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.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#17051

Cornelius Golightly

1917 - 1976 (59 years)

Cornelius Lacy Golightly was the first black president of the Detroit Board of Education. He was a teacher, civil rights activist, public intellectual, and educational administrator. Early life Cornelius L. Golightly was born on March 23, 1917, in Waterford, Mississippi. His father, Reverend Richmond Mack Golightly, was from Livingston, Alabama. His mother, Margaret Fullilove was from Honey Island, Mississippi. Golightly was one of ten children.

#17052

Jan Rokycana

1396 - 1471 (75 years)

Jan Rokycana was a Czech Hussite theologian in the Kingdom of Bohemia and a key figure of the Bohemian Reformation. Life In his youth, Jan Rokycana entered the Augustinian monastery in Rokycany. Later, he left the monastery to study in Prague, gaining his baccalaureate in 1415. He joined the movement against Jan Želivský, after which he had to flee from Prague. He also opposed the Taborites, most notably at Konopiště in 1423. Later in Prague he opposed Jan Žižka, when he was blamed for the defeat of the Prague militia at Malešov.

#17053

Alexander Crombie

1762 - 1840 (78 years)

Alexander Crombie FRS was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, schoolmaster and philosopher. Biography He was born in Aberdeen on 17 July 1760, the son of Thomas Crombie. He studied at Marischal College. There he was taught divinity by James Beattie, gaining a M.A. in 1778. In 1794 his college awarded him an honorary doctorate .

#17054

Sebastiano Conca

Sebastiano Conca

1680 - 1764 (84 years)

Sebastiano Conca was an Italian painter. Biography He was born at Gaeta, then part of the Kingdom of Naples, and apprenticed in Naples under Francesco Solimena. In 1706, along with his brother Giovanni, who acted as his assistant, he settled in Rome, where for several years he worked only in chalk, to improve his drawing. He was patronized by the Cardinal Ottoboni, who introduced him to Clement XI, who commissioned him a well-received Jeremiah painted for the church of St. John Lateran. He also painted an Assunta for the church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome.

#17055

Frank Sullivan

Frank Sullivan is a Scottish medical doctor who works as a general practitioner and who is a medical researcher. He is Director of Research at the School of Medicine at University of St Andrews. He was the first Gordon F. Cheesbrough Research Chair in Family and Community Medicine at North York General Hospital, Canada. He was the director of the Scottish School of Primary Care from 2007 to 2014.

#17056

Mário Ferreira dos Santos

1907 - 1968 (61 years)

Mário Ferreira dos Santos was a Brazilian philosopher, translator, writer and anarchist activist. Born in Tietê, São Paulo, Ferreira dos Santos was raised in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, and graduated in Law and Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

#17057

Satyaprajna Tirtha

Satyaprajna Tirtha was an Indian philosopher, Hindu spiritual leader, guru, saint and the pontiff of Uttaradi Math, a matha dedicated to the Dvaita philosophy, which has a large following in southern India. He was the 39th pontiff of Uttaradi Math since Madhvacharya, reformer of the Dvaita philosophy from 24 March 1942 to 14 April 1945.

#17058

George Bogdan

1859 - 1930 (71 years)

George Bogdan was a Romanian physician and university professor. Bogdan attended the National College in Iași, graduating in 1876. He studied medicine in France, and earned a doctorate in psychiatry there. After returning home, he began work as a doctor at Sfântul Spiridon Hospital and as a teacher at the National College, where he offered a course on hygiene. In 1891, he became a part-time professor at the forensic medicine department of the University of Iași. The same year, he was named dean of the medical faculty and a member of the university senate. As such, he argued for an increase in...

#17059

George Brown

1835 - 1917 (82 years)

George Brown was an English Methodist missionary and ethnographer. Early life and education George Brown was born at Barnard Castle, Durham, England, the son of George Brown, barrister, and his wife Elizabeth, née Dixon, sister of the wife of Rev. Thomas Buddle, missionary in New Zealand. Brown was educated at a private school and on leaving, became an assistant in a doctors surgery, was afterwards with a chemist, and then in a draper's shop. Brown reacted to his stepmother's discipline and attempted to run away to sea.

#17060

Aristo of Ceos

Aristo of Ceos was a Peripatetic philosopher and a native of the island of Ceos. His birthplace was the town of Ioulis. He is not to be confused with Aristo of Chios, a Stoic philosopher of the mid 3rd century BC.

#17061

Juan de Celaya

1490 - 1558 (68 years)

Juan de Celaya was a Spanish mathematician, physicist, cosmologist, philosopher and theologian. He was a member of the so-called Calculators, using ideas from Merton College. He is known for his work on motion and in logic.

#17062

Rickman Godlee

1849 - 1925 (76 years)

Sir Rickman John Godlee, 1st Baronet was an English surgeon. In 1884 he became one of the first doctors to surgically remove a brain tumor, founding modern brain surgery. Early life Godlee was born in Upton, Essex, to a Quaker family, the second son of Rickman Godlee , a barrister at Middle Temple, and Mary Godlee , daughter of Joseph Jackson Lister. He was thus a nephew of Joseph Lister — whose biography he later wrote.

#17063

Georgy Aleksandrov

1908 - 1961 (53 years)

Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov was a Marxist philosopher and a Soviet politician. Biography Childhood and education Aleksandrov was born in 1908 in Saint Petersburg in a worker's family of Russian ethnicity, but became homeless during the Russian Civil War. In 1924-1930, he studied Communist philosophy in Borisoglebsk and Tambov and then transferred to the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1928. After graduating in 1932, Aleksandrov remained with the Institute for graduate studies, eventually becoming a professor, a deputy director and th...

#17064

Christian Sibelius

Christian Sibelius

1869 - 1922 (53 years)

Christian Sibelius was a Finnish doctor and professor of psychiatry. Sibelius became a bachelor of arts in 1889 and a doctor of medicine in 1897, and in the same year became an associate professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Helsinki. He studied under Ernst Alexander Homén. His doctoral thesis, Bidrag till kännedomen om de histologiska förändringarna i ryggmärgen, de spinala rötterna och ganglierna vid progressiv paralysi , discussed both normal histological and pathological conditions, and demonstrated the relationship between paralysis and spinal cord damage. It placed him ...

#17065

Eugene Halliday

1911 - 1987 (76 years)

Eugene Halliday was a British artist, writer, and teacher. For a large part of his life he lived and taught in Manchester and Altrincham, England, lecturing , running groups and giving personal tuition to a large number of interested people. He was an artist, a writer of books, plays and poetry as well as possessing understandings of philosophy, religion and the science of his day. Much of his work centred on his interpretation of the esoteric ideas behind religion. He practised and taught an approach to psychotherapy. He was a friend of the artist Käthe Schuftan, giving the tribute at her ...

#17066

Avguštin Stegenšek

Avguštin Stegenšek

1875 - 1920 (45 years)

Avguštin Stegenšek was a Slovene theologian, philosopher and art historian. After earning a bachelor's degree in theology, he left for Rome to study archaeology and art history, under the supervision of Joseph Wilpert. Later, he was awarded a doctor's degree of philosophy sciences at the university of Graz in 1906. He took part in the Historic Society for Slovene Styria, founded 1906, and was appointed honorary conservator in Styria by Committee for the Protection of Monuments in Vienna. Stegenšek was the pioneer of the monumental topography on the territory of Slovenia. He framed the monumen...

#17067

Joseph Demarco

1718 - 1789 (71 years)

Joseph Demarco was a Maltese medical practitioner, a scientist, and a major philosopher. His areas of specialisation in philosophy were mostly philosophical psychology and physiology. Demarco's extensive interests make him quite unique. Indeed, though his main concern was human health, this must be understood in the widest of meanings. He was fascinated by the mechanisms of the human body but also with its infirmities, especially within their psychological and social contexts. This brought him to be very much attracted to the philosophical underpinnings of the human condition in all of its aspects.

#17068

Yang Rongguo

1907 - 1978 (71 years)

Yang Rongguo was a Chinese academic and philosopher who was involved in the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign of the Cultural Revolution. Yang initially began his study of Confucius with a publication in 1947 which was revised and published again in 1973. During the Cultural Revolution he was a professor at Zhongshan University. He published an article on July 7, 1973, in People's Daily entitled "Confucius-A Thinker Who Stubbornly Upheld the Slave System." This article, coupled with his republication of work, brought him into significance. He began publicly connecting Lin Biao, ...

#17069

Leonard J. Russell

1884 - 1971 (87 years)

Leonard James Russell, FBA was a British philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham from 1925 to 1950. Early life and education Russell was born on 18 October 1884 in Birmingham, where his father was working as a missionary. His older brother was the agricultural scientist Sir John Russell. The family moved to Barnsley, where Russell attended a local school and then they moved again to Glasgow, when Russell was aged 13, after his father became a Unitarian minister there. He then attended Hutchesons' Grammar School before studying mathematics and natural philo...

#17070

Richard Helsham

Richard Helsham

1683 - 1738 (55 years)

Richard Helsham was an Irish physician and natural philosopher at Trinity College Dublin. He was the inaugural Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1724 and Regius Professor of Physic from 1733.

#17071

Richard Specht

1870 - 1932 (62 years)

Richard Specht was an Austrian lyricist, dramatist, musicologist and writer. Specht, who had studied music with Ignaz Brüll, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Franz Schrecker, is most well known for his writings on classical music, and in his time was seen as a leading music journalist. He was a great authority on the music of Gustav Mahler, and in later life became a regular acquaintance of his widow, Alma Mahler-Werfel.

#17072

Antonio Persio

1542 - 1612 (70 years)

Antonio Persio was an Italian philosopher of the Platonic school who opposed the Aristotelianism which predominated in the universities of his time. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and an associate of Galileo Galilei.

#17073

Lokenath Brahmachari

1730 - 1860 (130 years)

Baba Lokenath Brahmachari was a Bengali yogi. External links

#17074

Aeschines of Sphettus

Aeschines of Sphettus

430 BC - 360 BC (70 years)

Aeschines of Sphettus or Aeschines Socraticus , son of Lysanias, of the deme Sphettus of Athens, was a philosopher who in his youth was a follower of Socrates. Historians call him Aeschines Socraticus—"the Socratic Aeschines"—to distinguish him from the more historically influential Athenian orator also named Aeschines. His name is sometimes but now rarely written as Aischines or Æschines.

#17075

W. R. Boyce Gibson

1869 - 1935 (66 years)

William Ralph Boyce Gibson was a British-Australian philosopher. He was an advocate of personal idealism. Biography He was born in Paris, the son of Reverend William Gibson, a Methodist minister and his wife Helen Wilhelmina, daughter of William Binnington Boyce.

#17076

Paul Yorck von Wartenburg

1835 - 1897 (62 years)

Hans Ludwig David Paul, Graf Yorck von Wartenburg was a German lawyer, writer, and philosopher. Life Graf Yorck was descended from the Prussian general Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg. His father Hans David Ludwig and his mother Bertha von Brause were both related to Prussian military families. They lived in Klein Öls Castle, now part of the Oława district in Poland. His nephew was the jurist Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, who opposed Hitler.

#17077

Guillaume Lamy

1644 - 1683 (39 years)

Guillaume Lamy was a French physician best known for his sympathies with Epicurean philosophy, and for his influence on materialists such as La Mettrie. He engaged in a lively dispute with Pierre Cressé over anatomical treatises, notably concerning the seat of the human soul.

#17078

Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani

1644 - 1721 (77 years)

Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani is one of the Iranian Shia philosophers during Safavid period. Life Molla Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani, according to Henry Corbin, lived in the catastrophic period namely when Shah Sultan Hossein ruled out. his time coincided with siege of Isfahan by Afghans.

#17079

Raymond Duncan

1874 - 1966 (92 years)

Raymond Duncan was an American dancer, artist, poet, craftsman, and philosopher, and brother of dancer Isadora Duncan. Biography Born in San Francisco on November 1, 1874, Duncan was the third of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan and of Mary Isadora Gray . Their other children were Elizabeth, Augustin, and Isadora, a noted dancer. In 1891, at the age of 17, Raymond Duncan developed a theory of movement which he called kinematics, "a remarkable synthesis of the movements of labor and of daily life." He believed that the importance of labor lay in the development of the worker, not i...

#17080

Leon of Salamis

401 BC - 400 BC (1 years)

Leon of Salamis was a historical figure, mentioned in Plato's Apology, Xenophon's Hellenica and Andocides' On the Mysteries . This Leon may also be the renowned Athenian general Leon of the Peloponnesian War.

#17081

Wilhelm Esser

1798 - 1854 (56 years)

Wilhelm Esser was a German academic, logician, and philosopher. His works focused on logic, psychology, and moral philosophy. Esser is also identified as a post-Kantian logician. Biography Esser was born on February 21, 1798, in Düren, Germany. He received his primary education in this North Rhine-Westphalian town, studying science under a Jesuit priest at Ratheim before attending a gymnasium at his hometown. In 1814, he moved to Cologne, where he studied philology, philosophy, and theology. He then moved to Münster to continue his studies.

#17082

George Herriman

George Herriman

1880 - 1944 (64 years)

George Joseph Herriman III was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat . More influential than popular, Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among those in the arts. Gilbert Seldes' article "The Krazy Kat Who Walks by Himself" was the earliest example of a critic from the high arts giving serious attention to a comic strip. The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century. Herriman's work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Elzie C. Segar, Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bil...

#17083

Saint David

512 - 589 (77 years)

David was a Welsh bishop of Mynyw during the 6th century. He is the patron saint of Wales. David was a native of Wales, and tradition has preserved a relatively large amount of detail about his life. His birth date, however, is uncertain: suggestions range from 462 to 512. He is traditionally believed to be the son of Non and the grandson of Ceredig ap Cunedda, king of Ceredigion. The Welsh annals placed his death 569 years after the birth of Christ, but Phillimore's dating revised this to 601.

#17084

George Herbert Palmer

George Herbert Palmer

1842 - 1933 (91 years)

George Herbert Palmer was an American scholar and author. He was a graduate, and then professor at Harvard University. He is also known for his published works, like the translation of The Odyssey and others about education and ethics, such as The New Education and The Glory of the Imperfect .

#17085

Igor Terentiev

1892 - 1937 (45 years)

Igor Gerasimovich Terentiev was a Russian poet, artist, stage director, representative of Russian avant-garde. Biography and creative work Terentiev was born in Pavlograd into the family of lieutenant Gerasim Lvovich Terentiev and Elizabeth von Derfelden, daughter of a resigned cavalry captain. He had a brother and two sisters: Vladimir , Olga and Tatiana .

#17086

Pietro da Cortona

Pietro da Cortona

1596 - 1669 (73 years)

Pietro da Cortona was an Italian Baroque painter and architect. Along with his contemporaries and rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, he was one of the key figures in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture. He was also an important designer of interior decorations.

#17087

Helgi Pjeturss

1872 - 1949 (77 years)

Helgi Pjeturss was an Icelandic geologist, philosopher, and spiritualist. In 1905 he became the first Icelander to graduate with a PhD in geology. He conducted extensive research on the geology of Iceland from 1898 to 1910. In 1919, Helgi started publishing Nýall, a collection of essays outlining his theories on what he referred to as astrobiology. Having conducted research on psychic phenomena, Helgi disagreed with spiritualism on several points. Most centrally, he held that the spirits contacted in séances and in dreams were not immaterial beings but material beings living on other planets....

#17088

Paul Diel

1893 - 1972 (79 years)

Paul Diel was a French psychologist of Austrian origin who developed the method of introspective analysis and the psychology of motivation. Life Diel was born in Vienna, Austria, on 11 July 1893, to a teacher of German origin and an unknown man. He was orphaned at the age of 13 after spending 8 years in a religious orphanage, but was able to obtain his baccalauréat with the support of a benefactor. Diel did not pursue formal higher education, but instead became an actor, novelist, and poet before teaching himself philosophy. Inspired by the philosophers Plato, Kant and Spinoza, and also b...

#17089

Matthew W. McKeon

1900 - Present (126 years)

Matthew W. McKeon is the chair of the philosophy department at Michigan State University and well known philosopher of logic. McKeon earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at The University of Connecticut in 1994. He teaches courses in Logic and Philosophy of Language.

#17090

Valentin Alberti

Valentin Alberti

1635 - 1697 (62 years)

Valentin Alberti was a Lutheran, orthodox philosopher and theologian from Silesia and was the son of a preacher. He is known for defending Lutheran orthodoxy against the natural law views of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, and being an active polemicist against Roman Catholicism.

#17091

Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington

1893 - 1932 (39 years)

Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.

#17092

Harold H. Joachim

1868 - 1938 (70 years)

Harold Henry Joachim, FBA was a British idealist philosopher. A disciple of Francis Herbert Bradley, whose posthumous papers he edited, Joachim is now identified with the later days of the British idealist movement. He is generally credited with the definitive formulation of the coherence theory of truth, in his book The Nature of Truth . He was also a scholar of Aristotle and Spinoza.

#17093

Isaac Albalag

1300 - 1300 (0 years)

Isaac Albalag was a Jewish philosopher of the second half of the 13th century. Biography According to Steinschneider , Albalag probably lived in northern Spain or southern France. Graetz makes him a native of southern Spain. His liberal views, especially his interpretations of the Biblical account of the Creation in accordance with the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world, stamped him in the eyes of many as a heretic.

#17094

William Turner

1510 - 1568 (58 years)

William Turner was an English divine and reformer, a physician and a natural historian. He has been called "The father of English botany." He studied medicine in Italy, and was a friend of the great Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner. He was an early herbalist and ornithologist, and it is in these fields that the most interest lies today. He is known as being one of the first "parson-naturalists" in England.

#17095

Friedrich Christian Laukhard

Friedrich Christian Laukhard

1757 - 1822 (65 years)

Friedrich Christian Laukhard was a German novelist, philosopher, historian and theologian. From 1783 to 1794 he volunteered in the Prussian army as a musketeer. During the War of the first coalition his regiment campaigned in Valmy. Laukhard's military diary is of great interest for historical research on the Prussian army and the French revolutionary wars. Due to his licentious and extrovert lifestyle, "Magister Laukhard" soon became a notorious figure.

#17096

Hans Thoma

1839 - 1924 (85 years)

Hans Thoma was a German painter. Biography Hans Thoma was born on 2 October 1839 in Bernau in the Black Forest, Germany. He was the son of a miller and was trained in the basics of painting by a painter of clock faces. He entered the Karlsruhe Academy in 1859, where he studied under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig des Coudres – the latter of which had a major influence on his career. Thoma also studied under Hans Gude, but rebelled against Gude's realism. He subsequently studied and worked, with but indifferent success, in Düsseldorf, Paris, Italy, Munich and Frankfurt, until his reputatio...

#17097

Hayk Gyulikevkhyan

Hayk Gyulikevkhyan

1886 - 1951 (65 years)

Hayk Gyulikevkhyan was an Armenian literary critic and philosopher and Professor of Yerevan State University. He was one of the founders of Soviet Armenian literary criticism. Biography He studied at Leipzig and Zurich universities, then graduated from the department of philosophy of Heidelberg University. Gyulikevkhyan cooperated with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. For his political activities he was arrested in 1914. In 1920's he became the editor of "Kommunist" newspaper of Yerevan and worked in Alexandropol. Gyulikevkhyan was the pro-rector of Yerevan State University and director of Armenian SSR Marxism–Leninism Institute.

#17098

Franco Burgersdijk

Franco Burgersdijk

1590 - 1635 (45 years)

Franco Petri Burgersdijk or Franciscus Burgersdicius was a Dutch logician. Life Franco Burgersdijk was born in De Lier, Defland in the year 1590 was a Dutch logician who worked as a professor of logic and moral philosophy and rector at Leiden University. Franco Burgersdijk's teaching helped raise the profile of logic and philosophy in Dutch universities. After growing up on a farm, Burgersdijk attended both the Latin School at Amersfoort and the Delft Gynasium . Shortly after, he decided to study theology at the University of Leiden. His growing interest in debate led him to become a mentee of Gisbertus Voetius, the vice principal of Staten Collegie.

#17099

Sam Houston

1793 - 1863 (70 years)

Samuel Houston was an American general and statesman who played an important role in the Texas Revolution. He served as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas and was one of the first two individuals to represent Texas in the United States Senate. He also served as the sixth governor of Tennessee and the seventh governor of Texas, the only individual to be elected governor of two different states in the United States.

#17100

Aristotle of Cyrene

400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)

Aristotle of Cyrene was a Greek philosopher who may have belonged to the Cyrenaic school. He was a native of Cyrene, and a contemporary of Stilpo. He taught Cleitarchus and Simmias of Syracuse before they became pupils of Stilpo. It has generally been assumed that Aristotle was a member of the Cyrenaic school, but this assumption is somewhat doubtful. According to Diogenes Laërtius, he wrote a work on the art of poetry. The only aspect of his philosophical views which is known is a short piece of ethical advice preserved by Aelian: Aristoteles of Cyrene said that you should not accept a favor from anyone.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions