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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,

#16901

John Arbuthnot

1667 - 1735 (68 years)

John Arbuthnot FRS , often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, was a Scottish physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club , and for inventing the figure of John Bull.

#16902

George Dalgarno

1616 - 1687 (71 years)

George Dalgarno was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems. Originally from Aberdeen, he later worked as a schoolteacher in Oxford in collaboration with John Wilkins, although the two parted company intellectually in 1659.

#16903

Thomas Munro

1897 - 1974 (77 years)

Thomas Munro was an American philosopher of art and professor of art history at Western Reserve University. He served as Curator of Education for the Cleveland Museum of Art for 36 years . Biography Munro was educated at Amherst College and received his B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University, where he was influenced by philosopher and educator John Dewey. Munro served as a sergeant with the psychological services of the Army Medical Corps before returning to Columbia to get his Ph.D. in 1920.

#16904

Isaak Izrailevich Prezent

1902 - 1969 (67 years)

Isaak Izrailevich Prezent was a Soviet philosopher of biology, best known for his work on Marxist methodology of science as one of the key figures of Lysenkoism. Early life and education Prezent was born in 1902 in the town of Toropets in a Jewish family. His father owned a shop in Zapadnaya Dvina.

#16905

Anniceris

400 BC - 360 BC (40 years)

Anniceris was a Cyrenaic philosopher. He argued that pleasure is achieved through individual acts of gratification which are sought for the pleasure that they produce, but he also laid great emphasis on the love of family, country, friendship and gratitude, which provide pleasure even when they demand sacrifice.

#16906

Paolo Mascagni

1755 - 1815 (60 years)

Paolo Mascagni was an Italian physician and anatomist. He is most well known for publishing the first complete description of the lymphatic system. Biography Early life Mascagni was born in the comune of Pomarance to Aurelio Mascagni and Elisabetta Burroni, both belonging to old gentry families of Chiusdino . He studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Siena. Upon graduating in 1777, renowned anatomist Pietro Tabarrani took Mascagni as an assistant. Upon Tabarrani's death in 1780, Mascagni was appointed as an anatomy lecturer at the University of Siena.

#16907

John Elliotson

1791 - 1868 (77 years)

John Elliotson , M.D. , M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. , professor of the principles and practice of medicine at University College London , senior physician to University College Hospital — and, in concert with William Collins Engledue M.D., the co-editor of The Zoist.

#16908

Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci

1560 - 1609 (49 years)

Annibale Carracci was an Italian painter and instructor, active in Bologna and later in Rome. Along with his brother and cousin, Annibale was one of the progenitors, if not founders of a leading strand of the Baroque style, borrowing from styles from both north and south of their native city, and aspiring for a return to classical monumentality, but adding a more vital dynamism. Painters working under Annibale at the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese would be highly influential in Roman painting for decades.

#16909

William Fontaine

1909 - 1968 (59 years)

William Thomas Valerio Fontaine was an American philosopher. Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1967, he was an American Professor of philosophy in the Ivy League. He was African American and advocated for African American rights.

#16910

Syed Mir Hassan

1844 - 1929 (85 years)

Syed Mir Hassan was an Indian Ahl-e-Hadith scholar of the Qur'an, Hadith, Sufism, and the Arabic language. He was a professor of Arabic at Scotch Mission College in Sialkot and was awarded the title of Shams al-’Ulama’ by the British Crown. Mir Hassan is best known as the teacher of the philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal and the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He was also the paternal uncle of the Pakistani journalist Syed Nazeer Niazi and was affiliated with Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's rationalist school of Islamic modernism.

#16911

Miskawayh

932 - 1030 (98 years)

Ibn Miskawayh , full name Abū ʿAlī Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb Miskawayh al-Rāzī was a Persian chancery official of the Buyid era, and philosopher and historian from Parandak, Iran. As a Neoplatonist, his influence on Islamic philosophy is primarily in the area of ethics. He was the author of the first major Islamic work on philosophical ethics entitled the Refinement of Character , focusing on practical ethics, conduct, and the refinement of character. He separated personal ethics from the public realm, and contrasted the liberating nature of reason with the deception and temptation of nature.

#16912

Chilon of Sparta

Chilon of Sparta

600 BC - 520 BC (80 years)

Chilon of Sparta was a Spartan and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Life Chilon was the son of Damagetus, and lived towards the beginning of the 6th century BC. Herodotus speaks of him as contemporary with Hippocrates, the father of Peisistratus. Diogenes Laërtius states that he was an old man in the 52nd Olympiad , and that he was elected an ephor in Sparta in the 56th Olympiad . Alcidamas states that he was a member of the Spartan assembly. Diogenes Laërtius even goes so far as to claim that Chilon was also the first person who introduced the custom of joining the ephors to the kings as their counselors.

#16913

Uriel da Costa

1585 - 1640 (55 years)

Uriel da Costa was a Portuguese philosopher who was born a New Christian but returned to Judaism and ended up questioning the Catholic and rabbinic traditions of his time. This led him into conflict with both Christian and rabbinic institutions and caused his books to be included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the List of Prohibited Books by the Catholic Church.

#16914

George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll

George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll

1823 - 1900 (77 years)

George John Douglas Campbell, 8th and 1st Duke of Argyll , was a British polymath and Liberal statesman. He made a significant geological discovery in the 1850s when his tenant found fossilized leaves embedded among basalt lava on the Island of Mull. He also helped to popularize ornithology and was one of the first to give a detailed account of the principles of bird flight in the hopes of advancing artificial aerial navigation . His literary output was extensive writing on topics varying from science and theology to economy and politics. In addition to this, he served prominently in the admi...

#16915

André Neher

1914 - 1988 (74 years)

André Neher was a French Jewish scholar and philosopher. Biography Neher was born in Obernai, Bas-Rhin. He was a student at the Collège Freppel in Obernai, then at the Lycée Fustel de Coulange in Strasbourg. He became professor at the Collège Erckmann-Chatrian in Phalsbourg, then at the Lycée Kléber in Strasbourg. During World War II, he lived in Brive-la-Gaillarde, where he was a member of Rabbi David Feuerwerker's community. After the War, he became a professor at the University of Strasbourg in 1948. In 1974, at age 60, Neher moved with his wife, Renée Neher-Bernheim to Jerusalem, Israel.

#16916

Arthur Bernard Cook

Arthur Bernard Cook

1868 - 1952 (84 years)

Arthur Bernard Cook FBA was a British archeologist and classical scholar, best known for his three-part work, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. Early life and education Arthur Bernard Cook was born in Hampstead, London on 22 October 1868. He was the son of William Henry Cook MD and Harriet Bickersteth His mother's family were leading ecclesiastical scholars of the time, including Edward Bickersteth , Edward Bickersteth and Edward Bickersteth .

#16917

Friedrich Hoffmann

Friedrich Hoffmann

1660 - 1742 (82 years)

Friedrich Hoffmann or Hofmann was a German physician and chemist. He is also sometimes known in English as Frederick Hoffmann. Life His family had been connected with medicine for 200 years before him. Born in Halle, he attended the local gymnasium where he acquired that taste for and skill in mathematics to which he attributed much of his later success. Beginning at age 18, he studied medicine at the University of Jena. From there, in 1680, he went to Erfurt, to attend Kasper Cramer's lectures on chemistry. Next year, returning to Jena, he received his doctor's diploma, and, after publishing a thesis, was permitted to teach.

#16918

Wilhelmus Luijpen

1922 - 1980 (58 years)

Wilhelmus Antonius Maria Luijpen, O.S.A. a.k.a. Nicodemus Wim Luijpen was a Dutch philosopher and Catholic priest of the Order of St. Augustine. An existential phenomenologist, Luijpen's works greatly contributed to the spread of Existentialism and phenomenology in Catholic intellectual circles in Europe and in the United States, having influenced generations of Catholic philosophers and theologians. Nicodemus Wim Having studied at Rome, Paris, Leuven and Fribourg, his intellectual and philosophical formation moved away from Neo-Scholasticism to Existential phenomenology through his stud...

#16919

Bertha Reynolds

1887 - 1978 (91 years)

Bertha Capen Reynolds was an American social worker who was influential in the creation of strength-based practice, radical social work and critical social work, among others. Early life and education Bertha Capen Reynolds born in Brockton, Massachusetts, on December 11, 1887 to Mary Reynolds and Franklin Stewart Reynolds. Her father died while she was a young child, and she moved with her mother to Boston to work as a teacher.

#16920

Feng Youlan

1895 - 1990 (95 years)

Feng Youlan was a Chinese philosopher, historian, and writer who was instrumental for reintroducing the study of Chinese philosophy in the modern era. The name he published under in English was 'Fung Yu-lan,' for which see, for example, the Bodde translation of A History of Chinese Philosophy. This earlier spelling also occurs in philosophical discussions, see for example the work of Wing-tsit Chan.

#16921

Dio of Alexandria

Dio of Alexandria was an Academic Skeptic philosopher and a friend of Antiochus of Ascalon who lived in the first century BC. Along with being an Academic Skeptic, Dio was an avid believer in the Greek gods and Titans, specifically worshipping the personification of time, Chronos. He was sent by his fellow citizens as ambassador to Rome, to complain about the conduct of their king, Ptolemy XII Auletes. In Rome he was poisoned by the king's secret agents, and the strongest suspicion of the murder fell upon Marcus Caelius. The defence of Caelius in April 56 BC, the Pro Caelio, is considered o...

#16922

James Braid

1795 - 1860 (65 years)

James Braid was a Scottish surgeon, natural philosopher, and "gentleman scientist". He was a significant innovator in the treatment of clubfoot, spinal curvature, knock-knees, bandy legs, and squint; a significant pioneer of hypnotism and hypnotherapy, and an important and influential pioneer in the adoption of both hypnotic anaesthesia and chemical anaesthesia. He is regarded by some, such as Kroger , as the "Father of Modern Hypnotism"; however, in relation to the issue of there being significant connections between Braid's "hypnotism" and "modern hypnotism" , let alone "identity", Weitzenh...

#16923

Eberhard Arnold

Eberhard Arnold

1883 - 1935 (52 years)

Eberhard Arnold was a German theologian and Christian writer. He was the founder of the Bruderhof in 1920. Early life Arnold was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany, the third child of Carl Franklin and Elizabeth Arnold. His father was a doctor of theology and philosophy, and his paternal grandfather was a pastor and missionary of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. Eberhard Arnold's life as a youth was unconventional. In 1899 at age 16, Arnold experienced an inner change, which he acknowledged as God's acceptance and the forgiveness of sins, and felt a calling t...

#16924

Tobias Barreto

1839 - 1889 (50 years)

Tobias Barreto de Meneses was a Brazilian poet, philosopher, jurist and literary critic. He is famous for creating the "Condorism" and revolutionizing Brazilian Romanticism and poetry. He is patron of the 38th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

#16925

Clearchus of Soli

400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)

Clearchus of Soli was a Greek philosopher of the 4th–3rd century BCE, belonging to Aristotle's Peripatetic school. He was born in Soli in Cyprus. He wrote extensively on eastern cultures, and is thought to have traveled to the Bactrian city of Ai-Khanoum in modern Afghanistan.

#16926

Johan Robeck

1672 - 1735 (63 years)

Johan Robeck was a Swedish-German theologian and philosopher who justified and committed suicide. Life Robeck was born in Kalmar, Sweden, and raised in the reformed religion. He studied in Uppsala, before going to Hildesheim in Germany, where he converted to Catholicism in 1704. He joined the Jesuits and lived in Rinteln, Westphalia.

#16927

Thomas Davidson

Thomas Davidson

1840 - 1900 (60 years)

Thomas Davidson was a Scottish-American philosopher and lecturer. Biography Davidson was born of Presbyterian parents at Old Deer, near Aberdeen. After graduating from Aberdeen University as first graduate and Greek prizeman, he held the position of rector of the grammar school of Old Aberdeen . From 1863 until 1866, he was master in several English schools, spending his vacations on the continent. In 1866 he moved to Canada, to occupy a place in the London Collegiate Institute. In the following year, he came to the United States, and, after spending some months in Boston, moved to St. Louis...

#16928

Ferdinand Ebner

1882 - 1931 (49 years)

Ferdinand Ebner , was an Austrian elementary school teacher and philosopher. Together with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, he is considered one of the most outstanding representatives of dialogical philosophy. Ebner's philosophy is about man existing in a I-Thou personal relationship with God and with others. His thought has similarities with the Christian existentialism of Gabriel Marcel. On the basis of the unity of I and Thou, which has in language , and in love its expressions, Ebner developed a religiously informed philosophy of language which led to his practical-ethical understanding...

#16929

Hipparchia of Maroneia

Hipparchia of Maroneia

350 BC - 280 BC (70 years)

Hipparchia of Maroneia was a Cynic philosopher, and wife of Crates of Thebes. She was the sister of Metrokles, the cynic philosopher. She was born in Maroneia, but her family moved to Athens, where Hipparchia came into contact with Crates, the most famous Cynic philosopher in Greece at that time. She fell in love with him, and, despite the disapproval of her parents, she married him. She went on to live a life of Cynic poverty on the streets of Athens with her husband.

#16930

Aizawa Seishisai

Aizawa Seishisai

1782 - 1863 (81 years)

Aizawa Seishisai, born Aizawa Yasushi, was a Japanese samurai and a nationalist thinker of the Mito school during the late shogunate period. In 1799 he became involved in the compilation of the Dai Nihon-shi being undertaken by the Mito school.

#16931

Paul Souriau

1852 - 1926 (74 years)

Paul Souriau was a French philosopher known for his works on invention theory and aesthetics. Biography He studied at the École normale supérieure where he wrote a doctoral thesis entitled Théorie de l'invention published in 1881. In his thesis, he argues that inventions are not the result of a rigorous scientific method but rather come as a deterministic consequence of a set of conditions in which the inventor lives. This theory was contested very soon after its publication in the 1882 edition of the Revue Internationale de l'Enseignement. The French thesis was created simultaneously with a Latin thesis titled De motus perceptione.

#16932

Eugénie Ginsberg

1870 - 1944 (74 years)

Eugénie Ginsberg or Eugénie Ginsberg-Blaustein was a Polish philosopher and psychologist noted for her works on descriptive psychology and her analysis of existential dependence, independence, and related concepts as applied in the area of psychology.

#16933

George Turnbull

1698 - 1748 (50 years)

George Turnbull was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, teacher, writer on education and an early but little-known figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He taught at Marischal College, Aberdeen, worked as a tutor and became an Anglican clergyman. Aside from his published writings on moral philosophy, he is also known for the influence he exerted on Thomas Reid and as the first member of the Scottish Enlightenment to publish a formal treatise on the theory and practice of education.

#16934

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

1809 - 1885 (76 years)

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle was a German physician, pathologist, and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. His essay, "On Miasma and Contagia," was an early argument for the germ theory of disease. He was an important figure in the development of modern medicine.

#16935

Lucilio Vanini

1585 - 1619 (34 years)

Lucilio Vanini , who, in his works, styled himself Giulio Cesare Vanini, was an Italian philosopher, physician and free-thinker, who was one of the first significant representatives of intellectual libertinism. He was among the first modern thinkers who viewed the universe as an entity governed by natural laws . He was also an early literate proponent of biological evolution, maintaining that humans and other apes have common ancestors. He was executed in Toulouse.

#16936

Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs

1794 - 1861 (67 years)

Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs was a German right Hegelian philosopher. Biography Hinrichs was the son of a Protestant pastor. He studied theology at Strassburg, and, following a crisis of faith, philosophy at Heidelberg under Hegel, who wrote a preface to his Religion im innern Verhältniss zur Wissenschaft , describing Hinrichs's work as turgid and difficult to follow. Hinrichs was convinced that philosophy was superior to theology in knowing and reconciling with God.

#16937

Bernardino Varisco

1850 - 1933 (83 years)

Bernardino Varisco , was an Italian philosopher and a professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome La Sapienza from 1905 to 1925. Life Bernardino Varisco was born on April 20, 1850, in Chiari, a commune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy, northern Italy. His mother was the daughter of the Italian philosopher Francesco Bonatelli and his father, Carlo, was the director of the Ginnasio Locale in Chiari. After the death of his mother in 1864, Varisco pursued classical studies at the Collegio Nazionale di Torino, and finally completed them first at the University of Padua then later at the University of Pavia where he graduated with a degree in mathematics.

#16938

Boetius of Dacia

1240 - 1284 (44 years)

Boetius de Dacia, OP was a 13th-century Danish philosopher. Name The rendering of his name Danske Bo into Medieval Latin as Boetius de Dacia stems from the fact that the toponym Dania, meaning Denmark, was occasionally confused with Dacia during the Middle Ages.

#16939

Henry Hudson

1565 - Present (461 years)

Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator during the early 17th century, best known for his explorations of present-day Canada and parts of the northeastern United States. In 1607 and 1608, Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a rumoured Northeast Passage to Cathay via a route above the Arctic Circle. In 1609, he landed in North America on behalf of the Dutch East India Company and explored the region around the modern New York metropolitan area. Looking for a Northwest Passage to Asia on his ship Halve Maen , he sailed up the Hudson River, which was later named after him, and thereby laid the foundation for Dutch colonization of the region.

#16940

François Picavet

1851 - 1921 (70 years)

François Picavet was a French philosopher, translator and authority on Kant. He is now best known for an 1891 essay, Les idéologues, on the history of ideas and of scientific theories, philosophy and religious and political ideas in France since 1789.

#16941

Ismail al-Faruqi

1921 - 1986 (65 years)

Ismaʻīl Rājī al-Fārūqī was a Palestinian-American philosopher. He spent several years at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, then taught at universities in North America, including McGill University in Montreal. He was Professor of Religion at Temple University, where he founded and chaired the Islamic Studies program. Al-Faruqi was also the founder of the International Institute of Islamic Thought. He wrote over 100 articles for various scholarly journals and magazines in addition to 25 books, of the most notable being Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas. ...

#16942

Origen the Pagan

200 - 300 (100 years)

Origen the Pagan was a Platonist philosopher who lived in Alexandria. He was a student of Ammonius Saccas and a contemporary of Plotinus in Ammonius's philosophy school in Alexandria. Some researchers posit that this Origen is the very same famous Christian philosopher and theologian Origen of Alexandria, who was educated by Ammonius Saccas. The pagan philosopher is sometimes referred to as Origenes to distinguish him more easily from the Christian Origen.

#16943

Inocenc Arnošt Bláha

Inocenc Arnošt Bláha

1879 - 1960 (81 years)

Inocenc Arnošt Bláha was a prominent Czech sociologist and philosopher. Since 1922 the professor of sociology at the Masaryk university, Brno, 1950 pensioned. Bláha was the leading figure of the Brno school of sociology and author of the theoretical concept of 'federative functionalism'.

#16944

Giuseppe Tarantino

1857 - 1950 (93 years)

Giuseppe Tarantino was an Italian philosopher, professor of moral philosophy and pedagogy and rector at the University of Pisa, Italy. Biography Giuseppe Tarantino was born in Gravina in Puglia. His father was Filippo Tarantino, a local nobleman, while his mother was Letizia Spagnuolo.

#16945

Elsie Whetnall

1897 - 1998 (101 years)

Elsie Matilda Maude Whetnall was a British analytic philosopher. Life and career Elsie Whetnall was the daughter of Thomas William Ward Whetnall, a Staff Officer for the Board of Education, and Emma Cox. She was educated at Southall County Secondary School, then at Bedford College, London University, where she obtained a first-class degree in 1921. Whetnall was an external doctoral student of Susan Stebbing, at Bedford College where she wrote her thesis on the theory of symbols. They were friends, and Stebbing, in the preface to her book A Modern Introduction to Logic , wrote: "...in personal discussion I owe more than I can say to my friend, Miss E.M.

#16946

Julius Bergmann

1839 - 1904 (65 years)

Julius Bergmann was a German philosopher. Biography At the University of Göttingen and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, he devoted himself to mathematics and philosophy, was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Königsberg in 1872, and three years later to a similar chair at the University of Marburg.

#16947

Pedro da Fonseca

Pedro da Fonseca

1528 - 1599 (71 years)

Pedro da Fonseca was a Portuguese Jesuit philosopher and theologian. His work on logic and metaphysics made him known in his time as the Portuguese Aristotle; he projected the 'Cursus Conimbricenses' realized by Manuel de Góis and others.

#16948

Ammonius of Athens

50 - 100 (50 years)

Ammonius of Athens , sometimes called Ammonius the Peripatetic, was a philosopher who taught in Athens in the 1st century AD. He was a teacher of Plutarch, who praises his great learning, and introduces him discoursing on religion and sacred rites. Plutarch wrote a biography of him, which is no longer extant, and also mentioned Ammonius master in other works like the De E apud Delphos within the collection of treatises known as Moralia. From the information supplied by Plutarch, Ammonius was clearly an expert in the works of Aristotle, but he may have nevertheless been a Platonist philosopher ...

#16949

Simon Flexner

1863 - 1946 (83 years)

Simon Flexner was a physician, scientist, administrator, and professor of experimental pathology at the University of Pennsylvania . He served as the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was also a friend and adviser to John D. Rockefeller Jr.

#16950

Pierre-Simon Ballanche

Pierre-Simon Ballanche

1776 - 1847 (71 years)

Pierre-Simon Ballanche was a French writer and counterrevolutionary philosopher, who elaborated a theology of progress that possessed considerable influence in French literary circles in the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was the ninth member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1842.

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