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,

#1751

Jeff Sebo

#44540

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Jeffrey Raymond Sebo is an American philosopher. He is clinical associate professor of environmental studies, director of the animal studies MA program, and affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy at New York University. In 2022, he published his first sole-authored book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves.

#1752

Victor Alekseyevich Vaziulin

Victor Alekseyevich Vaziulin

#42704

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Victor Alekseyevich Vaziulin was a Soviet and Russian philosopher. He became famous for his deep knowledge of Karl Marx's work as well as for further developing Marxism through the dialectical sublation of its acquis.

#1753

Manel Esteller

#19386

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Manel Esteller graduated in medicine from the University of Barcelona in 1992, where he also obtained his doctorate, specializing in the molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma, in 1996. He was an invited researcher at the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, during which time his research interests focused on the molecular genetics of inherited breast cancer.

#1754

Susan Brownmiller

#1881

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.

#1755

Sally Scholz

#46940

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Sally J. Scholz is an American Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and former editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Her research focuses on social philosophy, political philosophy, and feminist theory. Her early work involves issues of violence against women, oppression and peacemaking, and then progresses to ethics of advocacy and violence against women in conflict settings, including war rape and just war theory. Her recent research involves these issues in addition to solidarity. She has published four single-author books and edited three academic journals, among...

#1756

Juozas Girnius

#41004

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Juozas Girnius was a Lithuanian existentialist philosopher. His philosophy combined existentialism, Catholicism, and Lithuanian nationalism. Together with Antanas Maceina and Stasys Šalkauskis, Girnius became a cornerstone of modern Lithuanian philosophy. In 1994, he was awarded the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas.

#1757

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly

#3001

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.

#1758

Božidar Debenjak

Božidar Debenjak

#19793

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Božidar Debenjak is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, social theorist and translator. Biography He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1961, he became professor at the University of Ljubljana. For more than thirty years, he taught Marxist theory and history of philosophy at the Ljubljana University; many renowned Slovenian philosophers and sociologists were among his pupils, including Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Rastko Močnik, Renata Salecl and Tonči Kuzmanić. He was one of the first scholars to introduce the thought of the Frankfurt school in the curric...

#1759

Seymour Chatman

#13104

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Seymour Chatman was an American film and literary critic and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the most significant figures of American narratology , regarded as a prominent representative of its Structuralist or "classic" branch.

#1760

Alexander Dobrokhotov

#22437

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Alexander Lvovich Dobrokhotov is a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of culture, and university professor. He specialises in the history of Russian culture, history of philosophy, metaphysics, Russian philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy, Kant and German Idealism, and philosophy of culture.

#1761

John Worrall

#27601

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Worrall is a professor of philosophy of science at the London School of Economics. He is also associated with the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the same institution. Education Worrall attended Leigh Grammar School in Leigh, Lancashire and originally planned to join the school's Scholarship Stream in order to then apply for university admission to Oxbridge. He later described his change of mind, saying: "Think The History Boys – it then meant an additional year in the Sixth Form, and so another year in Leigh and I just couldn't face that!" After receiving a singl...

#1762

C. Michael Hall

#55235

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#1763

Peter Aczel

#18278

Overall Influence

1941 - 2023 (82 years)

Peter Henry George Aczel was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures.

#1764

John Tasioulas

#16344

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

John Tasioulas is a Greek-Australian moral and legal philosopher. He is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI , and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.

#1765

Frédéric Lordon

Frédéric Lordon

#7424

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Frédéric Lordon is a French economist and philosopher, CNRS Director of Research at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris. He is an influential figure in France's Nuit debout movement and has regularly contributed to French broadcast and print media on French and European politics, and also writes a regular opinion column for Le Monde diplomatique. He has argued in favour of Communism as an alternative to Capitalism in books, articles and media appearances, and has been engaged in a project of re-grounding the social sciences in a Spinoza-inspired materialism. He ...

#1766

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

#8185

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiologist or semiotician and professor of musicology at the Université de Montréal. He studied semiology with Georges Mounin and Jean Molino and music semiology with Nicolas Ruwet.

#1767

David Lane

#19892

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Sir David Philip Lane is a British immunologist, molecular biologist and cancer researcher. He is currently working in the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology at the Karolinska Institute and is Chairman of Chugai Pharmabody. He is best known for the discovery of p53, one of the most important tumour suppressor genes.

#1768

Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis

#5390

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.

#1769

Jonathan Rée

#37399

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jonathan Rée is a British freelance historian and philosopher from Bradford. Educated at Sussex University and then at Oxford, Rée was previously a professor of philosophy at Middlesex University, but gave up a teaching career in order to "have more time to think".

#1770

Norman Swartz

#30735

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Norman Swartz is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy, Simon Fraser University. He is the author or co-author of multiple books and multiple articles on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He earned a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1961, an M.A. in history and philosophy of science from Indiana University in 1965 and a Ph.D. in history of philosophy of science in 1971 also from Indiana University. He uses the term physical law to mean the laws of nature as they truly are and not as they are inferred and described in the practice of science.

#1771

George Caffentzis

#29468

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

George Caffentzis is an American political philosopher and an autonomist Marxist. He founded the Midnight Notes Collective, is a founder member of the co-ordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. His partner is Silvia Federici.

#1772

Emil Fackenheim

#18613

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

Emil Ludwig Fackenheim was a Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi. Born in Halle, Germany, he was arrested by Nazis on the night of 9 November 1938, known as . Briefly interned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , he escaped with his younger brother Wolfgang to Great Britain, where his parents later joined him. Emil's older brother Ernst-Alexander, who refused to leave Germany, was killed in the Holocaust.

#1773

Arvid Carlsson

#55692

Overall Influence

#1774

Reinhard Brandt

#46801

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Reinhard Brandt is a German philosopher. Brandt studied Greek, Latin and philosophy in Marburg, Munich and Paris. In 1965 he completed his doctorate on the Aristotelian theory of judgement. His habilitation was on an unpublished work of David Hume's theoretical philosophy.

#1775

Ursula Coope

#37906

Overall Influence

Ursula Charlotte Macgillivray Coope FBA is a British classical scholar, who is an expert in the study of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's physics, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as on Neoplatonism. She is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

#1776

Jean Jolivet

#42249

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Jean Jolivet was a French philosopher and medievalist. He was an authority on Medieval philosophy and honorary director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He was co-director of the publication series "Études de philosophie médiévale" for the Vrin Library of philosophy. Jolivet has been an influential mentor for, and collaborator with, Constant Mews, particularly in relation to Peter Abelard.

#1777

Antonio Millán-Puelles

#37255

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Antonio Millán-Puelles was a Spanish philosopher interested in phenomenology and metaphysics, who published many books and articles. He discovered his vocation to philosophy when he read Husserl’s Logical Investigations and abandoned the medical studies he had just begun.

#1778

Edward C. Holmes

Edward C. Holmes

#31233

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Edward Charles Holmes is a British evolutionary biologist and virologist. Since 2012, he has been a fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia and professor at the University of Sydney. He was an honorary visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, from 2019-2021.

#1779

Peter Szendy

#21045

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Peter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist. He is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening. Paying close attention to arrangements as "signed listenings" and to the juridical history of the listener, Szendy suggests an alternative model based on deconstruction: listening, he argues , is a "tolerated theft", and our ears are always already haunted by the ear of the other.

#1780

David Seyfort Ruegg

#20107

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

David Seyfort Ruegg was an eminent American-British Buddhologist with a long career, extending from the 1950s to the present. His specialty was Madhyamaka philosophy, a core doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism.

#1781

Anthony Atala

#4732

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Anthony Atala is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He is the W.H. Boyce professor of urology, the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. His work focuses on the science of regenerative medicine: "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells".

#1782

Gregory Loewen

#33780

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Gregory Victor Loewen is a Canadian social philosopher in the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. The author of over thirty scholarly non-fiction books as well as over twenty works of fiction, he is age-relative one of a number of modern period academic writers to have produced a significant body of work early in their careers, along with Herder, de Bono, Spir, Joad, Aguilera, and Schelling.

#1783

Patrick Gardiner

#36901

Overall Influence

1922 - 1997 (75 years)

Patrick Lancaster Gardiner, FBA was a British academic philosopher and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Biography Gardiner was born in Chelsea, London, on 17 March 1922. His father was Clive Gardiner, a landscape artist and principal of Goldsmiths College; his mother was Lilian Lancaster, an artist and a pupil of Walter Sickert. His paternal grandfather was Alfred George Gardiner, editor of The Daily News. His younger brother was the architect Stephen Gardiner. He was educated at Westminster School, and then received a First in history from Christ Church, Oxford. After Army service in It...

#1784

Elisabeth Schellekens

#50890

Overall Influence

Elisabeth Schellekens is a Swedish philosopher and Chair Professor of Aesthetics at Uppsala University . Previously, she was Senior Lecturer at Durham University . Schellekens is known for her works in aesthetics. Her research interests include aesthetic cognitivism and objectivism, aesthetic normativity, Hume, Kant, aesthetic and moral properties, conceptual art, non-perceptual or intelligible aesthetic value, the relations between perception and knowledge, the aesthetics and ethics of cultural heritage , and the interaction between aesthetic, moral, cognitive and historical value in art.

#1785

Arturo Ardao

#14500

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Arturo Ardao was a Uruguayan philosopher and historian of ideas. From 1968 to 1972 he was dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Before the Military Coup in 1973, he was forced into exile in Venezuela, where he continued his academic activity as professor at the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas . In addition, he participates as researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies Rómulo Gallegos.

#1786

Brian Herbert

#5309

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Brian Patrick Herbert is an American author who lives in Washington state. He is the elder son of science fiction author Frank Herbert . Brian Herbert's novels include Sidney's Comet, Prisoners of Arionn, Man of Two Worlds , and Sudanna Sudanna. In 2003, Herbert wrote a biography of his father titled Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. The younger Herbert has edited the Songs of Muad'dib and the Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune. Herbert has also created a concordance for the Dune universe based on his father's notes, though, according to the younger Herbert, there are no immedia...

#1787

Jack Hirsh

#36482

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jack Hirsh is a Canadian clinician and scientist specializing in anticoagulant therapy and thrombosis. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Hirsh is a graduate of the University of Melbourne Medical School. He studied hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, the London Postgraduate Medical School and the University of Toronto. In 1973 he joined the Faculty of Medicine of McMaster University. He is also the Director of the Hamilton Civic Hospital Research Centre.

#1788

George F. McLean

#32582

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

George Francis McLean was a Professor Emeritus at the School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America , Washington, D.C., and Director of its Centre for the Study of Culture and Values . He lectured internationally, promoting global philosophical dialogue and cooperation. Likewise, he invited scholars from many countries to participate in seminars in Washington, D.C.

#1789

Edward Gorey

#4830

Overall Influence

1925 - 2000 (75 years)

Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer, Tony Award-winning costume designer, and artist, noted for his own illustrated books as well as cover art and illustration for books by other writers. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.

#1790

Liu Xiaofeng

#15269

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Liu Xiaofeng is a contemporary Chinese scholar and a professor at Renmin University of China. He has been considered the prototypical example of what is called a cultural Christian , meaning a believer who may lack a specific church identification or affiliation, and was, along with He Guanghu, one of the main forerunners of the academic field of Sino-Christian Theology . However, in recent years, his interest has shifted from studies in Christian theology to the political theories of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt.

#1791

Michèle Le Dœuff

#46611

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Michèle Le Dœuff is a French philosopher with a scholarly interest in the philosophy of Francis Bacon, and Sir Thomas More's utopianism. She questions the boundaries of philosophy, while insisting upon philosophy's importance . She is critical of professional philosophers' neglectful attitude to science, and argues that disputes within sciences are often epistemological . In Hipparchia's Choice she questions philosophy's pretensions to being a unique practice which achieves a pure clarity: philosophy is inevitably shaped by language, metaphor, and power relations. According to Le Dœuff feminists make a special contribution.

#1792

Otto Pöggeler

#41325

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Otto Pöggeler was a German philosopher. He specialized in phenomenology and commenting on Heidegger. In 1963 he authored the acclaimed Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, one of the first rigorous attempts at tracing the development of Heidegger's thought. He also published a study of poetry of Paul Celan, and was director of the Hegel-Archiv at the Ruhr University in Bochum.

#1793

Padmapadacharya

#37304

Overall Influence

Padmapadacharya was an Indian philosopher, a follower of Adi Shankara. Padmapāda's dates are unknown, but some modern scholarship places his life around the middle of the 8th century; similarly information about him comes mainly from hagiographies. What is known for certain is that he was a direct disciple of Shankara, of whom he was a younger contemporary. Padmapada was the first head of Puri Govardhana matha. He is believed to have founded a math by name Thekke Matham in Thrissur, Kerala. Keralites believe that he was a Nambuthiri belonging to Vemannillom, though according to textual source...

#1794

William C. Dowling

#18594

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

William Courtney Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.

#1795

Cemal Yıldırım

#41953

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Cemal Yıldırım was a Turkish philosopher, author, educator, and researcher. He wrote 15 books and numerous academic papers. He wrote extensively on the philosophy of science and the history of science. His popular books Bilimin Öncüleri and Evrim Kuramı ve Bagnazlık were widely read and discussed in Turkey. His book Matematiksel Düşünme was also very influential.

#1796

Fouad Zakariyya

#43348

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Fouad Zakariyya was an Egyptian philosopher, and critic of Islamist thought who is known as “the father of Arab existentialism.” Biography Zakariyya was born in 1927. He studied at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1956. Zakariyya was the head of the philosophy department at Kuwait University from 1974 to 1991.

#1797

Yujin Nagasawa

#43885

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Yujin Nagasawa is a Japanese-born British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Nagasawa is H.G. Wood Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham. He is also former president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and co-director of the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion. He is best known for his work on the nature and existence of God and the problem of consciousness.

#1798

Thomas Talbott

#14700

Overall Influence

Thomas Talbott is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He is best known for his advocacy of trinitarian universalism. The 2003 book Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate presents Talbott's defense of Trinitarian universalism together with responses from various fields theologians, philosophers, church historians and other religious scholars supporting or opposing Talbott's universalism.

#1799

S. Albert Kivinen

#49143

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Seppo Albert Kivinen was a Finnish author and doctor of philosophy and docent emeritus of University of Helsinki, known for his occult interests and study of monsters. He is a onetime winner of the Atorox Award for best Finnish short story, for his Lovecraftian pastiche Keskiyön Mato Ikaalisissa. Kivinen is a well known fixture in Finnish academia and a proponent of the study of the history of the occult with a sceptical bent.

#1800

Mark Sainsbury

#44139

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Richard Mark Sainsbury is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. He is known for his work in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and on the philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions