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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#201
Jules Vuillemin
#2092
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Jules Vuillemin was a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge at the prestigious Collège de France, in Paris, from 1962 to 1990, succeeding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Professor emeritus from 1991 to 2001. He was an Invited Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey .
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Seyla Benhabib
#2392
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-born American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008.
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Michael Hardt
#923
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as dominating contemporary life, such as class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services , have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire was published in August 2004. It outlines an idea first propounded in Empire, which is that of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
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Elliott Sober
#1688
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elliott R. Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sober is noted for his work in philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science.
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Bhikkhu Bodhi
#275
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bhikkhu Bodhi , born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk ordained in Sri Lanka. He teaches in the New York and New Jersey area. He was appointed the second president of the Buddhist Publication Society and has edited and authored several publications grounded in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
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Ágnes Heller
#2765
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ágnes Heller was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
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Alex Callinicos
#2177
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and serves as its International Secretary. He is also editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
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Bruno Bosteels
#2647
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Bruno Bosteels is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his work on Latin American literature and culture and his translations of the work of Alain Badiou . Theory of the Subject appeared in 2009, Bosteels' translation of Badiou's Théorie du sujet .
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Robert Paul Wolff
#4011
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Robert Paul Wolff is an American political philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wolff has written widely on topics in political philosophy, including Marxism, tolerance , political justification, and democracy.
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Jonathan Dancy
#3549
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Peter Dancy is a British philosopher, who has written on ethics and epistemology. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin and Research Professor at the University of Reading. He taught previously for many years at the University of Keele.
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David Lewis
#3731
Overall Influence
1941 - 2001 (60 years)
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
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John Passmore
#3734
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
John Passmore AC was an Australian philosopher. Life John Passmore was born on 9 September 1914 in Manly, Sydney, where he grew up. He was educated at Sydney Boys High School. He originally aspired to be a school teacher, but the terms of his employment required him to do coursework in philosophy, a discipline which was to absorb him. He subsequently graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours in English literature and philosophy whilst studying with a view to become a secondary-school teacher. In 1934 he accepted the position of assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney, continuing teaching there until 1949.
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Daisaku Ikeda
#190
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher, educator, author, and nuclear disarmament advocate. He served as the third president and then honorary president of the Soka Gakkai, the largest of Japan's new religious movementss. Ikeda is the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International , the world's largest Buddhist lay organization, which claims to have approximately 12 million practitioners in 192 countries and territories, more than 1.5 million of whom reside outside of Japan as of 2012.
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Nuel Belnap
#4327
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. is an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his retirement in 2011.
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Robert T. Pennock
#3863
Overall Influence
Robert T. Pennock is a philosopher working on the Avida digital organism project at Michigan State University where he has been full professor since 2000. Pennock was a witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, and described how intelligent design is an updated form of creationism and not science, pointing out that the arguments were essentially the same as traditional creationist arguments with adjustments to the message to eliminate explicit mention of God and the Bible as well as adopting a postmodern deconstructionist language. ...
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Michel Weber
#2281
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michel Weber is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international scholarly societies and publication projects devoted to Whitehead and the global relevance of process philosophy.
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Ned Block
#1146
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ned Joel Block is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psychology at New York University since 1996.
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Kai Nielsen
#5311
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Kai Nielsen was an American professor, latterly emeritus, of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He specialized in naturalism, metaphilosophy, ethics, analytic philosophy, social and political philosophy. Nielsen also wrote about philosophy of religion, and was an advocate of contemporary atheism. He was also known for his defense of utilitarianism, writing in response to Bernard Williams's criticism of it.
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Jan Narveson
#4212
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Jan Narveson is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An anarcho-capitalist and contractarian, Narveson's ideology is deeply influenced by the thought of Robert Nozick and David Gauthier.
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Jon Barwise
#3939
Overall Influence
1942 - 2000 (58 years)
Kenneth Jon Barwise was an American mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used. Education and career He was born in Independence, Missouri, to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise.
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Will Kymlicka
#2623
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
William Kymlicka is a Canadian political philosopher best known for his work on multiculturalism and animal ethics. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University at Kingston, and Recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. For over 20 years, he has lived a vegan lifestyle, and he is married to the Canadian author and animal rights activist Sue Donaldson.
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Douglas N. Walton
#2394
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Douglas Neil Walton was a Canadian academic and author, known for his books and papers on argumentation, logical fallacies and informal logic. He was a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and before that , he held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor. Walton's work has been used to better prepare legal arguments and to help develop artificial intelligence.
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Czesław Lejewski
#4217
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Czesław Lejewski was a Polish philosopher and logician, and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic. He studied under Jan Łukasiewicz and Karl Popper in the London School of Economics, and W. V. O. Quine.
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David Wiggins
#5648
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Wiggins is an English moral philosopher, metaphysician, and philosophical logician working especially on identity and issues in meta-ethics. Biography David Wiggins was born on 8 March 1933 in London, the son of Norman and Diana Wiggins . He attended St Paul's School before reading philosophy at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree. His tutor was J. L. Ackrill.
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Gary L. Francione
#3512
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American academic in the fields of law and philosophy. He is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia . He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal ethics.
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Doug Altman
#4321
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Douglas Graham Altman FMedSci was an English statistician best known for his work on improving the reliability and reporting of medical research and for highly cited papers on statistical methodology. He was professor of statistics in medicine at the University of Oxford, founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group, and co-founder of the international Equator Network for health research reliability.
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Levi Bryant
#5754
Overall Influence
Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. Bryant has written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. His blog, Larval Subjects, was founded in 2006 and had over 2 million hits as of September 2011.
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Stuart Hampshire
#3574
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire was an English philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.
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Jacques Rancière
#1992
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.
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Noël Carroll
#3563
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Noël Carroll is an American philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Although Carroll is best known for his work in the philosophy of film , he has also published journalism, works on philosophy of art generally, theory of media, and also philosophy of history. As of 2012, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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Josef Pieper
#3105
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and an important figure in the resurgence of interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in early-to-mid 20th-century philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance; Leisure, the Basis of Culture; and Guide to Thomas Aquinas .
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Mark Rowlands
#5087
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mark Rowlands is a Welsh writer and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. He is known within academic philosophy for his work on the animal mind and is one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism, or the extended mind, the view that thoughts, memories, desires and beliefs can be stored outside the brain and the skull. His works include Animal Rights , The Body in Mind , The Nature of Consciousness , Animals Like...
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Mihailo Marković
#4115
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Mihailo Marković was a Serbian philosopher who gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s as a proponent of the Praxis School, a Marxist humanist movement that originated in Yugoslavia. He was a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia, co-author of the SANU Memorandum and a prominent supporter of Slobodan Milošević's politics in the late 1980s and 1990s.
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Donald T. Campbell
#2105
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
Donald Thomas Campbell was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term evolutionary epistemology and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Campbell as the 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Raymond Frey
#6116
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Raymond G. Frey was a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, specializing in moral, political and legal philosophy, and author or editor of a number of books. He was a noted critic of animal rights.
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John Llewelyn
#3341
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
John Llewelyn was a Welsh-born British philosopher whose extensive body of work, published over a period of more than forty years, spans the divide between Analytical and Continental schools of contemporary thought. He has conjoined the rigorous approach to matters of meaning and logic typical of the former and the depth and range of reference typical of the latter in a constructive and critical engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
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Allan Gotthelf
#4839
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Allan Stanley Gotthelf was an American philosopher. He was a scholar of the philosophies of both Aristotle and Ayn Rand. Academic career Allan Stanley Gotthelf was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 30, 1942. He received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1963 and a Master of Arts in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University in 1964. He then received a Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from Columbia University in 1972 and 1975, respectively, where he studied under professors such as Aristotelian scholar John Herman Randall, Jr. An ...
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Pierre Macherey
#2079
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Pierre Macherey is a French Marxist philosopher and literary critic at the University of Lille Nord de France. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume Reading Capital, Macherey is a central figure in the development of French post-structuralism and Marxism. His work is influential in literary theory and Continental philosophy in Europe though it is generally little read in the United States.
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Robert Bernasconi
#4083
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#240
Richard Brandt
#3970
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Richard Booker Brandt was an American philosopher working in the utilitarian tradition in moral philosophy. Education and career Brandt was originally educated at Denison University, a Baptist institution he was shepherded to by his minister father, and graduated in 1930 with majors in philosophy and classical studies. In 1933 he earned another B.A., this time in the philosophy of religion, from Cambridge University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1936. He taught at Swarthmore College before becoming Chair of the Department of Philosophy the University of Michigan in 1964, where he taught with Charles Stevenson and William K.
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Tyler Burge
#3480
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy.
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Tibor Machan
#3510
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Tibor Richard Machan was a Hungarian-American philosopher. A professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, Machan held the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California until 31 December 2014.
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Wolfgang Stegmüller
#5627
Overall Influence
1923 - 1991 (68 years)
Wolfgang Stegmüller was a German-Austrian philosopher who made important contributions in philosophy of science and analytic philosophy. Biography W. Stegmüller studied economics and philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. In 1944 he graduated as "Diplom-Volkswirt" and one year later he obtained a PhD in economics. Also at the University of Innsbruck he obtained in 1947 a PhD in philosophy with the thesis Erkenntnis und Sein in der modernen Ontologie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Erkenntnismetaphysik Nicolai Hartmanns: eine kritische Untersuchung. In 1949 he habilitated with the thes...
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Alan Soble
#4166
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alan Gerald Soble is an American philosopher and author of several books on the philosophy of sex. He taught at the University of New Orleans from 1986 to 2006. He is currently Adjunct Professor of philosophy at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
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Peter D. Klein
#6305
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Peter David Klein is an American philosopher specializing in issues in epistemology who spent most of his career at Rutgers University. Education and career He received a BA at Earlham College , and an MA and PhD from Yale University .
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Edgar Morin
#622
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information who has been recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought" , and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. As he explains: He holds two bachelors: one in history and geography and one in law. He never did a Ph.D. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Euro...
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Ernst von Glasersfeld
#1265
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Ernst von Glasersfeld was a philosopher, and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, research associate at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, and adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a member of the board of trustees of the American Society for Cybernetics, from which he received the McCulloch Memorial Award in 1991. He was a member of the scientific board of the Instituto Piaget, Lisbon. Glasersfeld is known for the development of radical constructivism.
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Graham Oppy
#4396
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Graham Robert Oppy is an Australian philosopher whose main area of research is the philosophy of religion. He currently holds the posts of Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Research at Monash University and serves as CEO of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, Chief Editor of the Australasian Philosophical Review, Associate Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and serves on the editorial boards of Philo, Philosopher's Compass, Religious Studies, and Sophia. He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2009.
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Alexander Nehamas
#3310
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alexander Nehamas is a Greek-born American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature and the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1990. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and Member of the American Philosophical Society , the Academy of Athens since 2018. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and literary theory.
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Raoul Vaneigem
#2040
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970.
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