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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,

#1701

Bernard Lown

#3643

Overall Influence

1921 - 2021 (100 years)

Bernard Lown was a Lithuanian-American cardiologist and inventor. Lown was the original developer of the direct current defibrillator for cardiac resuscitation, and the cardioverter for correcting rapid disordered heart rhythms. He introduced a new use for the drug lidocaine to control heartbeat disturbances.

#1702

Frances Egan

#15672

Overall Influence

Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception. Education and career Egan graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1988. She has taught at Rutgers University since her appointment as an assistant professor in 1990. Besides her Rutgers appointment, she is also an associate editor of Noûs, a quarterly journal of philosophy.

#1703

S. Barry Cooper

S. Barry Cooper

#16867

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

S. Barry Cooper was an English mathematician and computability theorist. He was a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Cooper grew up in Bognor Regis and attended Chichester High School for Boys, during which time he played scrum-half for the under-15s England rugby team.

#1704

John G. Bartlett

#50709

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

John Gill Bartlett was an American physician and medical researcher, specializing in infectious diseases. He is known as a pioneer in HIV/AIDS research and for his work on vancomycin as a treatment for Clostridioides difficile infection.

#1705

Claude Bouchard

#44548

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Claude Bouchard is Professor and the John W. Barton, Sr. Endowed Chair in Genetics and Nutrition at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center , where he is also the Director of the Human Genomics Laboratory. He is known for his research on the role of genetics in obesity and in the process of adaptation to regular physical activity. He was president of the Obesity Society in 1991–92.

#1706

Jñanasrimitra

#27138

Overall Influence

Jñānaśrīmitra was an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the epistemological tradition of Buddhist philosophy, which goes back to Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Jñānaśrīmitra was also known as a Yogācāra Buddhist who defended a form of Buddhist idealism termed Sākāravada which holds that cognitive content or aspects of consciousness are real and not illusory.

#1707

Eric Heinze

#14641

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at the School of Law Queen Mary, University of London. He has made contributions in the areas of legal philosophy, justice theory, jurisprudence, and human rights. He has also contributed to the law and literature movement.

#1708

Howard Kainz

#46425

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Howard P. Kainz is professor emeritus at Marquette University, Milwaukee. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for 1977-1978, and Fulbright fellowships in Germany for 1980-1981 and 1987-1988. Kainz advocates aspects of the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel.

#1709

Carl Raschke

#31549

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Carl A. Raschke is an American philosopher and theologian. Raschke is a Past Chair and Professor of Religious Studies Department at the University of Denver, specializing in continental philosophy, the philosophy of religion and the theory of religion. He was given the university lecturer award for 2020-2021. He is also listed with the affiliated faculty of the Global Center for Advanced Studies.

#1710

Napoleone Ferrara

#12571

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Napoleone Ferrara , is an Italian-American molecular biologist who joined University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center in 2013 after a career in Northern California at the biotechnology giant Genentech, where he pioneered the development of new treatments for angiogenic diseases such as cancer, age-related macular degeneration , and diabetic retinopathy. At Genentech, he discovered VEGF—and made the first anti-VEGF antibody—which suppresses growth of a variety of tumors. These findings helped lead to development of the first clinically available angiogenesis inhibitor, bevacizumab ...

#1711

Federico Lombardi

#3411

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Federico Lombardi is an Italian Catholic priest and the former director of the Holy See Press Office. He succeeded Joaquín Navarro-Valls and was succeeded by Greg Burke. Lombardi also serves as the postulator for the sainthood cause of Fr Bernardo Mattio.

#1712

David E. Cooper

#35381

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

David Edward Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. Life and work David E. Cooper is a British author and philosopher. He was brought up in Surrey and educated at Highgate School and then St Edmund Hall, Oxford, the University at which he was given his first job in 1967, as a Lecturer in Philosophy. He went on to teach at the universities of Miami, London and Surrey before being appointed, in 1986, as Professor of Philosophy at Durham University – where he remained until retiring in 2008. During his academic career, David was a Visiting Professor at universities in the United States, Canada, Malta, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

#1713

Hannah Arendt

#53689

Overall Influence

#1714

Catia Faria

#31896

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.

#1715

Joseph Levine

#28241

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Joseph Levine is an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981. He works on philosophy of mind and is best known for formulating the explanatory gap argument against a materialist explanation for consciousness. This has been cited as a precursor to David Chalmers's formulation of the hard problem of consciousness and as one of the main objections materialist theories in philosophy of mind must address. The idea of the explanatory gap is that an unbridgeable gap exists when trying to comprehend consciousness from the per...

#1716

Warwick Fox

#20805

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Warwick Fox is an Australian-UK philosopher. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire, and his books include Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism; Ethics and the Built Environment ; A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment; and On Beautiful Days Such as This: A Philosopher's Search for Love, Work, Place, Meaning, and Suchlike. His main areas of philosophical interest are environmental philosophy, General Ethics , and the nature of the interior lives of humans and other animals.

#1717

Robert S. Corrington

Robert S. Corrington

#16086

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert S. Corrington is an American philosopher and author of many books exploring human interpretation of the universe as well as biographies on C.S. Peirce and Wilhelm Reich. He is currently the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Before that he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is a Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.

#1718

Dolores Huerta

#1518

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, is a co-founder of the United Farmworkers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers . Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California and was the lead negotiator in the workers' contract that was created after the strike.

#1719

Donald W. Sherburne

#44802

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Donald W. Sherburne was an American philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University. He was a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America . He was born in Rutland, Vermont, the son of Hermon Kirk Sherburne, Jr. and Alma May Bixby Sherburne.

#1720

Chris Cuomo

#37872

Overall Influence

Chris Cuomo is the Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies Before moving to the University of Georgia, Cuomo was the Obed J. Wilson Professor of Ethics at the University of Cincinnati.

#1721

Trisha Greenhalgh

#19712

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Patricia Mary Greenhalgh is a British professor of primary health care at the University of Oxford, and retired general practitioner. Early life and education Trisha Greenhalgh was born on 11 March 1959. She attended Folkestone Grammar School. She gained a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1980, and three years later graduated in medicine from the University of Oxford.

#1722

Hubert Damisch

#14732

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Hubert Damisch , was a French philosopher specialised in aesthetics and art history, and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1975 until 1996. Damisch studied at the Sorbonne with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, later, with Pierre Francastel. In 1967 he founded the Cercle d’histoire/théorie de l’art that would later become the CEHTA at the EHESS.

#1723

Pedro Cuatrecasas

#54055

Overall Influence

#1724

Frank Cioffi

#6648

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

Frank L. Cioffi, of Baruch College is Frank Cioffi's nephew.Frank Cioffi was an American philosopher educated in New York and Oxford. Cioffi held posts at the University of Singapore, the University of Kent and the University of Essex, where he was a founding member of the Department of Philosophy.

#1725

Eric T. Olson

#43496

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Eric Todd Olson is an American philosopher who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Olson is best known for his research in the field of personal identity, and for advocating animalism, the theory that persons are animals. Olson received a BA from Reed College and a PhD from Syracuse University. Olson is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield.

#1726

Gilbert LaFreniere

Gilbert LaFreniere

#20561

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Gilbert LaFreniere is an American ecological philosopher, active in the study of geology, ecology, and human impact upon nature. Biography Gilbert attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst and earned a Masters of Geology from Dartmouth College before completing a Ph.D in intellectual history from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1976.

#1727

John E. Thomas

#26434

Overall Influence

1926 - 1996 (70 years)

John Edward Thomas was a British-born Canadian philosopher and pioneer of medical ethics in Canada. Biography Early life and education Born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales in 1926, John Thomas moved to Birmingham, England with his parents, David Llewlyn Thomas and Ann Olwyn Thomas, where he worked for two years at the Birmingham Small Arms. Thomas moved to Scotland to enter the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, and there met Moreen Duff Muir , daughter of William C. Muir a noted herbalist and Jeanne Duff. Thomas married Muir in 1947 and they left the United Kingdom for Canada, where they settled in St.

#1728

Désiré Collen

#26771

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Désiré, Baron Collen is a Belgian physician, chemist, biotechnology entrepreneur and life science investor. He made several discoveries in thrombosis, haemostasis and vascular biology in many of which serendipity played a significant role. His main achievement has been his role in the development of tissue-type plasminogen activator from a laboratory concept to a life-saving drug for dissolving blood clots causing acute myocardial infarction or acute ischemic stroke. Recombinant t-PA was produced and marketed by Genentech Inc as Activase and by Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH as Actilyse, and is c...

#1729

Antoine Berman

#15842

Overall Influence

1942 - 1991 (49 years)

Antoine Berman was a French translator, philosopher, historian and theorist of translation. Life Antoine Berman was born in the small town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, near Limoges, to a Polish-Jewish father and a French-Yugoslav mother. After living in hiding during the Second World War, the family settled near Paris. Berman attended the Lycée Montmorency. Later he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, where he met his wife Isabelle. In 1968, they moved to Argentina where they remained for five years. On their return to Paris, Berman directed a research program and taught several seminar...

#1730

Joseph Owens

#35637

Overall Influence

1908 - 2005 (97 years)

Joseph Owens was a Canadian Roman Catholic priest and a philosopher specializing in the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and medieval philosophy. Life and career Owens received his PhD in 1951 from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, an affiliate of the University of Toronto, and remained at the institute as a teacher and distinguished researcher for the rest of his career. He authored nine books and almost 150 academic papers.

#1731

Bonnie Steinbock

#39374

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Bonnie Steinbock is a professor emerita of philosophy at the University at Albany and a specialist in bioethics who has written on topics such as abortion, end of life issues, and animal rights. Biography Steinbock received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. She now lives in Oakland, CA, with her husband, Paul Menzel. In retirement, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In retirement, she continues to publi...

#1732

Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir

#46545

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir , who publishes as Ásta, is an Icelandic philosopher. She was a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and is currently a professor at Duke University.

#1733

Barbara Skarga

#44247

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Barbara Skarga was a Polish philosophy historian and philosopher who worked mainly in ethics and epistemology. Biography Skarga was born in 1919 at Warsaw to a Calvinist family with gentry roots. Her sister was actress Hanna Skarżanka and brother was Edward Skarga. Skarga studied philosophy at Wilno University. During World War II she was a member of the resistance movement Armia Krajowa. In 1944 the Soviet NKVD arrested and sentenced her to ten years at the katorga. Afterwards, she was forced to live at a collective farm. After the war she wrote an anonymous memoir about her time in the gul...

#1734

Simon Caney

#24134

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Simon Caney is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Warwick and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Caney studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Merton College, Oxford, and was a postgraduate student of G. A. Cohen at Nuffield College, Oxford. He taught at the University of Newcastle, the University of Birmingham, and at Magdalen College, at the University of Oxford before taking up his position at Warwick as Professor of Political Theory.

#1735

Robert J. Richards

#16532

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert J. Richards is an author and the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. He has written or edited seven books about the history of science as well as dozens of articles.

#1736

Gerard Casey

#32193

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gerard Casey is an Irish academic who is Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin. Career He holds law degrees from the University of London and UCD as well as a primary degree in philosophy from University College Cork, an MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame and the higher doctorate, DLitt, from the National University of Ireland. He was formerly Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America 1983–1986. He was a member of the School of Philosophy in University College Dublin from 1986 until he retired in December 2015. He is a Fellow of Mises UK, an Associated...

#1737

Rob Buckman

#11726

Overall Influence

1948 - 2011 (63 years)

Robert Alexander Amiel Buckman was a British doctor of medicine, comedian and author, and president of the Humanist Association of Canada. He first appeared in a Cambridge University Footlights Revue in 1968, and subsequently presented several television and radio programmes about medicine, as well as appearing on comedy programmes such as Just a Minute. He was also the author of many popular books on medicine.

#1738

Roberta Millstein

Roberta Millstein

#29623

Overall Influence

Roberta L. Millstein is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, with affiliations in the Science and Technology Studies Program and the John Muir Institute for the Environment. She is the Senior Co-chair of the Philosophy of Science Association’s Women's Caucus and an Editor of the peer-reviewed online open-access journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology. She also serves as a member of the executive committee and Council for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division as well as the council for the International Society for the ...

#1739

Donald C. Hodges

#12866

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Donald Clark Hodges was a philosophy professor at Florida State University, who wrote about revolutions and revolutionaries . Growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Hodges returned to the USA in 1941. He was a student of James Burnham, the author of "The Managerial Revolution," which argued that both in the Communist and the capitalist world the managers "rule the world." Hodges was a devoted Marxist and an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man.

#1740

James Doull

#31701

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

James Alexander Doull was a Canadian philosopher and academic who was born and lived most of his life in Nova Scotia. His father was the politician, jurist, and historian John Doull. Biography From the late 1940s until the mid-1980s, he taught in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He was himself educated at Dalhousie as well as at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

#1741

William M Pardridge

#54584

Overall Influence

#1742

Vernon Bourke

#47105

Overall Influence

1907 - 1998 (91 years)

Vernon Joseph Bourke was a Canadian-born American Thomist philosopher and professor at Saint Louis University. His area of expertise was ethics, and especially the moral philosophy of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.

#1743

Benny Lévy

#15019

Overall Influence

1945 - 2003 (58 years)

Benny Lévy was a philosopher, political activist and author. A political figure of May 1968 in France, he was the disciple and last personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980. Along with him, he helped founding the French newspaper Libération in 1972.

#1744

Peter Kenneth Dews

#18663

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Peter Kenneth Dews is a British philosopher, in the fields of critical theory and continental philosophy. He made his name with the Logics of Disintegration, on the limitations of post-structuralism. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.

#1745

Jaap Kruithof

#26582

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

Jaap Kruithof was a Belgian philosopher and writer. His parents were Dutch Protestants. He took degrees in history, law and philosophy in Ghent, and in Paris. Then he earned a Ph.D. on Hegel's ontology, with honours. Since the 1960s he was, along with Etienne Vermeersch and Leo Apostel, one of the icons of the Ghent University and the Flemish intelligentsia in general. He was also a musician and taught the sociology of music at the Royal Music Conservatory in Antwerp.

#1746

Jeroen van den Hoven

#30518

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jeroen van den Hoven is a Dutch ethicist and a philosophy professor at Delft University of Technology. He specializes in ethics of information technology. Work Van den Hoven has written and worked with a range of scholars including Seumas Miller, Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum and John Weckert.

#1747

Thomas Mormann

#41708

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Thomas Mormann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain. He obtained his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Dortmund . He obtained his Habilitation from the University of Munich. He works in the philosophy of science, formal ontology, structuralism, Carnap studies, and neo-Kantianism.

#1748

W. H. William H. Harris

#54896

Overall Influence

#1749

Marcel Conche

#33175

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Marcel Conche was a French philosopher and emeritus professor at the Sorbonne University . Biography Marcel Conche was born in Altillac, France. "Philosophizing ad infinitum" has been published by SUNY Press, June 2014. It is the translation of one of his major works: "Philosopher à l'infini", published by PUF, Presses Universitaires de France, in 2005.

#1750

Thomas Noguchi

#3527

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Thomas Tsunetomi Noguchi is the former Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner for the County of Los Angeles. Popularly known as the "coroner to the stars", Noguchi determined the cause of death in many high-profile cases in Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s. He performed autopsies on Marilyn Monroe, Albert Dekker, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Inger Stevens, Janis Joplin, Gia Scala, David Janssen, Divine, William Holden, and John Belushi.

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