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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,

#1801

Emil du Bois-Reymond

Emil du Bois-Reymond

1818 - 1896 (78 years)

Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond was a German physiologist, the co-discoverer of nerve action potential, and the developer of experimental electrophysiology. His lectures on science and culture earned him great esteem during the latter half of the 19th century.

#1802

Alfred Espinas

1844 - 1922 (78 years)

Alfred Victor Espinas was a French thinker noted for having been an influence on Nietzsche. He was a student of Comte and Spencer. Although initially an adherent of positivism, he later became a committed realist.

#1803

Alasdair Urquhart

Alasdair Urquhart

#20952

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Alasdair Ian Fenton Urquhart is a Scottish–Canadian philosopher and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has made contributions to the field of logic, especially non-classical logic. One of his ideas is proving the undecidability of the relevance logic R. He also published papers in theoretical computer science venues, mostly on mathematical logic topics of relevance to computer science.

#1804

Sherry Turkle

#1184

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

#1805

Eliot Deutsch

#22479

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Eliot Sandler Deutsch was a philosopher, teacher, and writer. He made important contributions to the understanding and appreciation of Eastern philosophies in the West through his many works on comparative philosophy and aesthetics. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

#1806

Craig Callender

#10907

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Craig Callender is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His main areas of research are philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and metaphysics. Education and career Callender obtained his PhD in 1997 from Rutgers University with a thesis entitled Time's Arrow under the supervision of Robert Weingard. From 1996-2000, he worked in the Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Currently, he is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego where he is also the co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego.

#1807

Richard Doll

#2227

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of :lung cancer and :heart disease.

#1808

Murray Murphey

#20436

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Murray Griffin Murphey was an American historian and philosopher. A native of Colorado Springs, Colorado born to Bradford and Margaret Murphey on February 22, 1928, Murray Murphey graduated from Harvard University and earned a doctorate from Yale University. He began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania as a Rockefeller Fellow shortly after completing his studies in 1954. Murphey joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1956, and became a full professor in 1966. He retired in 2000. Over the course of his career, Murphy earned awards from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the American Studies Association.

#1809

Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis

Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis

1757 - 1808 (51 years)

Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis was a French physiologist, freemason and materialist philosopher. Life Cabanis was born at Cosnac , the son of Jean Baptiste Cabanis , a lawyer and agronomist. At the age of ten, he attended the college of Brives, where he showed great aptitude for study, but his independence of spirit was so great that he was almost constantly in a state of rebellion against his teachers and was finally expelled. He was then taken to Paris by his father and left to carry on his studies at his own discretion for two years. From 1773 to 1775 he travelled in Poland and Germany, and on his return to Paris he devoted himself mainly to poetry.

#1810

Dean Zimmerman

#20902

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dean W. Zimmerman is an American professor of philosophy at Rutgers University specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Education and career Zimmerman received his bachelor's degree from Mankato State University in 1987 in French, philosophy, and English. He went on to receive a Master of Arts degree from Brown University in 1990 and then a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the same institution in 1992, where he worked with Jaegwon Kim and Roderick Chisholm. He taught at the University of Notre Dame and Syracuse University prior to joining Rutgers University, where he is also now Director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.

#1811

Lorraine Code

#10509

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Lorraine Code is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her principal area of research is feminist epistemology and the politics of knowledge.

#1812

J. B. Schneewind

#18818

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Jerome Borges Schneewind is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Life He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Schneewind taught at the University of Chicago, Princeton, Yale University, the University of Pittsburgh and Hunter College CUNY where he was also Provost before coming to Hopkins as chair of the philosophy department in 1981. He has also taught at Leicester, Stanford, and Helsinki. He taught courses on the history of ethics, types of ethical theory, the British empiricists, Kant's ethics, and utopian t...

#1813

Richard Milton Martin

1916 - 1985 (69 years)

Richard Milton Martin was an American logician and analytic philosopher. In his Ph.D. thesis written under Frederic Fitch, Martin discovered virtual sets a bit before Quine, and was possibly the first non-Pole other than Joseph Henry Woodger to employ a mereological system. Building on these and other devices, Martin forged a first-order theory capable of expressing its own syntax as well as some semantics and pragmatics , all while abstaining from set and model theory , and from intensional notions such as modality.

#1814

Keith Ansell-Pearson

#15777

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Keith Ansell-Pearson is a British philosopher specialising in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University. Ansell-Pearson is the author of numerous books including Germinal Life, Viroid Life and Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual.

#1815

Bahya ibn Paquda

1050 - 1120 (70 years)

Bahya ben Joseph ibn Paquda , c. 1050–1120, was a Jewish philosopher and rabbi who lived at Zaragoza, Al-Andalus . He was one of two people now known as Rabbeinu Behaye, the other being Bible commentator Bahya ben Asher.

#1816

Simon Frith

#2610

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Simon Webster Frith is a British sociomusicologist and former rock critic who specializes in popular music culture. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at University of Edinburgh. Career As a student, he read PPE at Oxford and earned a doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley. He is the author of many influential books, including The Sociology of Rock , Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll , Art into Pop , Music for Pleasure: Essays on the Sociology of Pop , and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music . He has also co-edited key anthologies in the interdiscip...

#1817

Andrew Wakefield

Andrew Wakefield

#716

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around the 1998 study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world. He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London and b...

#1818

Moritz Lazarus

1824 - 1903 (79 years)

Moritz Lazarus , born at Filehne, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, was a German-Jewish philosopher, psychologist, and a vocal opponent of the antisemitism of his time. Life and education He was born at Filehne, Posen. The son of Aaron Levin Lazarus, a pupil of Akiba Eiger, and himself president of the bet din and the yeshiva of Filehne , he was educated in Hebrew literature and history, and subsequently in law and philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1850 he obtained his PhD degree; in the same year he married Sarah Lebenheim.

#1819

Moses ibn Ezra

1060 - 1138 (78 years)

Rabbi Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known as Ha-Sallaḥ was an Andalusi Jewish philosopher, linguist, and poet. He was born in Granada about 1055 – 1060, and died after 1138. Ibn Ezra is considered to have had great influence in the Arabic literary world. He is considered one of Spain's greatest poets and was thought to be ahead of his time in terms of his theories on the nature of poetry. One of the more revolutionary aspects of Ibn Ezra's poetry that has been debated is his definition of poetry as metaphor and how his poetry illuminates Aristotle's early ideas. The impact of Ibn Ezra's philosop...

#1820

Robert Blanché

1898 - 1975 (77 years)

Robert Blanché was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse. He wrote many books addressing the philosophy of mathematics. About Structures intellectuelles Robert Blanché died in 1975. Nine years before, in 1966, he published with Vrin: Structures intellectuelles. Therein, he deals with the logical hexagon. Whereas the logical square or square of Apuleius represents four values: A,E,I,O , the logical hexagon represents six, that is to say, not only A,E,I,O but also two new values: Y and U. It is advisable to read the article: logical hexagon as well what concerns In...

#1821

Arthur Pap

1921 - 1959 (38 years)

Arthur Pap was a philosopher in the school of analytic philosophy. Pap published a number of books regarding analytical philosophy, its function within philosophy, and its impact on society. Life and works Pap was born October 1, 1921, in Zürich, Switzerland in a Jewish family. His musical talent was revealed early and his passion for playing the piano remained through all of his life. In high school Pap developed also a passion for philosophy and enrolled at Zürich University, where took courses in philosophy and logic from Karl Dürr. At the start of World War II the family fled to the United States and, in 1941, settled in New York City.

#1822

Bronisław Trentowski

Bronisław Trentowski

1808 - 1869 (61 years)

Bronisław Ferdynand Trentowski was a Polish "Messianist" philosopher, pedagogist, journalist and Freemason, and the chief representative of the Polish Messianist "national philosophy." Life Bronisław Trentowski was an alumnus of the Piarist college in Łuków. In his youth, he taught school in Podlasie, then fought as an ulan in the Polish November 1830–31 Uprising. After the uprising's suppression, he emigrated to Germany, eventually settling at Freiburg in Baden. He developed an interest in philosophy, became an assistant professor at Freiburg University and remained there to the end of his life.

#1823

Marianne Janack

#20797

Overall Influence

Marianne Janack is an American philosopher and John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. She is the president of the Richard Rorty Society. She was the Phi Bet Kappa Romanell Professor of Philosophy in 2017-18.

#1824

Stephen Hicks

#11657

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher. He teaches at Rockford University, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. Career Hicks earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Guelph, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Indiana University Bloomington. His doctoral thesis was a defense of foundationalism.

#1825

Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert

#16245

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert is a professor of philosophy at the university of Hagen, Germany. Biography Gethmann-Siefert was born in 1945, studied philosophy, art history and theology in Münster, Bonn, Innsbruck and Bochum. She earned her PhD in philosophy 1973 from the Ruhr University Bochum writing her dissertation about Heidegger and her habilitation 1982 about Hegel's Aesthetics. She taught since 1991 at the Fernuniversität Hagen.

#1826

Shen Dao

350 BC - 275 BC (75 years)

Shen Dao was a Chinese philosopher and writer. He was a "Chinese Legalist" theoretician most remembered for his influence on Han Fei with regards to the concept of shi , though most of his book concerns the concept of fa more commonly shared among "Legalists". Compared with western schools, Shen Dao considered laws that are not good "still preferable to having no laws at all."

#1827

Karel Kosík

#11166

Overall Influence

1926 - 2003 (77 years)

Karel Kosík was a Czech Marxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work, Dialectics of the Concrete , Kosík presents an original reinterpretation of the ideas of Karl Marx in light of Martin Heidegger's phenomenology. His later essays can be called a sharp critique of the modern society from a leftist but not strictly Marxist position.

#1828

Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera

1225 - 1290 (65 years)

Shem-Tov ben Joseph ibn Falaquera, also spelled Palquera was a Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet and commentator. A vast body of work is attributed to Falaquera, including encyclopedias of Arabic and Greek philosophies, maqamas, some 20,000 poetic verses, and commentaries on Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. The common theme in Falaquera’s writing was to encourage observant Jews to study philosophy and to appreciate the harmony that existed between Torah and rational truth learned in philosophy. While Falaquera did not advocate teaching the secrets of science and divine sciences to every...

#1829

Yang Zhu

369 BC - 318 BC (51 years)

Yang Zhu , also known as Yangzi , was a Chinese philosopher during the Warring States period. An early ethical egoist alternative to Mohist and Confucian thought, Yang Zhu's surviving ideas appear primarily in the Chinese texts Huainanzi, Lüshi Chunqiu, Mengzi, and possibly the Liezi and Zhuangzi. He founded the philosophical school of "Yangism".

#1830

Frederic Fitch

1908 - 1987 (79 years)

Frederic Brenton Fitch was an American logician, a Sterling Professor at Yale University. Education and career At Yale, Fitch earned his B.A in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1934 under the supervision of F. S. C. Northrop. From 1934 to 1937 Fitch was a postdoc at the University of Virginia. In 1937 he returned to Yale, where he taught until his retirement in 1977.

#1831

Jeremy Sugarman

#23464

Overall Influence

Jeremy Sugarman is an American bioethicist and physician. He is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Bioethics and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians, the National Academy of Medicine, and the Hastings Center.

#1832

Zhou Dunyi

1017 - 1073 (56 years)

Zhou Dunyi was a Chinese cosmologist, philosopher, and writer during the Song dynasty. He conceptualized the Neo-Confucian cosmology of the day, explaining the relationship between human conduct and universal forces. In this way, he emphasizes that humans can master their qi in order to accord with nature. He was a major influence to Zhu Xi, who was the architect of Neo-Confucianism. Zhou Dunyi was mainly concerned with Taiji and Wuji , the yin and yang, and the wu xing .

#1833

Takeshi Umehara

Takeshi Umehara

#10949

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

was born in Miyagi Prefecture in Tōhoku and graduated from the philosophical faculty of Kyoto University in 1948. He taught philosophy at Ritsumeikan University and was subsequently appointed president of the Kyoto City University of Arts. He is noted for his prolific essays on Japanese culture, in which he has endeavoured to refound the discipline of Japanese studies along more Japanocentric lines, notably in his book written in 1972 in collaboration with Shunpei Ueyama. Aside from his voluminous academic essays on numerous aspects of Japanese culture he has also composed theatrical works o...

#1834

Raanan Gillon

#25016

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Raanan Evelyn Zvi Gillon FRCP is emeritus professor of medical ethics at Imperial College London, and past president of the British Medical Association. A general practitioner until his retirement in 2002, Gillon edited the Journal of Medical Ethics from 1980 to 2002, and from 1995 to 1999 was professor at Imperial. He is an author on several works on medical ethics including Philosophical Medical Ethics.

#1835

Stephen Houlgate

#20150

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Stephen Houlgate is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is known for his works on Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida's thought. Books Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press, 1986An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edition, Blackwell, 2005The Opening of Hegel's Logic. From Being to Infinity, Purdue University Press, 2006Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. A Reader's Guide, Bloomsbury, 2013Hegel on Being , Bloomsbury, 2021

#1836

Georges Chapouthier

Georges Chapouthier

#18193

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Georges Chapouthier is a French neuroscientist and philosopher. Biography Georges Chapouthier is the son of Odette Mazaubert and Fernand Chapouthier . Fernand Chapouthier was a classicist and archeologist who was deputy director of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Odette Mazaubert was known under the pseudonym of "Carquelin" for her Saintongeais writings. Chapouthier attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He then followed the "Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles" at the Lycée Saint-Louis and subsequently enrolled at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1964....

#1837

Michael Friedman

#16519

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Michael Friedman is an American philosopher who serves as Professor of Philosophy and the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. Friedman is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially on scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics, and for his historical work on Immanuel Kant. Friedman has also done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. Friedman also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.

#1838

Joan Weiner

#16573

Overall Influence

Joan Weiner is an American philosopher and professor emerita of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, known for her books on Gottlob Frege. Education and career Weiner majored in mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating with high distinction and honors in 1975. She completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1982.

#1839

Mark Mitin

1901 - 1987 (86 years)

Mark Borisovich Mitin was a Soviet Marxist–Leninist philosopher, university lecturer and Professor of Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University . He was interested primarily dialectical and historical materialism, the philosophy of history and criticism of bourgeois philosophy.

#1840

Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée

Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée

1838 - 1912 (74 years)

Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée was a French philosopher. Life Fouillée was born at La Pouëze, Maine-et-Loire. He held several minor philosophical lectureships, and from 1864 was professor of philosophy at the lycées of Douai, Montpellier and Bordeaux successively. In 1867 and 1868 he was crowned by the Academy of Moral Science for his work on Plato and Socrates. In 1872 he was elected master of conferences at the Ecole Normale, and was made doctor of philosophy in recognition of his two treatises, Platonis Hippias Minor sine Socratica contra liberum arbitrium argumenta and La Liberté et le déter...

#1841

Richard W. Miller

#23343

Overall Influence

1945 - 2023 (78 years)

Richard W. Miller the Wyn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor in Ethics and Public Life and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life in the Cornell University Department of Philosophy. He specializes in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of science.

#1842

David Hockney

#546

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.

#1843

Henryk Skolimowski

Henryk Skolimowski

#13752

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Henryk Skolimowski was a Polish philosopher. He completed technical studies, musicology and philosophy in Warsaw. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. The student of Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, he specialized in logic and philosophy of language. Skolimowski earned a doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he also taught before he began his professorships at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and then at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was for many years a professor of philosophy, and then held the position of professor emeritus.

#1844

Corine Pelluchon

Corine Pelluchon

#13203

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Corine Pelluchon is a French philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée . Education Corine Pelluchon received her agrégation in philosophy in 1997, then defended a thesis entitled at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2003, and obtained a habilitation in philosophy entitled in 2010.

#1845

Richard Whately

Richard Whately

1787 - 1863 (76 years)

Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.

#1846

Bronisław Bandrowski

Bronisław Bandrowski

1879 - 1914 (35 years)

Bronisław Bandrowski was a Polish philosopher and psychologist. He was one of the pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. Drawing from his mentor's theories and the tradition of the Lwów–Warsaw school, his works dealt with the problem of induction. Bandrowski was also noted for his death in the Tatra Mountains near Zakopane.

#1847

Radovan Richta

1924 - 1983 (59 years)

Radovan Richta was a Czech philosopher who coined the term technological evolution; a theory about how societies diminish physical labour by increasing mental labour. Richta's first work was Člověk a technika v revoluci našich dnů , published in 1963. This work did much to bring the concept of technology into the forefront of philosophical thought during the 1960s. Richta then went on to publish Civilizace na rozcestí in 1966. "Crossroads" was a compilation work published by 60 authors that "attempt[ed] to analyze the social and human implications of the scientific and technological revolution".

#1848

Alcinous

Alcinous was a Middle Platonist philosopher. He probably lived in the 2nd century AD, although nothing is known about his life. He is the author of The Handbook of Platonism, an epitome of Middle Platonism intended as a manual for teachers. He has, at times, been identified by some scholars with the 2nd century Middle Platonist Albinus.

#1849

Ludwig Büchner

1824 - 1899 (75 years)

Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig Büchner was a German philosopher, physiologist and physician who became one of the exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism. Biography Büchner was born at Darmstadt on 29 March 1824. From 1842 to 1848 he studied physics, chemistry, botany, mineralogy, philosophy and medicine at the University of Giessen, where he graduated in 1848 with a dissertation entitled Beiträge zur Hall'schen Lehre von einem excitomotorischen Nervensystem . Afterwards, he continued his studies at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Würzburg and the University of Vienna.

#1850

Wolfgang Fritz Haug

#14081

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Wolfgang Fritz Haug was from 1979 till his retirement in 2001 professor of philosophy at the Free University Berlin, where he had also studied romance languages and religious studies and taken his PhD .

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