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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,

#1551

Brian Cantwell Smith

#3354

Overall Influence

Brian Cantwell Smith is a philosopher and cognitive scientist working in the fields of cognitive science, computer science, information studies, and philosophy, especially ontology. His research has focused on the foundations and philosophy of computing, both in the practice and theory of computer science, and in the use of computational metaphors in other fields, such as philosophy, cognitive science, physics, and art. He is currently professor of information, computer science, and philosophy at University of Toronto.

#1552

Gary Steiner

#18341

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Gary Steiner is an American moral philosopher, and the John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University. Steiner's particular focus is animal rights, Descartes, and 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy.

#1553

David Albert

#5768

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

David Z. Albert is Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy and Director of the MA Program in The Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University in New York. Education and career He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Columbia College and his PhD in theoretical physics from The Rockefeller University under Professor Nicola Khuri. Afterwards he worked with Yakir Aharonov of Tel Aviv University. He has spent most of his career in the philosophy department at Columbia University, although he has also been a frequent visiting professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.

#1554

Robert A. McDermott

#6407

Overall Influence

Robert McDermott is professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. in 1969 in philosophy from Boston University and is president emeritus of the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has taught at Manhattanville College and is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY . He was secretary of the American Academy of Religion and secretary treasurer of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy .

#1555

Ugo Spirito

1896 - 1979 (83 years)

Ugo Spirito was an Italian philosopher; at first, a fascist political philosopher and subsequently an idealist thinker. He has also been an academic and a university teacher. Early life Spirito undertook academic study in law and philosophy. He was initially an advocate of positivism although in 1918, whilst attending Sapienza University of Rome, he abandoned his position to become a follower of the Actual Idealism of Giovanni Gentile. By the age of 22 he was a self-proclaimed fascist and actualist.

#1556

Predrag Vranicki

#18733

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Predrag Vranicki was a Marxist Humanist and member of the Praxis school in the 1960s in Yugoslavia. Life Vranicki was born in 1922, in Benkovac, Croatia. During World War II he fought with the National Liberation Army against the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. He received a diploma in philosophy from the University of Zagreb in 1947 and earned his PhD from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy in 1951. From 1964 to 1966 he was dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and rector of the Zagreb University from 1972 to 1976. Vranicki became president of the Yugoslav Society for ...

#1557

Barry Stroud

#17329

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Barry Stroud was a Canadian philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Known especially for his work on philosophical skepticism, he wrote about David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the metaphysics of color, and many other topics.

#1558

Janet Biehl

#8615

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Janet Biehl is an American author, copyeditor, translator, and artist. She authored several books and articles associated with social ecology, the body of ideas developed and publicized by Murray Bookchin. Formerly an advocate of his antistatist political program, she broke with it publicly in 2011 and now identifies as a progressive Democrat.

#1559

Karl Rosenkranz

Karl Rosenkranz

1805 - 1879 (74 years)

Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Life Born in Magdeburg, he read philosophy at Berlin, Halle and Königsberg, devoting himself mainly to the doctrines of Hegel and Schleiermacher. After holding the chair of philosophy at Halle for two years, he became, in 1833, professor at the University of Königsberg. In his last years he was blind.

#1560

Jan van Eyck

1390 - 1441 (51 years)

Jan van Eyck was a painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting, though most now regard that claim as an oversimplification.

#1561

Rahel Jaeggi

#14940

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research areas are in social philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, philosophical anthropology, social ontology, and critical theory. Since February 2018 she has been the head of the Berlin campus of the newly founded International Center for Humanities and Social Change.

#1562

Nancy Bauer

#9325

Overall Influence

For the Canadian writer and editor, see Nancy Bauer. Nancy Bauer is an American philosopher specializing in feminist philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, and the work of Simone de Beauvoir. She was recently Chair of the Philosophy Department at Tufts University and is currently Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy as well as the Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. Her interests include methodology in philosophy, feminism, metaphysics, social/political/moral philosophy, philosophy of language, phenomenology, and philosophy in film.

#1563

Bhāviveka

500 - 578 (78 years)

Bhāviveka, also called Bhāvaviveka , and Bhavya was a sixth-century madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher. Alternative names for this figure also include Bhavyaviveka, Bhāvin, Bhāviviveka, Bhagavadviveka and Bhavya. Bhāviveka is the author of the Madhyamakahrdaya , its auto-commentary the Tarkajvālā and the Prajñāpradīpa .

#1564

Stanisław Jaśkowski

1906 - 1965 (59 years)

Stanisław Jaśkowski was a Polish logician who made important contributions to proof theory and formal semantics. He was a student of Jan Łukasiewicz and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic. He is regarded as one of the founders of natural deduction, which he discovered independently of Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. He is also known for his research into paraconsistent logic. Upon his death, his name was added to the Genius Wall of Fame. He was the President of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.

#1565

Constantine Sandis

#18445

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Constantine Sandis is a Greek and British philosopher and entrepreneur. Having worked on philosophy of action, moral psychology, David Hume, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in 2013 he became Professor of Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University. He is currently Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, a Founding Director of author services firm Lex Academic and Chief Operations Officer of lexacademic.science.

#1566

Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși

1876 - 1957 (81 years)

Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought ...

#1567

Svetozar Stojanović

Svetozar Stojanović

#18093

Overall Influence

1931 - 2010 (79 years)

Svetozar "Sveta" Stojanović was a Serbian philosopher and political theorist. Biography Stojanović was an intellectual in the European tradition, an academic who contributed to philosophical theory and engaged in practical politics. He bridged the divide between the more grand and speculative Continental philosophy and analytic Anglo-American ethical theory. His doctoral dissertation on Contemporary Meta-ethics was grounded on his study of ordinary language analysis at the University of Oxford and later he met weekly at the University of Michigan to discuss ethical issues with William Frankena, Richard Brandt and Charles Stevenson.

#1568

Uma Narayan

#8726

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Uma Narayan is an American feminist scholar and a current professor of philosophy at Vassar College on the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Humanities. Narayan's work focuses on the epistemology of the inequities involving postcolonial feminism.

#1569

Mark Wrathall

#16273

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mark Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is considered a leading interpreter of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Wrathall is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World. According to a recent reviewer of Wrathall's latest book, "Wrathall's writing is clear and comprehensive, ranging across virtually all of Heidegger's collected works.... Wrathall's overall interpretation of Heidegger's work is crystal clear, compelling, and relevant."

#1570

Michael Lou Martin

#15331

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Michael Lou Martin was an American philosopher and former professor at Boston University. Martin specialized in the philosophy of religion, although he also worked on the philosophies of science, law, and social science. He served with the US Marine Corps in Korea.

#1571

Herman Van Breda

1911 - 1974 (63 years)

Herman Leo Van Breda was a Franciscan, philosopher and founder of the Husserl Archives at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. On 19 August 1934, he was ordained as a priest and in 1936 he started studying philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he obtained a PhD degree in 1941 with a dissertation on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Later he became a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he stayed until his death in 1974.

#1572

Gérard Granel

#9361

Overall Influence

1930 - 2000 (70 years)

Gérard Granel was a French philosopher and translator. Life and work Born in Paris, Granel attended the lycée Louis-le-Grand and the courses of Michel Alexandre, Jean Hyppolite and, later, of Louis Althusser and Jean Beaufret. He taught in Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Aix, before being appointed professor of philosophy at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, a position he held from 1972 until his death.

#1573

Jakob Sigismund Beck

1761 - 1840 (79 years)

Jakob Sigismund Beck was a German philosopher. Biography Beck was born in the village of Liessau in the rural district of Marienburg in Royal Prussia, Poland in 1761. The son of a priest , he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Königsberg, where Christian Jakob Kraus, Johann Schultz, and Immanuel Kant were his teachers. After his studies he first accepted a post as a teacher at a grammar school in Halle. With his thesis Dissertatio de Theoremate Tayloriano, sive de lege generali, secundum quam functionis mutantur, notatis a quibus pendent variabilibus, which he wrote in Halle, he was qualified as a university lecturer.

#1574

Jordan Howard Sobel

#17274

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Jordan Howard Sobel was a Canadian-American philosopher specializing in ethics, logic, and decision theory. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. In addition to his areas of specialization, Sobel made notable contributions in the fields of philosophy of religion, and value theory. Before his death, Sobel was considered by Christian apologist William Lane Craig to be the leading philosophical defender of Atheism prior to Graham Oppy.

#1575

Manuel Sacristán

1925 - 1985 (60 years)

Manuel Sacristán Luzón was a Spanish philosopher and writer. Sacristán, the son of a Francoist collaborator, moved to Barcelona in 1940, thereafter living most of his life in said city. He soon became a member of the Falange Española youth section and studied Law and Philosophy in the University of Barcelona, where he became a member of the cultural section of the Sindicato Español Universitario . After a thwarted contact with a clandestine Anarchist group, he and two fellow Falangists were shunned and persecuted by the mainstream SEU officials, resulting in the suicide of one of them and an ...

#1576

Joseph Henry Woodger

1894 - 1981 (87 years)

Joseph Henry Woodger was a British theoretical biologist and philosopher of biology whose attempts to make biological sciences more rigorous and empirical was significantly influential to the philosophy of biology in the twentieth century. Karl Popper, the prominent philosopher of science, claimed "Woodger... influenced and stimulated the evolution of the philosophy of science in Britain and in the United States as hardly anybody else".

#1577

Edgar S. Brightman

Edgar S. Brightman

1884 - 1953 (69 years)

Edgar Sheffield Brightman was an American philosopher and Christian theologian in the Methodist tradition, associated with Boston University and liberal theology, and promulgated the philosophy known as Boston personalism.

#1578

Jean Grenier

1898 - 1971 (73 years)

Jean Grenier was a French philosopher and writer. He taught for a time in Algiers, where he became a significant influence on the young Albert Camus. Biography Born in Paris, Grenier spent his childhood and adolescence in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, the birthplace of Jules Lequier, the visionary philosopher to whom Grenier would eventually dedicate his doctoral thesis. These early years, during which he became acquainted with Louis Guilloux, Edmond Lambert and Max Jacob, are documented in his autobiographical novel Les grèves . In 1922 Grenier gained a teaching qualification in philosophy and began his academic career at the Institut français in Naples, alongside Henri Bosco.

#1579

Baruch Brody

#13315

Overall Influence

1943 - 2018 (75 years)

Baruch A. Brody was an American bioethicist. He was the Leon Jaworski Professor of biomedical ethics and former Director of the Center for Ethics, Medicine and Public Issues at The Baylor College of Medicine and Andrew Mellow professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University.

#1580

Mario De Caro

#14372

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Mario De Caro is an Italian philosopher, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Rome III in Italy. Since 2000, he has also been teaching at Tufts University, where he is regularly a visiting professor. He is interested in moral philosophy, the free-will controversy, theory of action, history of science, Donald Davidson's and Hilary Putnam's philosophies, and early modern philosophy. With David Macarthur, he has defended a metaphilosohical view called liberal naturalism.

#1581

Walter Dubislav

1895 - 1937 (42 years)

Walter Dubislav was a German logician and philosopher of science . Biography After studying mathematics and philosophy, Dubislav attained a doctorate in 1922 with "Contributions to the theories of definition and proof within mathematical logic" . In 1928 he became a private lecturer in philosophy of mathematics and the natural sciences at the Technical University of Berlin and from 1931 was Professor Extraordinarius . In 1936 he emigrated to Prague.

#1582

Michael Frede

#19469

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

Michael Frede was a prominent scholar of ancient philosophy, described by The Telegraph as "one of the most important and adventurous scholars of ancient philosophy of recent times." Education and career Frede earned his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1966 and worked there as an assistant from 1966 to 1971.

#1583

Helen Keller

1880 - 1968 (88 years)

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the Unite...

#1584

Rudolf Christoph Eucken

Rudolf Christoph Eucken

1846 - 1926 (80 years)

Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life", after he had been nominated by a member of the Swedish Academy.

#1585

Charles Beitz

#6460

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Charles R. Beitz is an American political theorist. He is Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he has been director of the University Center for Human Values and director of the Program in Political Philosophy. His philosophical and teaching interests focus on global political theory, democratic theory, the theory of human rights and theories of property.

#1586

Jean Borella

#14696

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Jean Borella is a Christian philosopher and theologian. Borella's works are inspired by Ancient and Christian Neoplatonism, but also by the Traditionalist School of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon.

#1587

Ogyū Sorai

1666 - 1728 (62 years)

Ogyū Sorai, pen name Butsu Sorai, was a Japanese historian, philologist, philosopher, and translator. He has been described as the most influential such scholar during the Edo period Japan. His primary area of study was in applying the teachings of Confucianism to government and social order. He responded to contemporary economic and political failings of the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as the culture of mercantilism and the dominance of old institutions that had become weak with extravagance. Sorai rejected the moralism of Neo-Confucianism and instead looked to the ancient works. He argue...

#1588

James Randi

#466

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

James Randi was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry , and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation . Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87.

#1589

Ksenija Atanasijević

Ksenija Atanasijević

1894 - 1981 (87 years)

Ksenija Atanasijević was the first recognised major female Serbian philosopher, and the first female professors of Belgrade University, where she graduated. She wrote about Giordano Bruno, ancient Greek philosophy and the history of Serbian philosophy, and translated important philosophical works into Serbian, including works by Aristotle, Plato, and Spinoza. She was also an early Serbian feminist writer and philosopher.

#1590

Max Bense

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Max Bense was a German philosopher, writer, and publicist, known for his work in philosophy of science, logic, aesthetics, and semiotics. His thoughts combine natural sciences, art, and philosophy under a collective perspective and follow a definition of reality, which – under the term existential rationalism – is able to remove the separation between humanities and natural sciences.

#1591

Peter Checkland

#971

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Peter Checkland is a British management scientist and emeritus professor of systems at Lancaster University. He is the developer of soft systems methodology : a methodology based on a way of systems thinking systems practice. Systems practice is the idea of uncovering an optimal solution within complex environments, thus leading to a thorough understanding of the system, analysing and adapting to change in the environment. In an important way his work preceded data science and change management disciplines in the next century.

#1592

Karl Groos

1861 - 1946 (85 years)

Karl Groos was a German philosopher and psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play. His 1898 book on The Play of Animals suggested that play is a preparation for later life.

#1593

Leo the Mathematician

790 - 900 (110 years)

Leo the Mathematician, the Grammarian or the Philosopher was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century". He was archbishop of Thessalonica and later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic.

#1594

Richard Schacht

#16913

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Richard Schacht is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign now residing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is an expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, was the editor of International Nietzsche Studies, and is former executive director of the North American Nietzsche Society. His philosophical interests include European philosophy after Kant, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and concepts such as human nature, alienation, and value theory.

#1595

Christine Grady

#12389

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Christine Grady is an American nurse and bioethicist who serves as the head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Early life and education Grady was born and raised in Livingston, New Jersey. Her father, John H. Grady Jr., was a graduate of Yale University and a U.S. Navy veteran who served as the mayor of Livingston. Her mother, Barbara, was an assistant dean at Seton Hall University School of Law.

#1596

Wayne Proudfoot

#9510

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Wayne Lee Proudfoot is an American scholar of religion and has written several works in that field, specializing in the philosophy of religion. Proudfoot earned the degree of Master of Theology from the Harvard Divinity School in 1969, after which he taught at the College of Liberal Arts at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University in midtown Manhattan.

#1597

James V. Schall

#7259

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

James Vincent Schall was an American Jesuit Roman Catholic priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher. He was Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He retired from teaching in December 2012, giving his final lecture on December 7, 2012, at Georgetown; it was entitled "The Final Gladness," and was sponsored by the Tocqueville Forum. has been described as "a reflection on different aspects of lifelong learning" by the National Catholic Register.

#1598

Paul Horwich

#16685

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paul Gordon Horwich is a British analytic philosopher at New York University, noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, the philosophy of language and the interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

#1599

Thomas Starzl

#2166

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Thomas Earl Starzl was an American physician, researcher, and expert on organ transplants. He performed the first human liver transplants, and has often been referred to as "the father of modern transplantation." A documentary, entitled "Burden of Genius," covering the medical and scientific advances spearheaded by Starzl himself, was released to the public in 2017 in a series of screenings. Dr. Starzl also penned his autobiography, "The Puzzle People: Memoirs Of A Transplant Surgeon," which was published in 1992.

#1600

Daniel A. Bell

#8833

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Daniel A. Bell is a Canadian political theorist. He is currently Chair of Political Theory at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He was previously Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University and professor at Tsinghua University .

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