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, and professor, notable for his academic research and works on biopolitics. He currently serves as professor of theoretical philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

#1515

Jessica Wilson

#16072

Overall Influence

Jessica M. Wilson is an American professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on metaphysics, especially on the metaphysics of science and mind, the epistemologies of skepticism, a priori deliberation, and necessity. Wilson was awarded the Lebowitz Prize for excellence in philosophical thought by Phi Beta Kappa in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association.

#1516

Giotto

1267 - 1337 (70 years)

Giotto di Bondone , known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great a...

#1517

Petr Hájek

#12018

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Petr Hájek was a Czech scientist in the area of mathematical logic and a professor of mathematics. Born in Prague, he worked at the Institute of Computer Science at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and as a lecturer at the faculty of mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague and at the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague.

#1518

Stephen Palmquist

#16461

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Richard Palmquist is an American philosopher, currently living in Los Angeles. He taught philosophy at various universities in Hong Kong from 1987 to 2021. A Patheos article referred to him as "one of the greatest living interpreters of Kant".

#1519

Adam Morton

#17694

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Adam Morton was a Canadian philosopher. Morton's work focused on how we understand one another's behaviour in everyday life, with an emphasis on the role mutual intelligibility plays in cooperative activity. He also wrote on ethics, decision-making, philosophy of language and epistemology. His later work concerned our vocabulary for evaluating and monitoring our thinking. Morton was Professor of Philosophy from 1980 to 2000 at the University of Bristol in the UK and finished his academic career at the University of British Columbia. He was president of the Aristotelian Society during 1998–19...

#1520

Cristina Bicchieri

Cristina Bicchieri

#3518

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Cristina Bicchieri is an Italian–American philosopher. She is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. She has worked on problems in the philosophy of social science, rational choice and game theory. More recently, her work has focused on the nature and evolution of social norms, and the design of behavioral experiments to test under which conditions norms will be followed.

#1521

Christian von Ehrenfels

1859 - 1932 (73 years)

Christian von Ehrenfels was an Austrian philosopher, and is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology. Christian von Ehrenfels was born on 20 June 1859 in Rodaun near Vienna and grew up at his father's castle Brunn am Walde in Lower Austria. He joined secondary school in Krems and first studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and then changed to the University of Vienna.

#1522

Gregory Lip

#26133

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gregory Lip is a clinical researcher and Price-Evans Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine, at the University of Liverpool. He is Director of the Liverpool Centre for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital.

#1523

Dharmapala of Nalanda

530 - 561 (31 years)

Dharmapāla . A Buddhist scholar, he was one of the main teachers of the Yogacara school in India. He was a contemporary of Bhavaviveka , with whom he debated. Xuanzang, the famous Chinese pilgrim, tells that Dharmapāla was born in Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. He was a son of a high official, and betrothed to a daughter of the king, but escaped on the eve of the wedding feast, entered the order, studied all views, from Hinayana as well as Mahayana, and attained to reverence and distinction. He studied in Nalanda as a student of Dignāga. Later he succeeded him as abbot of the University. He spent h...

#1524

Alfred Baeumler

1887 - 1968 (81 years)

Alfred Baeumler , was an Austrian-born German philosopher, pedagogue and prominent Nazi ideologue. From 1924 he taught at the Technische Universität Dresden, at first as an unsalaried lecturer Privatdozent. Bäumler was made associate professor in 1928 and full professor a year later. From 1933 he taught philosophy and political education in Berlin as the director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy.

#1525

Antonio Labriola

Antonio Labriola

1843 - 1904 (61 years)

Antonio Labriola was an Italian Marxist theoretician and philosopher. Although an academic philosopher and never an active member of any Marxist political party, his thought exerted influence on many political theorists in Italy during the early 20th century, including the founder of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce, as well as the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga. He also influenced the Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician Leon Trotsky.

#1526

Albinus

100 - 200 (100 years)

Albinus was a Platonist philosopher, who lived at Smyrna, and was teacher of Galen. A short tract by him, entitled Introduction to Plato's dialogues, has survived. From the title of one of the extant manuscripts we learn that Albinus was a pupil of Gaius the Platonist. The original title of his work was probably Prologos, and it may have originally formed the initial section of notes taken at the lectures of Gaius. After explaining the nature of the Dialogue, which he compares to a Drama, the writer goes on to divide the Dialogues of Plato into four classes, logical, critical, physical, ethical, and mentions another division of them into Tetralogies, according to their subjects.

#1527

Hicetas

Hicetas was a Greek philosopher of the Pythagorean School. He was born in Syracuse, Magna Graecia. Like his fellow Pythagorean Ecphantus and the Academic Heraclides Ponticus, he believed that the daily movement of permanent stars was caused by the rotation of the Earth around its axis. When Copernicus referred to Nicetus Syracusanus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium as having been cited by Cicero as an ancient who also argued that the Earth moved, it is believed that he was actually referring to Hicetas.

#1528

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

1714 - 1799 (85 years)

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution, philosopher and deist. He is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics. In 1767 he became a judge in the Court of Session.

#1529

Friedrich Paulsen

Friedrich Paulsen

1846 - 1908 (62 years)

Friedrich Paulsen was a German Neo-Kantian philosopher and educator. Biography He was born at Langenhorn and educated at the Gymnasium Christianeum, the University of Erlangen, and the University of Berlin. He completed his doctoral thesis under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg at Berlin in 1871, he habilitated there in 1875, and he became extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy there in 1878. In 1896 he succeeded Eduard Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin.

#1530

Jean Bodin

1530 - 1596 (66 years)

Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. Bodin lived during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote against the background of religious conflict in France. He seemed to be a nominal Catholic throughout his life but was critical of papal authority over governments and there was evidence he may have converted to Protestantism during his time in Geneva. Known for his theory of sovereignty, he favoured the strong central control of a national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife.

#1531

Arnold Davidson

#8467

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Arnold Ira Davidson is an American philosopher and academic, and the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, History of Science, and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Chicago and a professor at the Università di Pisa in Pisa, Italy.

#1532

Gordon Guyatt

#11395

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gordon Henry Guyatt is a Canadian physician who is Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact and Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is known for his leadership in evidence-based medicine, a term that first appeared in a single-author paper he published in 1991. Subsequently, a 1992 JAMA article that Guyatt led proved instrumental in bringing the concept of evidence-based medicine to the world's attention.[2] In 2007, The BMJ launched an international election for the most important contributions to healthcare. Evidence-based medicine came 7th, ahead of the computer and medical imaging.

#1533

Pierre Leroux

1797 - 1871 (74 years)

Pierre Henri Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist. He was born at Bercy, now a part of Paris, the son of an artisan. Life His education was interrupted by the death of his father, which compelled him to support his mother and family. Having worked first as a mason and then as a compositor, he joined P. Dubois in the foundation of Le Globe which became in 1831 the official organ of the Saint-Simonian community, of which he became a prominent member. In November of the same year, when Prosper Enfantin became leader of the Saint-Simonians and preached the enfranchisement of women and the functions of the couple-prêtre, Leroux separated himself from the sect.

#1534

Georg Jellinek

1851 - 1911 (60 years)

Georg Jellinek was a German public lawyer and was considered to be "the exponent of public law in Austria“. Life From 1867, Jellinek studied law, history of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He also studied philosophy, history and law in Heidelberg and Leipzig up until 1872. He was the son of Adolf Jellinek, a famous preacher in Vienna's Jewish community. In 1872 he completed his Dr. phil. thesis in Leipzig and in 1874 also his Dr. jur. in Vienna.

#1535

Branislav Petronijević

Branislav Petronijević

1875 - 1954 (79 years)

Branislav "Brana" Petronijević was a Serbian philosopher and paleontologist. His major work is the two-volume Prinzipien der Metaphysik , in which he outlines his original metaphysical system – a synthesis of Baruch Spinoza's monism and Gottfried Leibniz's monadological pluralism into what he called "monopluralism". Influenced by George Berkeley and G.W.F. Hegel, Petronijević held that our immediate experience is the source of basic logical and metaphysical axioms – what he called "empirio-rationalist" epistemology.

#1536

Nicola Abbagnano

Nicola Abbagnano

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Nicola Abbagnano was an Italian existential philosopher. Life Nicola Abbagnano was born in Salerno on 15 July 1901. He was the first-born son of a middle-class professional family. His father was a practicing lawyer in the area. He studied in Naples, and in November 1922 obtained a degree in philosophy, his thesis that became the subject of his first book Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero . His mentor was Antonio Aliotta. In the following years, he taught philosophy and history at the Liceo Umberto I°, in Naples, and from 1917 to 1936 he was the professor of philosophy and pedagogy in the Istituto di Magistero Suor Orsola Benincasa.

#1537

Kurt Riezler

1882 - 1955 (73 years)

Kurt Riezler was a German philosopher and diplomat. A top-level cabinet adviser in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he negotiated Germany's underwriting of Russia's October Revolution and authored the 1914 September Program which outlined German war aims during World War I. The posthumous publication of his secret notes and diaries played a role in the "Fischer Controversy" among German historians in the early 1960s.

#1538

Nathan Salmon

#18834

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Nathan U. Salmon is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic. Life and career Salmon was born January 2, 1951, in Los Angeles to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews of Spanish-Turkish heritage. He is the grandson of archivist Emily Sene and oud player Isaac Sene. Salmon attended Lincoln Elementary School in Torrance, California through eighth grade, where he was a classmate and friend of the child prodigy, James Newton Howard. Salmon graduated from North High School in 1969.

#1539

Hans-Joachim Niemann

#12744

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Hans-Joachim Niemann , is a German philosopher and PhD chemist, who has become known especially as a translator and editor of works by Karl Popper, including first editions and first translations. As a scholarly writer, he first published scientific papers, then many essays and several books on Karl Popper's philosophy and Critical Rationalism, including a 400-page Lexicon of Critical Rationalism. His Popper studies helped to establish Karl Popper as a major ethicist and as an important biophilosopher.

#1540

Leo Kofler

#9021

Overall Influence

1907 - 1995 (88 years)

Leo Kofler was an Austrian-German Marxist sociologist. He ranks with the Marburg politicologist Wolfgang Abendroth and the Frankfurt school theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno among the few well-known Marxist intellectuals in post-war Germany. However, almost nothing of his work was ever translated into English, and he is therefore little known in the English-speaking world. Kofler had his own, distinctive interpretation of Marxism, which connected sociology and history with aesthetics and anthropology.

#1541

Alison Wylie

#15079

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Alison Wylie is a Canadian philosopher of archaeology. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and holds a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of the Social and Historical Sciences.

#1542

Morris Lazerowitz

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Morris Lazerowitz was Polish-born American philosopher and author. Early life and education Born Morris Laizerowitz in Lodz, Poland, his father, Max and eldest sister emigrated to the United States in 1912 and through their hard work, saved enough money to bring the rest of the family to join them three years later. The family settled in Omaha, Nebraska. Morris studied the violin and becoming proficient enough to be substituting in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the age of nineteen. However he was forced by a back injury to give this up.

#1543

David Ellerman

#6083

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

David Patterson Ellerman is a philosopher and author who works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, quantum mechanics, and in mathematics. He has written extensively on workplace democracy based on a modern treatment of the labor theory of property and the theory of inalienable rights as rights based on de facto inalienable capacities.

#1544

Luigi Pareyson

#17637

Overall Influence

1918 - 1991 (73 years)

Luigi Pareysón was an Italian philosopher, best known for challenging the positivist and idealist aesthetics of Benedetto Croce in his 1954 monograph, Estetica. Teoria della formatività , which builds on the hermeneutics of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

#1545

Jay L. Garfield

#9899

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#1546

Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Hoff Sommers

#1765

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys . She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.

#1547

Günter Abel

#21655

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Günter Abel is a German philosopher and former professor for theoretical philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin. Abel studied philosophy, history, romance studies and political science at the University of Marburg and the University of Lausanne. After finishing his PhD thesis on stoicism Abel habilitated in 1981 with a work on Friedrich Nietzsche. Since 1987 he is professor for theoretical philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin. From 1999 to 2001 he was vice-president of the Technical University of Berlin, from 2002 to 2005 he was president of the German Society of Philosophy .

#1548

Heydar Huseynov

1908 - 1950 (42 years)

Dr. Heydar Najaf oglu Huseynov was an Azerbaijani philosopher and academician. Life Huseynov was born in Erivan into the petty bourgeois family of Haji Najaf Karbalai Huseynoglu and his wife Mashadi Gulsum, being the youngest of their six children. His father died shortly after Heydar's birth. After their eldest son Yusif was killed in an ethnic conflict in 1918, the family moved first to Batumi, then to Stavropol, until they finally settled in Baku where he received secondary education, graduated from the Azerbaijan State Pedagocical Institute with a degree in linguistics in 1931 and a Candidate of Sciences degree in philosophy.

#1549

John Amos Comenius

John Amos Comenius

1592 - 1670 (78 years)

John Amos Comenius was a Moravian philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century.

#1550

Edward Bellamy

1850 - 1898 (48 years)

Edward Bellamy was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of his political ideas.

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