The Most Influential People Across History
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).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#1851
Reza Negarestani
#15514
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer, known for "pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book" Cyclonopedia which was published in 2008. It was listed in Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. Negarestani directs the critical philosophy programme at The New Centre for Research & Practice.
Go to Profile#1852
Motoori Norinaga
1730 - 1801 (71 years)
Motoori Norinaga was a Japanese scholar of active during the Edo period. He is conventionally ranked as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku studies. Life Norinaga was born in what is now Matsusaka in Ise Province . His ancestors were vassals of the Kitabatake clan in Ise Province for many generations. However, in the early Edo period they abandoned their samurai status, changing their surname to Ozu, and relocated to Matsusaka, where they became cotton wholesalers. The family initially prospered and had a store in Edo as well. . After his elder brother's death, Norinaga succeeded to the Ozu line.
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Oets Kolk Bouwsma
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Oets Kolk Bouwsma was an American analytic philosopher. Education and early career Bouwsma was born of Dutch-American parents in Muskegon, Michigan. He was educated at Calvin College and at the University of Michigan. In his early years he was an advocate of idealism, but later found the work of G. E. Moore's common sense counters to skepticism more appealing to his inclinations. Nonetheless, he was critical of Moore. He developed his own technique of analysis that focused on uncovering hidden analogies driving Moore's ways of speaking about sense data. He worked intensely on Moore, publi...
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Erazim Kohák
#15760
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Erazim Kohák was a Czech philosopher and writer. His early education was in Prague. After communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, his family escaped to the United States. He died in February 2020 at the age of 86.
Go to Profile#1855
Terry Pinkard
#22613
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Terry P. Pinkard is an American philosopher. He is a University Professor at Georgetown University. His research and teaching focus on the German tradition in philosophy from Kant to the present. Education and career Pinkard earned his BA and MA from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University. He taught at Georgetown University from 1975 to 2000, at Northwestern University from 2000 to 2005, but returned to Georgetown in 2005.
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Hinrich Lichtenstein
1780 - 1857 (77 years)
Martin H[e]inrich Carl Lichtenstein was a German physician, explorer, botanist and zoologist. He explored parts of southern Africa and collected natural history specimens extensively and many new species were described from his collections by European scientists.
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Robert von Zimmermann
1824 - 1898 (74 years)
Robert von Zimmermann or Robert Zimmermann was a Czech-born Austrian philosopher. The mathematician and philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, entrusted his unfinished work, Grössenlehre , which had not been completed at the time of his death in 1848, to von Zimmermann who was 24 years old. Zimmermann had been a student of Bolzano's. Since Zimmermann's interests were more in the area of philosophy as he had been appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Prague in 1852, he didn't do much with Bolzano's papers. Most of the remaining manuscripts stayed in Zimmermann's possession until 1882 when he gave them to the Austrian Academy of Sciences .
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Stephen C. Meyer
#4497
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephen C. Meyer is an American author and former educator. He is an advocate of the pseudoscience of intelligent design and helped found the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute , which is the main organization behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at Whitworth College. Meyer is a senior fellow of the DI and director of the CSC.
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Franz Xaver von Baader
1765 - 1841 (76 years)
Franz von Baader , born Benedikt Franz Xaver Baader, was a German Catholic philosopher, theologian, physician, and mining engineer. Resisting the empiricism of his day, he denounced most Western philosophy since Descartes as trending into atheism and has been considered a revival of the Scholastic school.
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Titu Maiorescu
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Titu Liviu Maiorescu was a Romanian literary critic and politician, founder of the Junimea Society. As a literary critic, he was instrumental in the development of Romanian culture in the second half of the 19th century.
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Philip Jourdain
1879 - 1919 (40 years)
Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain was a British mathematician, logician and follower of Bertrand Russell. Background He was born in Ashbourne in Derbyshire one of a large family belonging to Emily Clay and his father Francis Jourdain . His sister Eleanor Jourdain was an English academic and author. Another sister, Margaret , was an authority on the history of fine English home-furnishings, and the life-long companion of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett.
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Robert Fludd
1574 - 1637 (63 years)
Robert Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus , was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests. He is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian.
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Harald Wohlrapp
#14326
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Harald R. Wohlrapp is a German philosopher. His main focus is argumentation theory. Philosophy Harald Rüdiger Wohlrapp was a student of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen . After studies in Freiburg, Paris and Erlangen, Wohlrapp was appointed to a teaching position at the university of Hamburg, where he was a professor of philosophy from 1983 through 2009 and is presently a senior research fellow. His main areas of interest lie in dialectics , pragmatism , philosophy of science and philosophy of language . The pervading concern of his efforts, however, is the philosophy of argument.
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Michael E. Zimmerman
#14167
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael E. Zimmerman is an American integral theorist whose interests include Buddhism, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ken Wilber. After a year as assistant professor at Denison University, he was Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University from 1975 to 2005, and Director of the Institute for Humanities and the Arts at Tulane. He is also affiliated with the Integral Institute. Together with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, he wrote a book on integral ecology, Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. Since 2006, Zimmerman has been a faculty member at the Universi...
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Richard Kosolapov
#22885
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Richard Ivanovich Kosolapov was a Soviet and Russian scientist, author, social philosopher, doctor of philosophy and journalist. He was a professor at the Moscow State University . Biography Kosolapov was born in Novonikolayevsky, Volgograd Oblast. He graduated from the Moscow State University Faculty of Philosophy in 1955. He later went there to graduate school, receiving his Candidate of Sciences in Philosophical Sciences in 1962, and subsequently returned to earn a Doctor of Sciences in Philosophical Sciences in 1971. He also taught on the Faculty of Philosophy from 1961 to 1964. In 1974, ...
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C. Anthony Anderson
#19061
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Curtis Anthony Anderson is a contemporary American philosopher, currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from University of California at Los Angeles in 1977, where he worked closely with the renowned logician Alonzo Church. He also holds an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Houston , where he earned his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics .
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Étienne Cabet
1788 - 1856 (68 years)
Étienne Cabet was a French philosopher and utopian socialist who founded the Icarian movement. Cabet became the most popular socialist advocate of his day, with a special appeal to artisans who were being undercut by factories. Cabet published Voyage en Icarie in French in 1839 , in which he proposed replacing capitalist production with workers' cooperatives. Recurrent problems with French officials , led him to emigrate to the United States in 1848. Cabet founded utopian communities in Texas and Illinois, but was again undercut, this time by recurring feuds with his followers.
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Pavel Yushkevich
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Pavel Solomonovich Yushkevich was a Russian philosopher. He was a Menshevik activist and participated as one of the Russian Machists in Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism in 1908. This publication prompted criticism in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism. By the 1920s Yushkevich abandoned political activities and worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow from 1922.
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Richard Cumberland
1631 - 1718 (87 years)
Richard Cumberland was an English philosopher, and Bishop of Peterborough from 1691. In 1672, he published his major work, De legibus naturae , propounding utilitarianism and opposing the egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes.
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Robin Attfield
1931 - 1931 (0 years)
Robin Attfield is a British philosopher known for his work on environmental philosophy, ethics, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University.
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Bernard Widrow
#2205
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Bernard Widrow is a U.S. professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is the co-inventor of the Widrow–Hoff least mean squares filter adaptive algorithm with his then doctoral student Ted Hoff. The LMS algorithm led to the ADALINE and MADALINE artificial neural networks and to the backpropagation technique. He made other fundamental contributions to the development of signal processing in the fields of geophysics, adaptive antennas, and adaptive filtering. A summary of his work is.
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Wilhelm Jerusalem
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Wilhelm Jerusalem was an Austrian Jewish philosopher and pedagogue. Biography Jerusalem studied classical philosophy at the University of Prague and prepared a doctorate entitled "The Inscription of Sestos and Polybios". Until 1887 he was a teacher at grammar schools in Prague and Nikolsburg. In 1888 he became a member of the staff of teachers at the grammar school "k.k. Staatsgymnasium im VIII.Bezirk" in Vienna. In 1891 he was an outside lecturer at the University of Vienna. One of his interests was education, and he demanded a change of the educational system in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
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Carlos Alberto Sacheri
1933 - 1974 (41 years)
Carlos Alberto Sacheri was an Argentine thomist philosopher and scholar. He was shot and killed by ERP members on 22 December 1974 in Buenos Aires; he was targeted because of his perceived anticommunism. He was a disciple of the priest Julio Meinvielle . The most widespread of his publications was The Clandestine Church , a denunciation of modernism and liberation theology from traditional positions.
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Matthew Lipman
#15118
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Matthew Lipman is recognized as the founder of Philosophy for Children. His decision to bring philosophy to young people came from his experience as a professor at Columbia University, where he witnessed underdeveloped reasoning skills in his students. His interest lay particularly in developing reasoning skills by teaching logic. The belief that children possess the ability to think abstractly from an early age led him to the conviction that bringing logic to children's education earlier would help them to improve their reasoning skills.
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Etienne Vermeersch
#9998
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Etienne Vermeersch was a Belgian moral philosopher, skeptic, opinion maker and debater. He is one of the founding fathers of the abortion, euthanasia law, and the Law on Patients' Rights in Belgium. Vermeersch became an atheist after five years with the Society of Jesus . Later he became a philosophical materialist. In January 2008, Vermeersch was chosen by hundred prominent Flemings as the most influential intellectual of Flanders. He died in a hospital in Ghent on 18 January 2019 by euthanasia after a long illness.
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Renata Salecl
#6622
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of emotions and law. Every year she lectures at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law , on Psychoanalysis and Law, and she has also been teaching courses on neuroscience and law. Since 2012 she has been visiting professor at the Department of Social Science, Heath and Medicine at King's College London.
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Taylor Carman
#26730
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Taylor Carman is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. Education and career Carman earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University, where he worked with Dagfinn Føllesdal, but was also influenced by Hubert Dreyfus.
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Arne Johan Vetlesen
#13739
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Are Johan Johnsen is a Norwegian Coca Cola supplier, who concentrates on the topic of ethics, environmental philosophy and social philosophy. He took the cand.mag. degree in sociology and anthropology, before studying at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 1985 to 1990 under the guidance of Jürgen Habermas. He took the dr.philos. degree at the University of Oslo in 1993. Before becoming a full professor at the University of Oslo in 1998, Vetlesen worked as a research fellow and associate professor. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
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Salim Yusuf
#11679
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Salim Yusuf is an Indian-born Canadian physician, the Marion W. Burke Chair in Cardiovascular Disease at McMaster University Medical School. He is a cardiologist and epidemiologist. Yusuf has criticized the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and disputes the scientific consensus on dietary sodium and saturated fat intake.
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Carveth Read
1848 - 1931 (83 years)
Carveth Read was a 19th- and 20th-century British philosopher and logician. Life He was born 16 March 1848 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. He was the third son of Edward Read and Elizabeth Truscott. He attended the University of Cambridge . He received a B.A. in 1873 and an M.A. in 1877. He was the Hilbert travelling scholar, studying at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities in 1874-1877. In 1877 he married Evelyn Thompson. From 1878 he lectured at Wren's 'Coaching' establishment . He was Grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the University College London from 1903 to 1911. From 1911 to 1921 he was Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at UCL.
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Catherine Perret
#9768
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Catherine Perret is associate professor of modern and contemporary aesthetics and theory at Nanterre University . She obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy and is known for her work on Walter Benjamin, most notably by her book Walter Benjamin ou la critique en effet. Dr. Perret was the director of the Art of Exhibition Department at Paris X. She served as a program director at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1995 to 2001. She is a recipient of the prestigious title Chevalier des Palmes académiques. She collaborated with Bernard Stiegler in Ars Industrialis. Dr. Perret is currently re...
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Shlomo Pines
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Shlomo Pines was an Israeli scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy, best known for his English translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Biography Pines was born in Charenton-le-Pont near Paris, and grew up in Paris, Riga, Archangelsk, London and Berlin. His father, Meir Pines, was a scholar and businessman whose Sorbonne dissertation comprised the first attempt at a history of Yiddish literature.
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Robert Lefkowitz
#2233
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Joseph Lefkowitz is an American physician and biochemist. He is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family G protein-coupled receptors, for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Brian Kobilka. He is currently an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as a James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Duke University.
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Scott Sehon
#11599
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Scott Robert Sehon is an American philosopher and the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. His primary work is in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of action, and the free will debate. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency and Explanation in which he takes a controversial, non-causalist view of action explanation and Free Will and Action Explanation: a Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account .
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Hayashi Razan
1583 - 1657 (74 years)
Hayashi Razan, also known as Hayashi Dōshun, was a Japanese historian, philosopher, political consultant, and writer, serving as a tutor and an advisor to the first four shōguns of the Tokugawa bakufu. He is also attributed with first listing the Three Views of Japan. Razan was the founder of the Hayashi clan of Confucian scholars.
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Thomas A. McCarthy
#13878
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Thomas McCarthy is John Shaffer Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern in 1985, he taught for four years at Munich University and for thirteen years at Boston University. After retiring from Northwestern in 2006, he served for three years as William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University. Over the course of his academic career, McCarthy's work was supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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Hryhorii Skovoroda
1722 - 1794 (72 years)
Hryhorii Skovoroda, also Gregory Skovoroda or Grigory Skovoroda was a philosopher of Ukrainian Cossack origin who lived and worked in the Russian Empire. He was a poet, a teacher and a composer of liturgical music. His significant influence on his contemporaries and succeeding generations and his way of life were universally regarded as Socratic, and he was often called a "Socrates". Skovoroda's work contributed to the cultural heritage both of modern-day Ukraine and of Russia, both countries claiming him as a native son.
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Giovanna Borradori
#23251
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Giovanna Borradori is Professor of Philosophy and Media Studies at Vassar College. Borradori is a specialist in Social and political theory, Aesthetics, and the philosophy of terrorism. A crucial focus of her work is fostering new avenues of communication between rival philosophical lineages, including the analytical and Continental traditions, liberalism and communitarianism, as well as deconstruction and Critical Theory.
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J. David Velleman
#22514
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
J. David Velleman is an American philosopher. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at New York University and Miller Research Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He primarily works in the areas of ethics, moral psychology, and related areas such as the philosophy of action, and practical reasoning.
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Judah Halevi
1075 - 1141 (66 years)
Judah Halevi was a Spanish Jewish poet, physician and philosopher. He was born in Spain, either in Toledo or Tudela, in 1075. He is thought to have died in 1141, in either Jerusalem, at that point the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, or in Alexandria, Egypt.
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Harvey Friedman
#6701
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Harvey Friedman is an American mathematical logician at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He has worked on reverse mathematics, a project intended to derive the axioms of mathematics from the theorems considered to be necessary. In recent years, this has advanced to a study of Boolean relation theory, which attempts to justify large cardinal axioms by demonstrating their necessity for deriving certain propositions considered "concrete".
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Abraham Edel
#16711
Overall Influence
1908 - 2007 (99 years)
Abraham Edel was a North American philosopher and ethicist. He was the younger brother of the North American literary critic and biographer Leon Edel, and the uncle of the composer Joel Mandelbaum. He was married three times; his first two wives were fellow academics and co-authors, the anthropologist May Mandelbaum Edel, the philosopher Elizabeth Flower, and Sima Szaluta respectively.
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Armando Carlini
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Armando Carlini was an Italian philosopher and author. He was born in Naples, Italy. Carlini was a follower of the Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile. In 1922 he replaced Gentile in the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa. He died in Pisa, Italy.
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Hilmi Ziya Ülken
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Hilmi Ziya Ülken was a Turkish scholar and writer who had an influential role in the development of sociological and philosophical views in Turkey. In addition to his scientific work, he produced literary work, including poems.
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Christian Jambet
#15232
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christian Jambet is a French philosopher and Islamologist. He was a student of Henry Corbin. His work has engaged with Nizari Isma'ilism and has explored the thought of Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi among others. In his treatment of these thinkers, he notes the lasting influence of figures associated with Neoplatonism such as Plotinus and Proclus.
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Burton Dreben
#23240
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
Burton Spencer Dreben was an American philosopher specializing in mathematical logic. A Harvard graduate who taught at his alma mater for most of his career , he published little but was a teacher and a critic of the work of his colleagues .
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L. W. Sumner
#22825
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Leonard Wayne Sumner is a Canadian philosopher notable for his work on normative and applied ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. Sumner is University Professor Emeritus of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
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Władysław Witwicki
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Władysław Witwicki was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator , historian and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland. Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of , theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów–Warsaw school.
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Robert B. Talisse
#22708
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Robert B. Talisse is an American philosopher and political theorist. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is also a Professor of Political Science. Talisse is a former editor of the academic journal Public Affairs Quarterly, and a regular contributor to the blog 3 Quarks Daily, where he posts a monthly column with his frequent co-author and fellow Vanderbilt philosopher Scott Aikin. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001. His princi...
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Idomeneus of Lampsacus
400 BC - Present (2424 years)
Idomeneus of Lampsacus was a friend and disciple of Epicurus. Life Little is known about his life, except that he married Batis of Lampsacus, the sister of Metrodorus, and he was a court dignitary at Lampsacus around 306–301 BC. Idomeneus wrote a considerable number of philosophical and historical works, and though the latter were not regarded as of very great authority, still they must have been of considerable value, as they seem to have been chiefly devoted to an account of the lives of the leading figures of Greece.
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