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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,

#15901

Jaroslav Hašek

1883 - 1923 (40 years)

Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian, first anarchist and then communist, and commissar of the Red Army against the Czechoslovak Legion. He is best known for his novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into about 60 languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature.

#15902

William Cowper

1666 - 1709 (43 years)

William Cowper was an English surgeon and anatomist, famous for his early description of what is now known as Cowper's gland. Cowper was born in Petersfield, Hampshire, and he was apprenticed to a London surgeon, William Bignall, in March 1682. He was admitted to the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1691 and began practising in London the same year. In 1694, he published his noted work, Myotomia Reformata, or a New Administration of the Muscles, and he was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1696. In 1698, he published The Anatomy of the Humane Bodies, which gained him great fame and notor...

#15903

Johann Nikolaus Forkel

Johann Nikolaus Forkel

1749 - 1818 (69 years)

Johann Nikolaus Forkel was a German musicologist and music theorist, generally regarded as among the founders of modern musicology. His publications include Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work, the first substantial survey on the life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

#15904

Altheides

1193 - 1262 (69 years)

Altheides was a Cypriot philosopher, primarily known from sayings attributed to him in the works of others. Little is known about the wandering philosopher known as Altheides of Cyprus, and little of his work remains available to modern scholars. His parents were Greek merchants living on the island under the rule of Guy of Lusignan. He was born a year before Guy's death, in 1193. At some point in his late teens he left Cyprus as a seaman on a Moorish trading vessel.

#15905

H. B. Acton

1908 - 1974 (66 years)

Harry Burrows Acton was an English academic in the field of political philosophy, known for books defending the morality of capitalism, and attacking Marxism-Leninism. He in particular produced arguments on the incoherence of Marxism, which he described as a 'farrago' . His book The Illusion of the Epoch, in which this appears, is a standard point of reference. Other interests were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and Sidney Webb. Acton also endorsed a version of negative utilitarianism, according to which the reduction of su...

#15906

Joseph Lane

1851 - 1920 (69 years)

Joseph Lane was an English libertarian socialist campaigner. Biography Lane was born on 2 April 1851 in Benson, Oxfordshire, England, to Thomas Lane, who was a cordwainer, and Mercy Lane . Lane had very little education, beginning farm work at a young age. As a boy he also took a keen interest in politics and attending election meetings. He moved to London and at the age of 15 began work as a carter. In the early 1870s he was involved in the Land Tenure Reform Association and the republican movement.

#15907

Einar Hammarsten

1889 - 1968 (79 years)

Einar Hammarsten was a Swedish physician and professor of pharmacy and chemistry at the Karolinska Institute from 1928 to 1957. His area of research was the chemistry of the cell nucleus, in particular nucleic acids.

#15908

Irvin Abell

1876 - 1949 (73 years)

Irvin Abell was a surgeon from Louisville, Kentucky. Early life Irvin Abell was born on September 13, 1876, in Lebanon, Kentucky to Sarah Silesia and William Irvin Abell. The Abell family had lived in Kentucky since 1788. He attended St Augustine's Catholic School in Lebanon. He graduated from St. Mary's College in 1894 with a Master of Arts. Abell graduated from Louisville Medical College in 1897 and then studied in Germany at the University of Marburg and the University of Berlin.

#15909

John Daniel Wild

1902 - 1972 (70 years)

John Daniel Wild was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Wild began his philosophical career as an empiricist and realist but became an important proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in the United States.

#15910

Alexandre Koyré

1892 - 1964 (72 years)

Alexandre Koyré , also anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science. Life Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog, Russia on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyra . In Imperial Russia he studied in Tiflis, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.

#15911

Brand Blanshard

1892 - 1987 (95 years)

Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of reason and rationalism. A powerful polemicist, by all accounts he comported himself with courtesy and grace in philosophical controversies and exemplified the "rational temper" he advocated.

#15912

Ernest Cruickshank

1888 - 1964 (76 years)

Ernest William Henderson Cruickshank FRSE LLD was a Scottish physician and physiologist. He was the author of several textbooks on nutrition. His book Food and Nutrition was an influential best-seller. It looks at the evolution of human diets, protein needs within the body and problems of world malnutrition.

#15913

Lawrence H. Gipson

1880 - 1971 (91 years)

Lawrence Henry Gipson was an American historian, who won the 1950 Bancroft Prize and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for History for volumes of his magnum opus, the fifteen-volume history of "The British Empire Before the American Revolution", published 1936–70. He was a leader of the "Imperial school" of historians who studied the British Empire from the perspective of London, and generally praised the administrative efficiency and political fairness of the Empire.

#15914

John Crighton Bramwell

1889 - 1976 (87 years)

John Crighton Bramwell was a British cardiologist, professor of medicine, and one of the founders of cardiology as a specialist subject in the UK. Education and career and Martha Crighton, he was education at Cheltenham College, before matriculated in 1907 at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he was influenced by the physiologist Keith Lucas. In 1911 Bramwell started clinical medical training at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. At the start of WWI he joined the 1st East Lancashire Territorial Field Ambulance in Egypt. In 1915 he was granted leave for two months to take his final examination at the University of Manchester, where he graduated MB CHB.

#15915

Paul Anton Cibis

1911 - 1965 (54 years)

Paul Anton Cibis was a clinical ophthalmologist, surgeon and pioneer of modern vitreoretinal surgery. As part of Operation Paperclip Cibis came to the United States and performed research for the U.S. Air Force and studied the effects of atomic weapons testing on the eye. He was an internationally recognized expert in retinal detachment surgery and pioneered the use of liquid silicon for this procedure.

#15916

Leon Carnovsky

1903 - 1975 (72 years)

Leon Carnovsky was an American librarian and educator who focused much of his time to the survey of libraries in the United States and around the globe. Carnovsky was recognized by American Libraries as being one of the 100 most influential figures in Library and Information Sciences.

#15917

Alfred Bielschowsky

Alfred Bielschowsky

1871 - 1940 (69 years)

Alfred Bielschowsky was a German ophthalmologist. His specialty was physiology and pathology of the eye, particularly in regards to research of eye movement, space perception and diagnosis of oculomotor anomalies.

#15918

Zechariah Chafee

Zechariah Chafee

1885 - 1957 (72 years)

Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.

#15919

Ben Shahn

1898 - 1969 (71 years)

Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.

#15920

John Plamenatz

1912 - 1975 (63 years)

John Petrov Plamenatz was a Montenegrin political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his analysis of political obligation and his theory of democracy.

#15921

Raphael Demos

1892 - 1968 (76 years)

Raphael Demos was a Greek-American philosopher. He was Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, emeritus, at Harvard University and an authority on the work of the Greek philosopher Plato. At Harvard, he taught Martin Luther King Jr.

#15922

David Weyhe Smith

1926 - 1981 (55 years)

David Weyhe Smith was an American pediatrician and dysmorphologist, best known for his pioneering book Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation and for describing fetal alcohol syndrome. Early life and education David Weyhe Smith was born in Oakland, California. He gained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and undertook postdoctoral studies during 1950-51 and 1953-56 in the Department of Pediatrics. He worked with Lawson Wilkins in the field of pediatric endocrinology.

#15923

Boyd Henry Bode

1873 - 1953 (80 years)

Boyd Henry Bode was an American academic and philosopher, notable for his work on philosophy of education. Bode was born in Ridott, Illinois. He grew up in rural areas of Iowa and South Dakota and attended Pennsylvania College in Iowa and later the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1900.

#15924

Felix Fleischner

1893 - 1969 (76 years)

Felix G. Fleischner was an Austrian-American radiologist from Boston. The Fleischner Society for thoracic imaging and diagnosis is named after him. Biography Felix Fleischner was born in Vienna. He became an expert in the field of radiology, and most of his work centered on the chest x-ray. He served as professor and head of radiology of the Second Medical Clinic of the University of Vienna.

#15925

John Elof Boodin

1869 - 1950 (81 years)

John Elof Boodin was a Swedish-born American philosopher and educator. He was the author of numerous books proposing a systematic interpretation of nature. Boodin's work preserved the tradition of philosophical idealism within the framework of contemporary science. Boodin also focused on the social nature of human behavior believing an understanding required an appreciation of individual participation in social life and interpersonal relationship.

#15926

George Hourani

1913 - 1984 (71 years)

George Fadlo Hourani was a British philosopher, historian, and classicist. He is best known for his work in Islamic philosophy, which focused on classical Islamic rationalism and ethics. Biography George Hourani was born into a prosperous British family of Lebanese Christian extraction in Didsbury, Manchester. He was the fourth of six children, having three older sisters and two younger brothers. His brothers were Albert Hourani and Cecil Hourani.

#15927

R. B. Braithwaite

R. B. Braithwaite

1900 - 1990 (90 years)

Richard Bevan Braithwaite was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Life Braithwaite was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, son of the historian of early Quaker history, William Charles Braithwaite. He was educated at Sidcot School, Somerset , and Bootham School, York, 1914–18. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he served in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.

#15928

Thomas Ferguson

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Thomas Ferguson FRSE CBE was a Scottish surgeon and Professor of Public Health from 1944 to 1964 at the University of Glasgow. Much of his early writing and philosophy paved the way for the National Health Service in Britain after the Second World War.

#15929

Marvin Farber

1901 - 1980 (79 years)

Marvin Farber was an American philosopher and educator. Early life and education He was born in Buffalo, New York to Jewish parents Simon and Matilda Farber. He was the second oldest of their 14 children. One of his brothers was pathologist and cancer researcher Sidney Farber.

#15930

G. E. Moore

1873 - 1958 (85 years)

George Edward Moore was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began deemphasizing the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk later dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".

#15931

Michael Mulholland

1900 - Present (126 years)

Michael W. Mulholland is an American surgeon who is Professor of Surgery and the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan. Biography Mulholland was educated at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and gained his medical degree from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. This was followed by postgraduate training in General Surgery at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he also gained his Ph.D. From 1985-1988, Mulholland was an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1988.

#15932

Maurice Mandelbaum

1908 - 1987 (79 years)

Maurice Mandelbaum was an American philosopher and phenomenologist . He was professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University with stints at Dartmouth College and Swarthmore College. He held two degrees from Dartmouth and a PhD from Yale University. He was known for his work in phenomenology, epistemology, philosophy of perception , and the history of ideas.

#15933

Walter Kaufmann

Walter Kaufmann

1921 - 1980 (59 years)

Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.

#15934

Charles W. Morris

1903 - 1979 (76 years)

Charles William Morris was an American philosopher and semiotician. Early life and education A son of Charles William and Laura Morris, Charles William Morris was born on May 23, 1901, in Denver, Colorado.

#15935

Cornelis de Langen

1887 - 1967 (80 years)

Cornelis Douwe de Langen was a Dutch physician. He spent a substantial part of his career in Java, Indonesia where he did extensive work on tropical medicine and observed an association between dietary cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones, arteriosclerosis and other "Western diseases".

#15936

A. C. Ewing

1899 - 1973 (74 years)

Alfred Cyril Ewing , usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was an English philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism. Biography Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics.

#15937

Lawrence S. Thompson

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Lawrence Sidney Thompson worked at the University of Kentucky as the Director of Libraries and as a faculty member in the classics department. He wrote extensively on the processes of printing and publication. Thompson also researched processes for cataloging materials, frequently corresponding with European colleagues.

#15938

Chassar Moir

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Chassar Moir CBE was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The University of Oxford. "One whose contributions were so outstanding as to make Chassar Moir’s an immortal name in the history of Obstetrics and Gynaecology". Sir Norman Jeffcoate

#15939

Curt John Ducasse

Curt John Ducasse

1881 - 1969 (88 years)

Curt John Ducasse was a French-born American philosopher who taught at the University of Washington and Brown University. Career Ducasse was born in Angoulême, France. He obtained A.B. and A.M. degrees in philosophy from University of Washington. In 1912, he obtained his PhD from Harvard University.

#15940

Rudolf Allers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Rudolf Allers was an Austrian psychiatrist who was a member of the first group of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Life and career Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883. He was the son of a doctor, Mark Allers and Augusta Grailich . In 1908, he married Carola Meitner .

#15941

Cicely Williams

Cicely Williams

1893 - 1992 (99 years)

Cicely Delphine Williams, OM, CMG, FRCP was a Jamaican physician, most notable for her discovery and research into kwashiorkor, a condition of advanced malnutrition, and her campaign against the use of sweetened condensed milk and other artificial baby milks as substitutes for human breast milk.

#15942

Ian Donald

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Ian Donald was an English physician who pioneered the diagnostic use of ultrasound in obstetrics, enabling the visual discovery of abnormalities during pregnancy. Donald was born in Cornwall, England, to a Scottish family of physicians. He was educated in Scotland and South Africa before studying medicine at the University of London in 1930, and became the third generation of doctors in his family. At the start of World War II, Donald was drafted into the Royal Air Force as a medical officer, where he developed an interest in radar and sonar. In 1952, at St Thomas' Hospital, he used what he ...

#15943

Loren Eiseley

1907 - 1977 (70 years)

Loren Eiseley was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

#15944

Gerhard Gentzen

Gerhard Gentzen

1909 - 1945 (36 years)

Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.

#15945

Ernst Philip Boas

1891 - 1955 (64 years)

Ernst Philip Boas was an American physician. He is a pioneer in the fields of pathology and physiology and was a highly respected expert in chronic diseases of the heart. He developed the cardiotachometer, a widely used instrument for measuring the rapidity of heartbeat.

#15946

George Boas

1891 - 1980 (89 years)

George Boas was a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Education Boas received his education at Brown University, obtaining both a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy there, after which he studied shortly at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1917.

#15947

Norman Dott

1897 - 1973 (76 years)

Norman McOmish Dott, CBE FRCSE FRSE FRCSC was a Scottish neurosurgeon. He was the first holder of the Chair of Neurological Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Life Norman Dott was born in Edinburgh on 26 August 1897, the third of the five children of Rebecca Morton and Peter McOmish Dott , a picture dealer based at 127 George Street in Edinburgh's New Town. He was educated at George Heriot's School and originally intended a career in engineering. However a serious motorcycle accident on Lothian Road, hospitalised him and left him with a permanent leg injury . The long spell in hospital re-inspired Dott and he changed his ambition to focus upon medicine rather than engineering.

#15948

Brian Gilmore Maegraith

1907 - 1989 (82 years)

Brian Gilmore Maegraith was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1907 and went to Britain in 1931 to take up the South Australian Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He served in France and Sierra Leone as a pathologist in the Royal Army Medical Corps, led the Malaria Research Unit at Oxford, held the Deanship of Faculty of Medicine at Oxford, and was appointed to the Chair of Tropical Medicine at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1944. He died in England in 1989.

#15949

Karl Loewenstein

1891 - 1973 (82 years)

Karl Loewenstein was a German lawyer and political scientist, regarded as one of the prominent figures of Constitutional law in the twentieth century. His research and investigations into the typology of the different constitutions have had some impact on the Western constitutional thought. Loewenstein is credited with establishing the theoretical foundations of militant democracy to battle anti-democratic mass movements.

#15950

Charles A. Hufnagel

Charles A. Hufnagel

1916 - 1989 (73 years)

Charles A. Hufnagel, M.D. was an American surgeon who invented the first artificial heart valve in the early 1950s. Hufnagel was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and reared in Richmond, Indiana. His father was also a surgeon. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. At Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he began work on the heart and other organ transplants and explored the use of plastic to replace blood vessels, developing a technique called multi-point fixation, which would have great importance in the placement of the artificial aort...

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