Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#15151

Louis Mink

1921 - 1983 (62 years)

Louis O. Mink Jr. was a philosopher of history whose works challenged early philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood and were part of a postmodern dialogue on history and historical narrative with other philosophers of history, like Hayden White and Georg Lukács. Mink and White were responsible for what would later be called the "linguistic turn" in philosophy of history.

#15152

Henri Grenier

1899 - 1980 (81 years)

Henri Grenier was a French Canadian priest, theologian, and philosopher. He was the author of a manual of Thomistic philosophy, once widely used in Roman Catholic seminaries. Life Grenier was born in Gaspé, Quebec, and ordained for the diocese of Gaspé in 1924. He studied philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome , and at the major seminary in Gaspé . From 1927-1930 he studied theology at the Angelicum and Canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University. He held doctorates in philosophy, theology, and canon law. From 1930 to 1947 he was professor of theology at the seminary of Québec. In 1938 he was incardinated in the diocese of Québec.

#15153

Nemesius

350 - 420 (70 years)

Nemesius of Emesa was a Christian philosopher, and the author of a treatise Περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου or De natura hominis . According to the title of his book, he was the Bishop of Emesa . His book is an attempt to compile a system of anthropology from the standpoint of Christian philosophy; it was very influential in later Greek, Arabic and Christian thought.

#15154

Quintus Sextius

50 BC - 100 BC (-50 years)

Quintus Sextius the Elder was a Roman philosopher, whose philosophy combined Pythagoreanism with Stoicism. Seneca frequently praised him. Life Sextius was born no later than 70 BC. He founded a school of philosophy combining some features of the Pythagoreans with others of the Stoics; and which was consequently classed sometimes with one, and sometimes with the other of those sects. Seneca describes Sextius as a Stoic but mentions that Sextius himself denied it. From the Epistles of Seneca we learn that Sextius, though born of an illustrious family, had declined the office of Senator when offered him by Julius Caesar.

#15155

Nestor Makhno

1888 - 1934 (46 years)

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno , also known as Bat'ko Makhno , was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian Civil War. He established the Makhnovshchina , a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown, Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine.

#15156

Erich Neumann

1905 - 1960 (55 years)

Erich Neumann was a German psychologist, philosopher, writer, and student of Carl Jung. Life and career Neumann was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1927 and then continued to study medicine at the University of Berlin, where he acquired his first degree in medicine in 1933. In 1934 Neumann and his wife Julie, who had been Zionists since they were teenagers, spurred on by fear of persecution of Jews by the Nazi government, moved to Tel Aviv. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C.

#15157

Victor Babeș

1854 - 1926 (72 years)

Victor Babeș was a Romanian physician, bacteriologist, academician and professor. One of the founders of modern microbiology, Victor Babeș is author of one of the first treatises of bacteriology in the world – Bacteria and their role in pathological anatomy and histology of infectious diseases, written in collaboration with French scientist Victor André Cornil in 1885. In 1888, Babeș underlies the principle of passive immunity, and a few years later enunciates the principle of antibiosis. He made early and significant contributions to the study of rabies, leprosy, diphtheria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

#15158

Antoine Louis

1723 - 1792 (69 years)

Antoine Louis was an 18th-century French surgeon and physiologist. He was originally trained in medicine by his father, a sergeant major at a local military hospital. As a young man he moved to Paris, where he served as gagnant-maîtrise at the Salpêtrière. In 1750 he was appointed professor of physiology, a position he held for 40 years. In 1764 he was appointed lifetime secretary to the Académie Royale de Chirurgie.

#15159

Robert S. Hartman

1910 - 1973 (63 years)

Robert Schirokauer Hartman was a German-American logician and philosopher. His primary field of study was scientific axiology and he is known as its original theorist. His axiology is the basis of the Hartman Value Inventory

#15160

Friedrich Jodl

1849 - 1914 (65 years)

Friedrich Jodl was a German philosopher and psychologist. Biography Friedrich Jodl grew up in a Munich family association which, due to its proximity to the royal court, had provided numerous senior civil servants in Bavaria. The painter Heinrich Bürkel, a family friend, introduced him to the fine arts at an early age.

#15161

Constantin Brunner

Constantin Brunner

1862 - 1937 (75 years)

Constantin Brunner was the pen-name of the German Jewish philosopher Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer . He was born in Altona on 27 August 1862. He came from a prominent Jewish family that had lived in the vicinity of Hamburg for generations; his grandfather, Akiba Wertheimer, was chief Rabbi of Altona and Schleswig-Holstein. Brunner studied philosophy under a number of prominent scholars, but never completed his doctorate. He established himself as a literary critic, and enjoyed a wide celebrity. In the 1890s, he withdrew from public life to devote himself to writing. He lived in Germany until 1933...

#15162

Chauncey D. Leake

1896 - 1978 (82 years)

Chauncey Depew Leake was an American pharmacologist, medical historian and ethicist. Leake received a bachelor's degree with majors in biology, chemistry, and philosophy from Princeton University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in pharmacology and physiology.

#15163

Lie Yukou

449 BC - 500 BC (-51 years)

Lie Yukou was a Chinese philosopher who is considered the author of the Daoist book Liezi, which uses his honorific name Liezi . Early life Lie Yukou was born in the State of Zheng, near today's Zhengzhou, Henan Province.

#15164

Jacob Taubes

1923 - 1987 (64 years)

Jacob Taubes was a sociologist of religion, philosopher, and scholar of Judaism. Taubes was born into an old rabbinical family. He was married to the writer Susan Taubes. He obtained his doctorate in 1947 for a thesis on "Occidental Eschatology" and initially taught religious studies and Jewish studies in the United States at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton University.

#15165

David of Dinant

1160 - 1217 (57 years)

David of Dinant was a pantheistic philosopher. He may have been a member of, or at least been influenced by, a pantheistic sect known as the Amalricians. David was condemned by the Church in 1210 for his writing of the "Quaternuli" , which forced him to flee Paris. When and where he died is unknown; all that can be ascertained is that he died after the year 1215, as he was condemned again in the council of 1215.

#15166

Francesc Pujols

Francesc Pujols

1882 - 1962 (80 years)

Francesc Pujols i Morgades was a Catalan writer and philosopher. Biography Pujols began to write poetry during his studies in secondary school, influenced by the work of Jacint Verdaguer and Joan Maragall. He took part in the literary competition Jocs Florals of Barcelona in 1902, and won the Natural Flower with the poem “Idil·li”.

#15167

Vydūnas

1868 - 1953 (85 years)

Wilhelm Storost, artistic name Vilius Storostas-Vydūnas , mostly known as Vydūnas, was a Prussian-Lithuanian teacher, poet, humanist, philosopher and Lithuanian writer, a leader of the Prussian Lithuanian national movement in Lithuania Minor, and one of leaders of the theosophical movement in East Prussia.

#15168

Aloys Fischer

1880 - 1937 (57 years)

Aloys Fischer was a German educationalist and worked on the foundations of a modern theory of education. Life Fischer was born in Furth im Wald, Bavaria on 10 April 1880. He attended the local elementary school. In 1891 he was awarded a scholarship to the grammar school based at the Benedictine Metten Abbey. He finished there 1899 and then attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich studying Classical Philology, German and history. After passing the First State Exam in 1902 he studied for a doctorate under Theodor Lipps. From 1903 to 1906 Fischer tutored the children of Adolf von Hildebrand.

#15169

Philipp Albert Stapfer

Philipp Albert Stapfer

1766 - 1840 (74 years)

Philipp Albert Stapfer was a Swiss politician and philosopher. He was the plenipotentiary envoi of the Helvetic Republic to the French consulate in Paris from 1801 till 1803. He married and settled in France, at the Chateau de Talcy and in Paris where he became the friend of Maine de Biran in 1805 at informal gatherings of Cabanis circle at Auteuil. He was also vice-president of the Paris Protestant society.

#15170

Samuel Adams

1722 - 1803 (81 years)

Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father of the United States. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States. He was a second cousin to his fellow Founding Father, President John Adams.

#15171

Walter Raleigh

1554 - 1618 (64 years)

Sir Walter Raleigh was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I.

#15172

Franciscus Donders

Franciscus Donders

1818 - 1889 (71 years)

Franciscus Cornelius Donders FRS FRSE was a Dutch ophthalmologist. During his career, he was a professor of physiology in Utrecht, and was internationally regarded as an authority on eye diseases, directing the Netherlands Hospital for Eye Patients. Along with Graefe and Helmholtz, he was one of the primary founders of scientific ophthalmology.

#15173

Pasquale Galluppi

Pasquale Galluppi

1770 - 1846 (76 years)

Pasquale Galluppi was an Italian philosopher. Biography and philosophy Galluppi was born at Tropea, Calabria, into the patrician Galluppi family. From 1831 he was a professor at the University of Naples, where he died in 1846.

#15174

Aristippus the Younger

400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)

Aristippus the Younger , of Cyrene, was a Cyrenaic philosopher in the second half of the 4th century BC. He was the grandson of Aristippus of Cyrene, the founder of the school. According to Diogenes Laërtius, he received the nickname "Mother-taught" . because he learned philosophy from his mother, Arete of Cyrene, who was the daughter of the elder Aristippus. Diogenes lists Theodorus the Atheist as one of his students. According to Aristocles of Messene, as quoted by Eusebius, he may have formalized the principles of Cyrenaic philosophy.: He quite plainly defined the end to be the life of pleasure, ranking as pleasure that which lies in motion.

#15175

Anacharsis

700 BC - 600 BC (100 years)

Anacharsis was a Scythian prince and philosopher of uncertain historicity who lived in the 6th century BC. Life Anacharsis was the brother of the Scythian king Saulius, and both of them were the sons of the previous Scythian king, Gnurus.

#15176

Julius Binder

1870 - 1939 (69 years)

Julius Binder was a German philosopher of law. He is principally known as an opponent of legal positivism, and for having remained as an active scholar during the 1930s in Nazi Germany who did not speak out against the prevailing government of that time.

#15177

Shadworth Hodgson

1832 - 1912 (80 years)

Shadworth Hollway Hodgson, FBA was an English philosopher. Biography He worked independently, without academic affiliation. He was acknowledged by William James as a forerunner of Pragmatism, although he viewed his work as a completion of Kant's project. Hodgson was a member of a London philosophy club with James, called the "Scratch Eight". Hodgson regarded the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as his chief inspirations, and had no academic background, though he was a member of the Metaphysical Society.

#15178

Rudolf Haym

1821 - 1901 (80 years)

Rudolf Haym was a German philosopher. He was born in Grünberg in Prussia , and died in St. Anton . He studied philosophy and theology at Halle and Berlin. He was a member of the National Assembly at Frankfurt in 1848, and wrote an account of the proceedings from the standpoint of the Right Centre. From 1851 he lectured in literature and philosophy at the University of Halle, and became professor in 1860.

#15179

Lazarus Bendavid

Lazarus Bendavid

1762 - 1832 (70 years)

Lazarus Bendavid was a German mathematician and philosopher known for his exposition of Kantian philosophy. Biography Bendavid was a Jewish Kantian philosopher. After his graduation from the University of Berlin he lectured for some years on the philosophy of Kant in Vienna. His lectures being discouraged by the Austrian government during a general purge of foreigners, Bendavid returned to Berlin, where he found government employment and continued to lecture and write.

#15180

Azar Kayvan

1501 - 1609 (108 years)

Āzar Kayvān was the Zoroastrian high priest of Istakhr and a gnostic philosopher, who was a native of Fars, Iran and later emigrated to Patna in the Mughal Empire during the reign of Emperor Akbar. A member of the community ,

#15181

Jakob Klatzkin

1882 - 1948 (66 years)

Jakob Klatzkin, Yakov/Jakub Klaczkin was a Jewish philosopher, publicist, author, and publisher. Life Klatzkin was born in Byaroza-Kartuskaya, a son of the local Rabbi Eliyahu Klatzkin. He received his early schooling from his father and yeshivas in Lithuania. Later he traveled to Germany to study with philosopher Hermann Cohen. Klatzkin received his doctorate from the University of Berne in Switzerland, then returned to Germany to write for Hebrew periodicals and establish Jewish publishing firms. He also served as director of the Jewish National Fund in Cologne.

#15182

Zeno of Tarsus

250 BC - 200 BC (50 years)

Zeno of Tarsus was a Stoic philosopher and the son of Dioscorides. Biography Zeno was a pupil of Chrysippus, and when Chrysippus died c. 206 BC, he succeeded him to become the fourth scholarch of the Stoic school in Athens.

#15183

Carl Hilty

1833 - 1909 (76 years)

Carl Andreas Hilty was a Swiss lawyer, professor of constitutional law, politician, philosopher, lay theologian and writer. Life Family background, education and early career Hilty was born in the small town of Werdenberg in the canton of St. Gallen in northeastern Switzerland. His father was the physician Johann Ulrich Hilty, who practised medicine in Chur, the capital of the eastern canton of the Grisons. His family had been based in Werdenberg for centuries and in 1835 he bought the crumbling Werdenberg Castle at an auction. Carl Hilty's mother Elisabeth hailed from Chur and was the daughter of a former regimental doctor of the French Army.

#15184

Tilman Pesch

1836 - 1899 (63 years)

Tilman Pesch , was a German Jesuit philosopher. Life He became a Jesuit on 15 October 1852, and made his novitiate at Friedrichsburg near Münster; he studied classics two years at Paderborn, philosophy two years at Bonn; taught four years at Feldkirch, Austria; studied theology one year at Paderborn and three years at Maria-Laach, after which he made his third year of novitiate at Paderborn. He then taught philosophy at Maria-Laach . From 1870 to 1876 he worked in the ministry, and again taught philosophy eight years , at the Castle of Bleijenbeek in Afferden.

#15185

M. Hiriyanna

1871 - 1950 (79 years)

Mysore Hiriyanna was an eminent Indian philosopher, Sanskrit scholar and authority on Indian aesthetics. He was a Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Mysore and a contemporary of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. His classes on Indian Philosophy were comprehensive. His classroom dictations, published by Allen & Unwin in book form as "Outlines of Indian Philosophy" brought Hiriyanna international recognition. This was a seminal work on Indian Philosophy. His other prominent works include "Indian Conception of Values", "Essentials of Indian Philosophy", "The Quest after Perfection" and "Art Experience".

#15186

Simmias of Thebes

500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)

Simmias of Thebes was an ancient Greek philosopher, disciple of Socrates, and a friend of Cebes. In his Memorabilia, Xenophon includes him in the inner circle of Socrates' followers. He appears in Plato's Phaedo as a main discussion partner of Socrates alongside Cebes, as well as Crito, Phaedrus, and Epistle XIII.

#15187

Alexander Tille

Alexander Tille

1866 - 1912 (46 years)

Alexander Tille was a German philosopher. He published the first English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra in 1896. Tille strongly supported eugenics and Social Darwinism. He claimed Christian ethics, democracy, equality, humanism and socialism were only the delusions held by the weak. Tille felt slums were good, since they could help purge society of the "unfit". He also thought disabled and mentally ill people should be left to starve, with food only given to the "fit".

#15188

Henry J. Mankin‡

#15189

Boyan Petkanchin

Boyan Petkanchin

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Boyan Petkanchin was a prominent Bulgarian mathematician, working in geometry and foundation of mathematics. As a first chairman of the Department of Mathematical Logic at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences he worked to promote and disseminate the knowledge of mathematical logic both in the professional mathematical community in Bulgaria and as popular science.

#15190

Elia del Medigo

Elia del Medigo

1460 - 1497 (37 years)

Elia del Medigo, also called Elijah Delmedigo or Elias ben Moise del Medigo and sometimes known to his contemporaries as Helias Hebreus Cretensis or in Hebrew Elijah Mi-Qandia . According to Jacob Joshua Ross, "while the non-Jewish students of Delmedigo may have classified him as an “Averroist”, he clearly saw himself as a follower of Maimonides". But, according to other scholars, Delmedigo was clearly a strong follower of Averroes' doctrines, even the more radical ones: unity of intellect, eternity of the world, autonomy of reason from the boundaries of revealed religion.

#15191

Theodor Mundt

1808 - 1861 (53 years)

Theodor Mundt was a German critic and novelist. He was a member of the Young Germany group of German writers. Biography Born at Potsdam, Mundt studied philology and philosophy at Berlin. In 1832 he settled at Leipzig as a journalist, where he co-edited Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung, and where he was subjected to a rigorous police supervision. In 1839 he married Klara Müller , who under the name of Luise Mühlbach became a popular novelist, and he moved in the same year to Berlin. Here his intention of entering upon an academical career was for a time thwarted by his collision with the Prussian press laws.

#15192

John Michell

1724 - 1793 (69 years)

John Michell was an English natural philosopher and clergyman who provided pioneering insights into a wide range of scientific fields including astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation. Considered "one of the greatest unsung scientists of all time", he is the first person known to have proposed the existence of black holes, and the first to have suggested that earthquakes travelled in wavess. Recognizing that double stars were a product of mutual gravitation, he was the first to apply statistics to the study of the cosmos. He invented an apparatus to measure the mass of the Earth, and explained how to manufacture an artificial magnet.

#15193

Margaret MacDonald

1907 - 1956 (49 years)

Margaret MacDonald was a British analytic philosopher. She worked in the areas of philosophy of language, political philosophy and aesthetics. Life and education Margaret MacDonald was born in London and abandoned as a child.

#15194

P. C. Chang

1892 - 1957 (65 years)

Peng Chun Chang, commonly known as P. C. Chang , was a Chinese academic, philosopher, playwright, human rights activist, and diplomat. He was born in Tianjin, China, and died at his home in Nutley, New Jersey.

#15195

Henry Longueville Mansel

Henry Longueville Mansel

1820 - 1871 (51 years)

Henry Longueville Mansel was an English philosopher and ecclesiastic. Life He was born at Cosgrove, Northamptonshire . He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London and St John's College, Oxford. He took a double first in 1843, and became tutor of his college. He was appointed reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855, and Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1859. He was a great opponent of university reform and of the Hegelianism which was then beginning to take root in Oxford. In 1867 he succeeded Arthur Penrhyn Stanley as regius professor of ecclesiastical history, and in 1868 he was appointed dean of St Paul's.

#15196

Polemarchus

500 BC - 403 BC (97 years)

Polemarchus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from Piraeus. Life The son of Cephalus of Syracuse, Polemarchus had two brothers, the famous orator Lysias and Euthydemus, and a sister who married Brachyllus. Polemarchus and Lysias traveled to Thurii when the latter was 15 years old.

#15197

Edmund Husserl

#15198

Belu Zilber

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Belu Zilber was a Romanian communist activist. Born into a Jewish family in Târgu Frumos, Iași County, he adhered to the Bolshevik movement while still an adolescent. Because he participated in the typographers' demonstration of December 13, 1918, he was expelled from every educational institution in his native country by the authorities of the Kingdom of Romania. He continued his high school education in Paris and began but did not complete studies at the polytechnic division of the University of Grenoble. He returned to Romania in 1922 and was hired as an expert at the War Ministry. He was ...

#15199

Xenophilus

400 BC - Present (2426 years)

Xenophilus , of Chalcidice, was a Pythagorean philosopher and musician who lived in the first half of the 4th century BC. Aulus Gellius relates that Xenophilus was the intimate friend and teacher of Aristoxenus and implies that Xenophilus taught him Pythagorean doctrine. He was said to have belonged to the last generation of Pythagoreans, and he is the only Pythagorean known to have lived in Athens in the 4th century BC.

#15200

Pedro Zulen

1889 - 1925 (36 years)

Pedro Salvino Zulen Aymar was a Peruvian philosopher and librarian of Chinese descent, who dedicated the most part of his short life to the fight for decentralised politics and the defense of indigenous rights.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions