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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#1651

Jim Dine

#3742

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jim Dine is an American artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking , sculpture and photography; his early works encompassed assemblage and happenings, while in recent years his poetry output, both in publications and readings, has increased.

#1652

Juan José Sebreli

Juan José Sebreli

#19155

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Juan José Pérez Sebreli is an Argentine sociologist, essayist and philosopher. Throughout his intellectual work, he concentrated on the notions of reason, city and everyday life. Life Inspired by Gay Power movement, he was co-founder of Frente de Liberación Homosexual along with Manuel Puig and Néstor Perlongher, in the last years of the self-called Argentine Revolution. The organization of the group was an adaptation of the democratic centralist partisan model. In years that followed the last coup d'état he directed study groups that were called "Universidad de las Sombras" . As suggested b...

#1653

Robert Califf

#7852

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Robert McKinnon Califf is an American cardiologist who currently serves as the 25th Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He was first nominated to be commissioner in September 2015 by President Barack Obama and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February 2016, serving until January 20, 2017.

#1654

David Sackett

#8409

Overall Influence

1934 - 2015 (81 years)

David Lawrence Sackett was an American-Canadian physician and a pioneer in evidence-based medicine. He is known as one of the fathers of Evidence-Based Medicine. He founded the first department of clinical epidemiology in Canada at McMaster University, and the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. He is well known for his textbooks Clinical Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Medicine.

#1655

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki

#20498

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki is an author and United Methodist professor emerita of theology at Claremont School of Theology. She is also co-director of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont. Suchocki earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Pomona College in 1970 and both Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in religion from Claremont Graduate School in 1974. She taught at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary from 1977 to 1983. From 1983 to 1990 she was professor of systematic theology and dean of Wesley Theological Seminary. In 1990 Suchocki returned to Claremont School...

#1656

Oliver Grau

#6401

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Oliver Grau is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Digital Art, Media Art History, immersion, digital humanities, documentation and conservation strategies of born-digital media art. He is founder and director of the Archive for Digital Art and founder and head of the Society for MediaArtHistories and its biennial conference series . His monograph "Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion" is among the most cited works in rece...

#1657

Laurie Zoloth

#24447

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Laurie Zoloth is an American ethicist, currently Margaret E. Burton Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She was dean of the Divinity School from 2017 to 2018, whereupon she stepped into an advisory administrative position.

#1658

Asa Kasher

#7819

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Asa Kasher is an Israeli philosopher and linguist working as a Professor at Tel Aviv University. Biography Asa Kasher is the grandson of talmudist Menachem Mendel Kasher. He is noted for authorship of Israel Defense Forces's Code of Conduct, as well as his co-authorship of an amended version of the controversial Hannibal Directive in the 1990s.

#1659

William H. Gass

William H. Gass

#10043

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts , won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.

#1660

Christian Guilleminault

#17070

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Christian Guilleminault was a French physician and researcher in the field of sleep medicine who played a central role in the early discovery of obstructive sleep apnea and made seminal discoveries in many other areas of sleep medicine.

#1661

James A. Lindsay

#18196

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

James Stephen Lindsay , known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author and cultural critic. He is known for the grievance studies affair, in which he, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to academic journals in 2017 and 2018 to test scholarship and rigor in several academic fields. Lindsay has written several books including Cynical Theories , which he co-authored with Pluckrose. He is also known for promoting conspiracy theories, such as that of Cultural Marxism, and right-wing LGBT grooming conspiracy theories.

#1662

John Fiske

#11670

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

John Fiske was a media scholar and cultural theorist who taught around the world. His primary areas of intellectual interest included cultural studies, critical analysis of popular culture, media semiotics, and television studies.

#1663

Mohammed Arkoun

Mohammed Arkoun

#5539

Overall Influence

1928 - 2010 (82 years)

Mohammed Arkoun was an Algerian scholar and thinker. He was considered to have been one of the most influential secular scholars in Islamic studies contributing to contemporary intellectual Islamic reform. In a career of more than 30 years, he had been a critic of the tensions embedded in his field of study, advocating Islamic modernism, secularism, and humanism. During his academic career, he wrote his numerous books mostly in French, and occasionally in English and Arabic.

#1664

Leopoldo Zea Aguilar

Leopoldo Zea Aguilar

#15685

Overall Influence

1912 - 2004 (92 years)

Leopoldo Zea Aguilar was a Mexican philosopher. Biography Zea was born in Mexico City. One of the integral Latin Americanism thinkers in history, Zea became famous thanks to his master's thesis, El Positivismo en México , in which he applied and studied positivism in the context of his country and the world during the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries. With it he began the defense of American Integration, first suggested by the Liberator and Statesman Simón Bolívar, giving it his own interpretation based in the context of neocolonialism during the separation of the American Empir...

#1665

Giuseppe Mancia

#52342

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

#1666

Belding Hibbard Scribner

#31250

Overall Influence

1921 - 2003 (82 years)

Belding Hibbard Scribner was an American physician and a pioneer in kidney dialysis. Biography Scribner received his medical degree from Stanford University in 1945. After completing his postgraduate studies at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, he joined the faculty of the School of Medicine at the University of Washington in 1951. Scribner was married to Ethel Hackett Scribner, and had four children from a previous marriage: Peter, Robert, Thomas and Elizabeth.

#1667

Jay Norman Cohn

#52450

Overall Influence

#1668

Barbara Scholz

#13046

Overall Influence

1947 - 2011 (64 years)

Barbara Caroline Scholz was an American philosopher of science, with a particular focus on the philosophy of cognitive science and linguistics. She taught at the University of Toledo, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at San Jose State University. She was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2005–2006. From 1994 until her death in 2011, she was married to linguist Geoff Pullum.

#1669

Frederick Ferré

#15896

Overall Influence

1933 - 2013 (80 years)

Frederick Pond Ferré was Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at The University of Georgia. He was a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Much of his work concerned how metaphysics is entwined with practical questions about how we live our life, including the ethical dimensions of life.

#1670

Markus Büchler

#20917

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Markus Wolfgang Büchler is a German surgeon and university full professor. He specialises in gastrointestinal, hepatobiliary and transplant surgery, and is especially known for pioneering operations on the pancreas.

#1671

Seana Shiffrin

#32383

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Seana Valentine Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles. Shiffrin's work spans issues in moral, political and legal philosophy, as well as matters of legal doctrine, that concern equality, autonomy and the social conditions for their realization. She is an associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and was elected a Fellow of the American Academic of Arts and Sciences in 2010.

#1672

Kai Wehmeier

#25660

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Kai Frederick Wehmeier is a German-American philosopher and logician. He is best known for proving that the fragment of Frege's inconsistent logical theory of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik becomes consistent upon restricting the complexity of comprehension formulas in the second-order comprehension schema to , for his development of a system of subjunctive modal logic and its use in rebutting Kripke's modal argument against description theories of proper names, as well as for refining and defending the thesis that there is no binary identity relation between objects.

#1673

Dave Snowden

#3889

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

David John Snowden is a Welsh management consultant and researcher in the field of knowledge management and the application of complexity science. Known for the development of the Cynefin framework, Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking.

#1674

Kai Simons

#51744

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Kai Simons is a Finnish professor of biochemistry and cell biology and physician living and working in Germany. He introduced the concept of lipid rafts, as well as coined the term trans-Golgi network and proposed its role in protein and lipid sorting. The co-founder and co-organizer of EMBO, ELSO, Simons initiated the foundation of MPI-CBG, where he acted as a director and a group-leader . He is the co-founder and co-owner of Lipotype GmbH.

#1675

Jonathan Westphal

#36134

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jonathan Westphal is an academic philosopher working on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science, logic and philosophy of language and aesthetics. More recently he has become interested in issues in the philosophy of time, and in the understanding of human freedom. In the history of philosophy, he has worked mostly on Wittgenstein and Leibniz. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut, and works as a private tutor in philosophy.

#1676

Neil Tennant

#46635

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Neil Tennant is an American philosopher. He is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University; and, before taking up his appointment at the Ohio State University he held positions at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Stirling, and the Australian National University.

#1677

Pamela Hieronymi

Pamela Hieronymi

#40724

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Pamela Hieronymi is an American philosopher who is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is mainly known for her work in moral psychology. Education and career Hieronymi earned her A.B. from Princeton University in 1992 and earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000. She has worked at UCLA since July 2000, where she was awarded tenure in 2007. She has presented her research widely, both nationally and internationally. In addition, she has appeared on Philosophy Talk public radio and her thoughts on technology and teaching were published by the Chroni...

#1678

Valentin A. Bazhanov

#25518

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Valentin A. Bazhanov is a professor and chairperson of the Philosophy Department at Ulyanovsk State University in Russia. Biography Bazhanov was born on 10 January 1953 in Kazan, Russia. He received his Candidate from Leningrad University in 1989, and was awarded the degree of Dr. Sci. in Philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988. He was on the faculty of Philosophy at Kazan University from 1979 to 1993. He was a senior research member at the Institute of Philosophy in 1987–1988. Since 1993 he has been at the Ulyanovsk branch of Moscow State Univer...

#1679

Ann Heberlein

#24039

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ann Helen Heberlein is a Swedish academic and author, who writes extensively on theology and ethics. She is best known for her autobiographical account of life with bipolar disorder, Jag vill inte dö, jag vill bara inte leva .

#1680

Tang Yijie

#17115

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Tang Yijie was a Chinese scholar and professor at Peking University, who has been described as China's top scholar on philosophy and Chinese studies. He spearheaded the Confucian Canon project, seeking to compile all known classical works on Confucianism, and was the first director of the Institute of Confucian Studies at Peking University.

#1681

Nancy Tuana

#20269

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Nancy Tuana is an American philosopher who specializes in feminist philosophy. She holds the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professorship in Philosophy and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She came to Penn State from the University of Oregon in 2001 to serve as the founding director of the Rock Ethics Institute. She won the 2022 Victoria Davion Award.

#1682

Catherine Clément

Catherine Clément

#11942

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. A member of the school of French feminism and écriture féminine, she has published books with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva.

#1683

Laurence Lampert

#31002

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Laurence Lampert is a Canadian philosopher and a leading scholar in the field of Nietzsche studies. Philosopher Michael Allen Gillespie of Duke University has described Lampert as "North America's greatest living Nietzsche scholar." He is also well known for his interpretations of Plato and the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss.

#1684

Gholamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani

Gholamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani

#32243

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Gholam-hossein Ebrahimi Dinani is an Iranian philosopher. He is best known for his research and writings about illuminationism and Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi. The three-time winner of Book of the Year award in Iran, Dinani is a professor emeritus at the University of Tehran, and lectures at Tarbiat Modares University and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Moreover, his public lectures at Institute for Research in Philosophy attract a diverse audience from students and scholars of theology and philosophy in general.

#1685

Alfred Mele

#28783

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher and the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is also the past Director of the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project and the Big Questions in Free Will Project . Mele is the author of thirteen books and over 250 articles.

#1686

Brian Weatherson

#36450

Overall Influence

Brian Weatherson is the Marshall Weinberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language. Education and career Born in Australia, Weatherson received his PhD from Monash University in 1998, with a dissertation on formal models for reasoning under uncertainty, titled "On Uncertainty."

#1687

Adrienne Clarkson

#1710

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Adrienne Louise Clarkson is a Hong Kong-born Canadian journalist who served from 1999 to 2005 as Governor General of Canada, the 26th since Canadian Confederation. Clarkson arrived in Canada with her family in 1941, as a refugee from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, and was raised in Ottawa. After receiving a number of university degrees, Clarkson worked as a producer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a journalist for various magazines. Her first diplomatic posting came in the early 1980s, when she promoted Ontarian culture in France and other European countries. In ...

#1688

Justin E. H. Smith

#19902

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Justin Smith-Ruiu is an American-Canadian professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité. His primary research interests include Leibniz, Post-structuralism, early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of biology, classical Indian philosophy, the history and philosophy of anthropology.

#1689

Ahmad Fardid

#12597

Overall Influence

1909 - 1994 (85 years)

Seyyed Ahmad Fardid , born Ahmad Mahini Yazdi, was a prominent Iranian philosopher and a professor of Tehran University. He is considered to be among the philosophical ideologues of the Islamic government of Iran which came to power in 1979. Fardid was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, the influential German philosopher, whom he considered "the only Western philosopher who understood the world and the only philosopher whose insights were congruent with the principles of the Islamic Republic. These two figures, Khomeini and Heidegger, helped Fardid argue his position." What he decried w...

#1690

Morton I. Grossman

#53073

Overall Influence

#1691

H. Evan Runner

#27785

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Howard Evan Runner was professor of philosophy at Calvin College from 1951 until his retirement in 1981. Runner was born in Oxford, Pennsylvania and graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia , and The Free University of Amsterdam. It was at the Free University that he was taught by Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven, whose ideas relating to the construction of a whole new way of doing philosophy Christianly from a biblical basis radically changed the direction of his life, and whose teachings he later brought to North America. Runner's dissertation applied D.

#1692

David Olivier

#34746

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

David Olivier Whittier is a French and British philosopher and antispeciesist activist. He is founder of the French journal Cahiers antispécistes , the annual event Veggie Pride and of the annual meeting Les Estivales de la question animale . Olivier is also the creator of the term "veggiephobia" and of numerous articles and conferences. He is an advocate of utilitarian and antinatauralist ethics, and defines himself politically as a progressive.

#1693

Steven Blair

#24299

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Steven Noel Blair was an American exercise scientist. He has been a tenured professor in the Department of Exercise Science and Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health since 2006. He previously worked at the Dallas, Texas-based Cooper Institute, of which he was president and CEO from 2002 to 2006. He is known for his research on the health benefits of physical exercise. A 2005 New York Times article described Blair as "one of the nation's leading experts on the health benefits of exercise".

#1694

Malachi

#1868

Overall Influence

Malachi , also known as Malachias, is the name used by the author of the Book of Malachi, the last book of the Nevi'im section of the Tanakh. According to the 1897 Easton's Bible Dictionary, it is possible that Malachi is not a proper name; because it simply means "messenger", many assume it to be a pseudonym. Jewish tradition claims that the real identity of Malachi is Ezra the scribe.

#1695

Gloria Origgi

#19134

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher at the CNRS in Paris who works on the theory of mind, epistemology and social sciences applied to new technology. She is the founder and director of the innovative project, a portal where many international virtual conferences in the social and cognitive sciences are being organized.

#1696

Miguel Benasayag

Miguel Benasayag

#26460

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Miguel Benasayag is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, epistemology researcher and former Franco-Argentinian Guévariste resistance fighter. He is close to the left-libertarian movement. Biography Miguel Benasayag was born in Argentina, into a family he describes as "intellectual Jews". He studied medicine in Argentina at the same time as he fought for the Guévariste guerillas.

#1697

David G. Cogan

#53264

Overall Influence

#1698

Michael P. Nelson

#26649

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Michael Paul Nelson is an environmental scholar, writer, teacher, speaker, consultant, and Professor of environmental philosophy and ethics at Oregon State University. Nelson is also the philosopher in residence of the Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Project, a senior fellow with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written word, and the co-founder and co-director of the Conservation Ethics Group. From 2012 to 2022 he served as the Lead Principal Investigator for the H.J. Andrews Long-Term Ecological Research Program and held the Ruth H. Spaniol Chair in Renewable Resources at Oregon Sta...

#1699

Gideon Koren

#16587

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Gideon Koren, FACMT, FRCP is an Israeli-Canadian pediatrician, clinical pharmacologist, toxicologist, and a composer of Israeli folk music. He was a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor at the University of Toronto. In 1985, Koren founded the Motherisk Program in Toronto, which was later shut down amid controversy. Furthermore, multiple scientific papers authored by Koren have been subject to concerns regarding academic and research misconduct, leading to the retraction of six research articles and editorial expression of concerns on multiple others. Koren currently has re...

#1700

Wolfgang Spohn

#26837

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Wolfgang Konrad Spohn is a German philosopher. He is professor of philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Konstanz. Biography Wolfgang Spohn studied philosophy, logic and philosophy of science and mathematics at the University of Munich and acquired there the MA and the PhD with a thesis on the Grundlagen der Entscheidungstheorie. In his time as an assistant professor he earned the habilitation with a thesis about Eine Theorie der Kausalität. He held professorships at the University of Regensburg , the University of Bielefeld , and the University of Konstanz . Since 2019 ...

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