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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,

#1601

Monique Canto-Sperber

Monique Canto-Sperber

#22527

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Monique Canto-Sperber is a French philosopher. Her works, translated in several languages, are focused on ethics and contemporary political issues. A former Director of the École normale supérieure from 2005 to 2012, she has been President of Paris Sciences et Lettres – Quartier latin, a French higher education and research institution, since 2012.

#1602

Susan Finsen

#42195

Overall Influence

Susan Finsen is an American philosopher, currently professor emeritus of philosophy and former chair of the department at California State University, San Bernardino. She specializes in moral philosophy, with a particular interest in animal rights, as well as philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. She is the co-author, with her husband Lawrence Finsen, of The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect , and is the director of Californians for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

#1603

Thomas Hurka

#28413

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Thomas Hurka is a Canadian philosopher who holds the Jackman Distinguished Chair in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto and who taught previously, from 1978 to 2002, at the University of Calgary.

#1604

Herbert Benson

#4204

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Herbert Benson was an American medical doctor, cardiologist, and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was a professor of mind/body medicine at Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute at MGH. He was a founding trustee of The American Institute of Stress. He contributed more than 190 scientific publications and 12 books. More than five million copies of his books have been printed in different languages.

#1605

Colin Howson

#32021

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Colin Howson was a British philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he joined the faculty on 1 July 2008. Previously, he was Professor of Logic at the London School of Economics. He completed a PhD on the philosophy of probability in 1981. In the late 1960s he had been a research assistant of Imre Lakatos at LSE. He died on Sunday 5 January 2020.

#1606

Lorenz Bruno Puntel

#33517

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Lorenz Bruno Puntel is a Brazilian philosopher based in Germany, who established the school of Structural-systematic philosophy. Professor emeritus at the University of Munich, Puntel has been named as one of the great contemporary philosophers, articulating his ideas from the most varied traditions.

#1607

Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias

#24953

Overall Influence

1918 - 2019 (101 years)

Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias was a Peruvian philosopher, journalist and politician. In his works he discusses the belief in "human nature" on the basis that any collective assumption about such a nature will be frustrating, and will have negative public results. He was interested in so-called "unorthodox logics". The term "paraconsistent logic" was coined in 1976 by him. He made his editorial debut in 1941, with Sense of the phenomenological movement.

#1608

Carla Fehr

#39190

Overall Influence

Carla Fehr is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo where she holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy. Education and career Fehr received her bachelor's from the University of Saskatchewan in biology and philosophy, and her doctorate in philosophy from Duke University.

#1609

Dino Formaggio

#41440

Overall Influence

1914 - 2008 (94 years)

Dino Formaggio was an Italian philosopher, art critic, and academic. He is part of the Italian phenomenological school or the School of Milan and is noted for his development of an organic description of the experiential complexity where art is phenomenologically constituted.

#1610

Lawrence Finsen

#31601

Overall Influence

Lawrence Finsen is a professor of philosophy at University of Redlands in California, specializing in animal ethics. With his wife Susan Finsen, he is the author of The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect .

#1611

Nina Karin Monsen

Nina Karin Monsen

#41116

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Nina Karin Monsen is a Norwegian moral philosopher and author. She has written several books, both non-fiction and fiction, and has been active in Norwegian public debate since the early 1970s. Life Monsen has a Magister's degree in Philosophy and was one of the founders of the Norwegian new feminist movement in 1970. Her early work was on the logician Quine and she later studied feminist philosophy. She has become the most visible proponent of Personalism in Norway, with Det elskende menneske as her most central work.

#1612

Abdul Jabbar Al Rifai

#32923

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Abdul Jabbar Al Rifai is an Iraqi professor of Islamic philosophy, born in Dhi Qar, Iraq, 1954. He obtained several academic degrees, including: a PhD degree cum laude in Islamic philosophy – 2005, a master's degree of Islamic Ilm Al-Kalam – 1990, a bachelor's degree in Islamic studies – 1988, and an agricultural art diploma in 1975. He has a philosophical vision on religious reformation and religious thinking approaches. "The Vatican's Pontifical Institute of Rome" devoted its yearbook to the Contemporary Islamic Issues Magazine in 2012, in recognition of its mission in building new Ilm Al-K...

#1613

Jon Stewart

#35552

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jon Bartley Stewart is an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He specializes in 19th century Continental philosophy with an emphasis on the thought of Kierkegaard and Hegel. Stewart works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

#1614

Gregg C. Fonarow

#50737

Overall Influence

#1615

Paul Terasaki

#33140

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Paul Ichiro Terasaki was an American scientist in the field of human organ transplant technology, and professor emeritus of surgery at UCLA School of Medicine. He spent three high school years during World War II interned with his family and other Japanese Americans in the Gila River War Relocation Center. Later he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in zoology all from UCLA and was appointed to the medical school faculty.

#1616

Stathis Psillos

#25898

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Stathis Psillos is a Greek philosopher of science. He is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics at the University of Athens, Greece and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy of the University of Western Ontario. In 2013–15, he held the Rotman Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Science at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

#1617

Lucy Allais

#37223

Overall Influence

Lucy Allais is a philosopher who holds academic positions at both the University of the Witwatersrand and Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the philosophy of Immanuel Kant as well as forgiveness, punishment, and bioethics.

#1618

Thomas A. Waldmann

Thomas A. Waldmann

#48699

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Thomas A. Waldmann was an American immunologist who has worked on therapeutic monoclonal antibodies to the IL-2 receptor, Interleukin 15 , and Adult T-cell Leukemia . Until the week he died, he was an active distinguished investigator at the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch of the National Cancer Institute.

#1619

Eugene Garfield

Eugene Garfield

#43813

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index , Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.

#1620

Peter Nowell

#19283

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Peter Carey Nowell was a cancer researcher and co-discoverer of the Philadelphia chromosome. At the time of his death, he was the Gaylord P. and Mary Louise Harnwell Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

#1621

Ahmad Shah Massoud

#381

Overall Influence

1953 - 2001 (48 years)

Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.

#1622

Joshua Cohen

#11107

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Joshua Cohen is an American philosopher specializing in political philosophy. He has taught at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently a member of the faculty at Apple University and the University of California, Berkeley.

#1623

Mark Johnston

#40714

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mark Johnston is an Australian-born philosopher working at Princeton University. Biography and career In 1980, after his undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, Johnston came to Princeton University to work with Saul Kripke and David Lewis, arguably the two most influential anglophone philosophers in the late 20th century. Under their supervision he completed his dissertation Particulars and Persistence in 1984. He became an assistant professor at Princeton in 1984, received tenure there in 1987, and became a full professor in 1991. From 2005-2015 he was the Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy.

#1624

Stephen Menn

#44583

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Stephen Menn is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and, between 2011 and 2015, was Professor of Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin and the author of Descartes and Augustine about the origin of Descartes' cogito. His specialties include ancient philosophy , medieval philosophy . He is also a mathematician, holding a doctorate in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1985 and one in Philosophy from University of Chicago in 1989.

#1625

Geneviève Fraisse

#18865

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Geneviève Fraisse is a French feminist philosopher. Early life She was born within Murs blancs , a community founded by Emmanuel Mounier at Châtenay-Malabry. Her parents, Paul Fraisse and Simone Fraisse , were both professors at the Sorbonne. In May 1968, she is a first year philosophy student at the Sorbonne. She co-funded with Jacques Rancière the journal Les Révoltes logiques .

#1626

Sarah Broadie

#34426

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Sarah Jean Broadie was a British philosopher, a Professor of Moral Philosophy and Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. Broadie specialised in ancient philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Aristotle and Plato. Her work engages with metaphysics and both ancient and contemporary ethics. She has achieved numerous honours throughout her career as an academic philosopher. Broadie studied Greats at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1960. Previously she has worked at the University of Edinburgh, University of Texas at Austin, Yale, Rutgers, and Princeton.

#1627

Howard Kahane

#30221

Overall Influence

1928 - 2001 (73 years)

Howard Kahane was an American professor of philosophy at Bernard M. Baruch College in New York City. He was noted for promoting a popular, and non-mathematical, approach to logic, now known as informal logic. His best known publication in that area is his textbook Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life, now at the 12th edition, published in 2014.

#1628

Robert Stern

#38551

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Robert Arthur Stern is a British philosopher who serves as professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on the history of philosophy, particularly G. W. F. Hegel and Immanuel Kant. His current research is focused on the Danish ethicist Knud Ejler Løgstrup.

#1629

Leon Plantinga

#24932

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Leon B. Plantinga is an American musicologist specializing in music of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His writings have influenced scholarship on Clementi, Beethoven, and Schumann, and his textbook Romantic Music continues to serve as a standard textbook on nineteenth-century music in American universities. Having served as a faculty member of the Department of Music at Yale University from 1963 to 2005, he is now a member of the emeritus faculty. He is the brother of philosopher Alvin Plantinga and theologian Cornelius Plantinga.

#1630

Peter Adamson

#26301

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Peter Scott Adamson is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. He holds two academic positions: professor of philosophy in late antiquity and in the Islamic world at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; and professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at King's College London.

#1631

Yuen Kwok-yung

#29805

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Yuen Kwok-yung is a Hong Kong microbiologist, physician and surgeon. He is a prolific researcher, with most of his nearly 800 papers related to research on novel microbes or emerging infectious diseases. He led a team identifying the SARS coronavirus that caused the SARS pandemic of 2003–4, and traced its genetic origins to wild bats. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, he has acted as expert adviser to the Hong Kong government.

#1632

Boris Grushin

#17525

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

Boris Andreevich Grushin was a well-known Soviet and Russian philosopher, sociologist and historical and sociological scientist. He is generally seen as the pioneer of public opinion polling in the Soviet Union more than thirty years before its breakup. Prominent American novelist Olga Grushin is his daughter.

#1633

Elizabeth A. Clark

#34542

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

Elizabeth Ann Clark was a professor of the John Carlisle Kilgo professorship of religion at Duke University. She was notable for her work in the field of Patristics, and the teaching of ancient Christianity in US higher education. Clark expanded the study of early Christianity and was a strong advocate for women, pioneering the application of modern theories such as feminist theory, social network theory, and literary criticism to ancient sources.

#1634

Günter Ropohl

#25345

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Günter Ropohl was a German philosopher of technology. Biography Günter Ropohl studied mechanical engineering and philosophy at Stuttgart University, where he was a scholar of the philosopher Max Bense. After his PhD in 1970, he wrote his Habilitation thesis in Philosophy und Sociology at Karlsruhe University 1978 under the supervision of Hans Lenk. His work dealt with the systems theory of "Technik" , leading to the concept of general technology. In 1979, Ropohl became professor at the Universität Karlsruhe . Soon after, in 1981, he became professor for Allgemeine Technologie and philosophy of technology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, Germany .

#1635

Moshé Machover

#16694

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Moshé Machover is a mathematician, philosopher, and socialist activist, noted for his writings against Zionism. Born to a Jewish family in Tel Aviv, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, Machover moved to Britain in 1968 where he became a naturalised citizen. He was a founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation, in 1962.

#1636

Karl Albert

#36013

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

Karl Albert was a German philosopher and professor emeritus at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Born in Neheim, a borough of the Westphalia town of Arnsberg, Albert studied at University of Cologne and University of Bonn. His 1950 dissertation On the Aesthetics of the Sublime in German Idealism was written under the supervision of professor Erich Rothacker at University of Bonn. In the years 1952–1955 he was an assistant of Joseph Koch at Thomas-Institut in Cologne. 1958–1970 he taught philosophy at a local Gymnasium. In this period he majored in linguistics and classics. Then until 1972 he was a Lehrbeauftragter at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum.

#1637

Trisha Brown

#8882

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Trisha Brown was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement. Brown’s dance/movement method, with which she and her dancers train their bodies, remains pervasively impactful within international postmodern dance.

#1638

Ricardo Maliandi

Ricardo Maliandi

#46752

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Ricardo Guillermo Maliandi Argentine writer and philosopher, devoted to ethics. He was professor in many Argentine universities and researcher in CONICET. Doctor in Philosophy for Mainz University, Germany. He received Konex Prize in 1986 for his labor on ethics.

#1639

Clodovis Boff

#28799

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Clodovis Boff is a Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, writer and professor. Biography Clodovis Boff is grandson of Italian immigrants who arrived from Veneto region to Rio Grande do Sul in the late nineteenth century. He did his primary and secondary studies in Concordia, Rio Negro and Agudos. Boff studied philosophy in Mogi das Cruzes and obtained a doctorate in theology at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. As early as 1986 Clodovis Boff declared that the acquisition of Marxist categories have performed in the early stages of liberation theology an attitude of carelessness and exaggeration.

#1640

Dennis S. Charney

Dennis S. Charney

#12249

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Dennis S. Charney is an American biological psychiatrist and researcher, with expertise in the neurobiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders. He is the author of Neurobiology of Mental Illness, The Physician's Guide to Depression and Bipolar Disorders and Molecular Biology for the Clinician, as well as the author of over 600 original papers and chapters. In 2022, he was listed #52 on Research.com's "Top Medicine Scientists in the United States," with an h-index of 194 with 146,109 citations across 651 publications. Charney is known for demonstrating that ketamine is effective for treating depression.

#1641

Milič Čapek

#28894

Overall Influence

1909 - 1997 (88 years)

Milič Čapek, was a Czech–American philosopher. Čapek was strongly influenced by the process philosophy of Henri Bergson and to a lesser degree by Alfred North Whitehead. Much of his work was devoted to the relation of philosophy and modern physics, especially the philosophy of space and time and metaphysics.

#1642

Robert F. Almeder

#40464

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Robert F. Almeder is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgia State University. He is known in particular for his work on the philosophy of science, and has also written on the philosophy of mind, epistemology and ethics. He is the author of 24 books, including The Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce , Death and Personal Survival , Harmless Naturalism: The Limits of Science and the Nature of Philosophy , Human Happiness and Morality , and Truth and Skepticism .

#1643

Barbara Forrest

Barbara Forrest

#7491

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Barbara Carroll Forrest is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. She is a critic of intelligent design and the Discovery Institute. Biography Forrest is a graduate of Hammond High School. She received her B.A. in English in 1974 from Southeastern Louisiana University, her M.A. in Philosophy in 1978 from Louisiana State University, and her PhD in philosophy from Tulane University in 1988. She has taught philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University since 1988 and presently is a professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Political S...

#1644

He Jiankui

#5894

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Areas of Specialization: Biophysics Jiankui He is a biophysics researcher, former professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, and the creator of the first gene-edited babies. He earned a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China and a PhD from Rice University. While at Rice University, he began working with CRISPR, and throughout his career, has used CRISPR on human embryos, mice and monkeys. He is the founder of two biotechnology companies, Direct Genomics and Vienomics Biotech. His most notable accomplishment, a successful gene-editing experiment, resulted in the birth of the very first gene-edited babies.

#1645

Maurice Cranston

Maurice Cranston

#17532

Overall Influence

1920 - 1993 (73 years)

Maurice William Cranston was a British philosopher, professor and author. He served for many years as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, and was also known for his popular publications. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was Professor of Political Theory at the European University Institute in Florence .

#1646

Dale Carrico

#12194

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Dale Carrico is an American critical theorist and rhetorician. He is a critic of futurology and geoengineering. Carrico received his Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley in 2005 and is an adjunct at the San Francisco Art Institute. Carrico was the Human Rights Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies from 2004 to 2008. He organized the 12th Annual Boundaries in Question Conference in March 2003, the 13th Annual Boundaries in Question Conference in March 2004, on the topic "New Feminist Perspectives on Biotechnology and Bioethics...

#1647

Samuel Brittan

#6019

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Sir Samuel Brittan was an English journalist and author. He was the first economics correspondent for the Financial Times, and later a long-time columnist. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

#1648

Yoichiro Murakami

#19088

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Yoichiro Murakami born in Tokyo, Japan on September 9, 1936, is a Japanese scholar. He specializes in the areas of history of science and philosophy of science. Murakami studied at the Hibiya High School before attaining his undergraduate degree at Tokyo University in the field of education. After teaching for a brief period at Sophia University in Yotsuya, he moved to teach at International Christian University in Mitaka, Tokyo.

#1649

Arturo Andrés Roig

#32922

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Arturo Andrés Roig was an Argentine philosopher. Biography Born in Mendoza, he entered the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, and graduated in 1949 with a degree in Education Sciences . Roig continued his studies at the Sorbonne.

#1650

Kenneth W. Kinzler

#45555

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kenneth Wayne Kinzler is a professor of oncology, and director of the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins University at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Kinzler received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1988. He is of German descent.

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