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).

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#1951

Radomir Konstantinović

Radomir Konstantinović

#36699

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Radomir Konstantinović was Serbian writer and philosopher. His most famous work is a philosophical treatise "Filosofija palanke" . He won the prestigious literary NIN Award in 1960 for the novel "Izlazak" .

#1952

Aaron L. Mackler

#32307

Overall Influence

Aaron L. Mackler is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and an ordained Conservative Rabbi. He is an author in the fields of bioethics and Jewish law. He was editor of Life and Death Responsibilities in Jewish Biomedical Ethics and authored Introduction to Jewish and Catholic Bioethics, part of the Georgetown Press Moral Traditions series.

#1953

Sam Gillespie

#39883

Overall Influence

1970 - 2003 (33 years)

Sam Gillespie was a philosopher with a particular interest in the work of Alain Badiou, a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure who wrote about being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Gillespie was described by Joan Copjec as "one of the most gifted and promising philosophers of his generation". He was a co-founder of the academic journal Umbr. Gillespie's book The Mathematics of Novelty was published posthumously in 2008. Peter Hallward wrote that "This tremendously valuable...

#1954

František Listopad

#34775

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

František Listopad was a Czech poet, prose writer, essayist, theatre and television director, promoter of Czech literature and culture abroad, regarded as an expert on Central European thought and cultural output.

#1955

Richard Schickel

Richard Schickel

#2658

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Richard Warren Schickel was an American film historian, journalist, author, documentarian, and film and literary critic. He was a film critic for Time magazine from 1965–2010, and also wrote for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His last writings about film were for Truthdig.

#1956

Sabina Leonelli

#34424

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sabina Leonelli is a philosopher of science and professor at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She is well known for her work on scientific practices, data-centric science, and open science policies. She was awarded the 2018 Lakatos award for her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study .

#1957

Gillian Rose

#25662

Overall Influence

1947 - 1995 (48 years)

Gillian Rosemary Rose was a British philosopher and writer. Rose held the chair of social and political thought at the University of Warwick until 1995. Rose began her teaching career at the University of Sussex. She worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Her writings include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso, amongst others.

#1958

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

#6612

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen is a professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the author of many works on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and hypnosis. Born to Danish parents, he began his studies in France and emigrated to the United States in 1986. His constructivist analysis of the co-production of psychical "facts" emphasises the accuracy of historical accounts of mental disorders.

#1959

José María Mainetti

#22313

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

José María Mainetti was an Argentine physician, surgeon and oncologist. Mainetti was born in Hinojo, Buenos Aires. He spent most of his childhood and youth in La Plata, were his family moved in 1911. He finished his medicine studies in 1932. Since 1940 he started working also as a professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata.

#1960

Michael Bordt

#47814

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Michael Bordt SJ is a German philosopher and academic. He is a professor at the Munich School of Philosophy and specialized in the area of ancient philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. Since 2011 he has been the chair of the Institute of Philosophy and Leadership at Munich.

#1961

Bence Nanay

#32845

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Bence Nanay is Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp and has worked as a film critic. He is co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

#1962

Benedikt Löwe

#41445

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Benedikt Löwe is a German mathematician and logician working at the universities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Cambridge. He is known for his work on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics, as well as for initiating the interdisciplinary conference series Foundations of the Formal Sciences and Computability in Europe .

#1963

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

#10669

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Philippe-Joseph Salazar , a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on 10 February 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco. Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. In 2015 he received a presti...

#1964

Daniel A. Helminiak

#18310

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Daniel A. Helminiak is a Catholic priest, theologian and author in the United States. He is most widely known for his international best-seller What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. He was a professor in the Department of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology at the University of West Georgia, near Atlanta. There from 1995 to 1997 and 2000 until early 2018, he regularly taught Human Sexuality, Statistics for the Social Sciences, Foundations of Neuroscience, and Animal Mind. On the graduate level he has taught courses related to the psychology of spirituality, which is his specia...

#1965

Marshall R. Urist

#34903

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Marshall R. Urist was a United States orthopedic surgeon working at University of California, Los Angeles who made discoveries in treating broken bones. He was best known for his discovery in 1965 of bone morphogenic protein.

#1966

Danielle Macbeth

#34296

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Danielle Monique Macbeth is a Canadian philosopher whose work focuses on the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of logic. She is T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania where she has taught since 1989. Macbeth also taught at the University of Hawaii from 1986–1989.

#1967

Chiara Bottici

#35661

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Chiara Bottici is an Italian philosopher, critical theorist and historian of philosophy. Biography Bottici is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, New York. Bottici studied philosophy at the University of Florence, then obtained a PhD from the European University Institute in 2004. After a post-doctorate at the SUM under the guidance of Roberto Esposito, she taught at the University of Frankfurt, subsequently joining the faculty of The New School for Social Research, where she has been teaching since 2...

#1968

Kah Kyung Cho

#21006

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Kah Kyung Cho was a Korean-American philosopher. He specialized in phenomenology, hermeneutics, contemporary German philosophy, and east–west comparative philosophy. He had worked with continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He taught at State University of New York from 1971 to 2017 and took retirement as a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor. Cho's seminars have traditionally centered on discussions anchored in close textual and hermeneutical readings of works in the phenomenological tradition, including Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, ...

#1969

J. Budziszewski

#30051

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

J. Budziszewski is an American philosopher and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 1981. He specializes in ethics, political philosophy and the interaction of these two fields with religion and theology.

#1970

Rudolf Makkreel

#36222

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Rudolf Adam Makkreel was an American philosopher and Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Emory University. Early life Rudolf Makkreel was born in 1939 in Antwerp, Belgium and grew up in The Hague in the Netherlands. He immigrated to the US in 1951 and received his BA and PhD from Columbia University.

#1971

Gadis Arivia

#20868

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gadis Arivia is an Indonesian feminist philosopher, lecturer, scholar, and activist. While teaching feminism and philosophy at the University of Indonesia, Arivia founded , Indonesia's first feminist journal, in 1996. She was arrested by the Suharto government for protesting against the regime in 1998.

#1972

Adam Swift

#22415

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Adam Swift is a British political philosopher and sociologist who specialises in debates surrounding liberal egalitarianism. He has published books on communitarianism, on the philosophical aspects of school choice, on social justice, on the ethics of the family, and on how to make education policy, as well as an introduction to contemporary political philosophy.

#1973

Sandro Galea

#19946

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Sandro Galea is a physician, epidemiologist, and author. He is the Robert A. Knox professor and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is the former Chair of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Galea is past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2012, chairing two of the organization's reports on mental health in the military. He formerly served as chair of the New York City Department of Health and Menta...

#1974

György Márkus

#33643

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

György Márkus was a Hungarian philosopher, belonging to the small circle of critical theorists closely associated with György Lukács and usually referred to as the Budapest School. Biography Márkus was born in Budapest in 1934 and survived the Holocaust as a young boy. After the war and the final victory of the Communist government he was sent to complete his philosophical training at Lomonosov University in Moscow from 1953 until 1957. There he met his future wife Maria Márkus who was also studying philosophy. They had their first of two sons György in 1956 and Andras two years later in Bud...

#1975

Julie Buring

#45383

Overall Influence

Julie Elizabeth Buring is an American epidemiologist and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Biography Buring works with Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is a professor in the epidemiology department at Harvard and also a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. She is the chair of the Institutional Review Board of Harvard Medical School. She graduated from Pomona College , University of Washington , and the Harvard School of Public Health .

#1976

Malcolm Budd

#51716

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Malcolm Budd is a British philosopher. Biography Budd studied mathematics and philosophy at Jesus College, Cambridge. He taught at University College London from 1970 until 2001, and was appointed the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic from 1998 until his retirement. He now holds an emeritus position.

#1977

Isabelle Soerjomataram

#61737

Overall Influence

#1978

Gerald Weissmann

Gerald Weissmann

#17833

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Gerald Weissmann was an Austrian-born American physician/scientist, editor, and essayist. He was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. He was editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal. At the time of his death he was its book review editor. In 1965, he was one of the discoverers of liposomes and is credited with coining that term.

#1979

James Brusseau

#44907

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

James Brusseau is a philosopher specializing in contemporary Continental philosophy, history of philosophy and ethics. In 1994 Brusseau joined the faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the Mexican National University in Mexico City teaching graduate courses in philosophy and comparative literature. He has also taught in Europe and the California State University. Currently he teaches at Pace University in New York City. Brusseau took a Ph.D. in Philosophy under the direction of Alphonso Lingis He is currently a professor at Pace University in New York City. He is married to a Spaniard and has t...

#1980

Hasok Chang

#22844

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Hasok Chang is a Korean-born American historian and philosopher of science currently serving as the Hans Rausing Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a board member of the Philosophy of Science Association. He previously served as president of the British Society for the History of Science from 2012 to 2014.

#1981

Menachem Kellner

Menachem Kellner

#21515

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Menachem Kellner is an American-Israeli academic and Jewish scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy with a particular focus on the philosophy of Maimonides. He is a retired Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa and is the founding chair of the Department of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He has taught courses in philosophy, religious studies, medieval and modern Jewish philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, the College of William & Mary, the University of Virginia, and the University of Haifa. He is probably best known for his book Must...

#1982

Jiang Qing

#21952

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jiang Qing is a contemporary Chinese Confucian. He is best known for his criticism of New Confucianism, which according to him, deviated from the original Confucian principles and is overly influenced by Western liberal democracy. He proposes an alternative path for China: Constitutional Confucianism, also known as Political Confucianism, or Institutional Confucianism, through the trilateral parliament framework.

#1983

David Hawkins

#5312

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

David Hawkins was an American scientist whose interests included the philosophy of science, mathematics, economics, childhood science education, and ethics. He was also an administrative assistant at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory and later one of its official historians. Together with Herbert A. Simon, he discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem.

#1984

Seán Patrick O'Malley

Seán Patrick O'Malley

#4318

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Seán Patrick O'Malley is an American cardinal of the Catholic Church serving as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Boston in Massachusetts since 2003. He is a member of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and was elevated by the Vatican to the rank of cardinal in 2006.

#1985

C. D. C. Reeve

#45075

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

C. D. C. Reeve is a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works primarily in Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. He has also published work in the philosophy of sex and love, and on film. He has translated many Ancient Greek texts, mostly by Plato and Aristotle.

#1986

Edward H. Sargent

#52286

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Edward H. Sargent is a Canadian scientist, who serves as University Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Vice-President of Research and Innovation, and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Toronto. He also is the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. He will join the Departments of Chemistry and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University, and will be affiliated with the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern.

#1987

Walter Brown Shelley

#61862

Overall Influence

#1988

R. Rox Anderson

R. Rox Anderson

#28655

Overall Influence

1950 - 2007 (57 years)

Richard Rox Anderson, FAAD , is a Boston-based dermatologist and entrepreneur. Education and career Anderson earned his BS degree from MIT, and then pursued his MD degree graduating magna cum laude from the joint MIT-Harvard medical program, Health Sciences and Technology. Anderson completed his residency in dermatology and research fellowship at Harvard University.

#1989

Arthur J. Moss

#54927

Overall Influence

1932 - 2018 (86 years)

Arthur Jay Moss was an American cardiologist. Early life and education Moss was born June 21, 1931, and attended Yale University graduating in 1953 with a degree in psychology. He then attended Harvard Medical School and graduated in 1957. After completing his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital, he then served in the United States Navy. In 1961, he joined the University of Rochester Medical School where he completed his training in cardiology in 1966.

#1990

Hector Zagal

#9404

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Héctor Jesús Zagal Arreguín is a Mexican philosopher, essayist, novelist, and associate member of Opus Dei. As a scholar he specializes in Aristotle. Academic career Zagal has written books on ecology, ethics, Aristotle, gastronomy and literature. He obtained a PhD from the Universidad de Navarra, with a dissertation on Aristotle's epagoge and has since then written several articles and books on Aristotle. He has written on several topics of culture, politics, art history and literature. He gained notoriety in the 2006 presidential election, when he wrote two books on two respective candidates...

#1991

T. Berry Brazelton

T. Berry Brazelton

#3759

Overall Influence

1918 - 2018 (100 years)

Thomas Berry Brazelton was an American pediatrician, author, and the developer of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale . Brazelton hosted the cable television program What Every Baby Knows, and wrote a syndicated newspaper column. He wrote more than two hundred scholarly papers and twenty-four books.

#1992

Aseem Shukla

#6040

Overall Influence

Aseem Ravindra Shukla is the Director of Minimally Invasive Surgery in the Department of Urology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, PA and is a Professor of Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Shukla is the co-founder and board member of the Hindu American Foundation.

#1993

Jonael Schickler

#47813

Overall Influence

1976 - 2002 (26 years)

Jonael Angelus Schickler was a Swiss philosopher who died in a rail crash in England at the age of 25. Life Schickler was born in Dornach, Switzerland. His family later moved to Forest Row, East Sussex, and he attended Michael Hall, the Rudolf Steiner school located there. At the age of sixteen he attended Sevenoaks School.

#1994

Werner Ulrich

#18791

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Werner Ulrich is a Swiss social scientist and practical philosopher, and a former professor of the theory and practice of social planning at the University of Fribourg. He is known as one of the originators of critical systems thinking and in particular for the development of critical systems heuristics.

#1995

Raymond Tallis

#12374

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Raymond C. Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic and a retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist. Specialising in geriatrics, Tallis served on several UK commissions on medical care of the aged and was an editor or major contributor to two key textbooks in the field, The Clinical Neurology of Old Age and Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology.

#1996

Peter Lipton

#45617

Overall Influence

1954 - 2007 (53 years)

Peter Lipton was the Hans Rausing Professor and Head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, and a fellow of King's College, until his unexpected death in November 2007. According to his obituary on the Cambridge web site, he was "recognized as one of the leading philosophers of science and epistemologists in the world."

#1997

Joseph Volpe

#56933

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Joseph J. Volpe is an American physician, the Bronson Crothers Professor of Neurology, Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and Neurologist-in-Chief Emeritus at Boston Children's Hospital. He was an early contributor to the field of neonatal neurology and has authored several editions of an influential textbook, Neurology of the Newborn.

#1998

George Pitcher

#37178

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

George Willard Pitcher was an American philosopher. He was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University from 1956 to 1982. He was an expert on the work of George Berkeley and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

#1999

Fernand Labrie

#38147

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Fernand Labrie, was a Canadian medical researcher who specializes in endocrinological research and prostate cancer research. Life and career Born in Laurierville, Quebec, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1957 from the Séminaire de Québec. He received his Doctor of Medicine in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1966 from Université Laval. From 1966 to 1969, he took his postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sussex.

#2000

Alain Fischer

#19245

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Alain Fischer is a doctor, professor of pediatric immunology and French researcher in biology. Biography Alain Fischer's father had wanted to become a doctor, but had been prevented from doing so by the numerous clauses established against the Jews of Hungary. Alain Fischer says his father was one of the reasons he has made a medical career choice.

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