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,
#2051
Susanna Siegel
#49450
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Susanna Siegel is an American philosopher. She is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and well known for her work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, especially on perception.
Go to Profile#2052
Dale Jacquette
#50609
Overall Influence
1953 - 2016 (63 years)
Dale Jacquette was an American analytic philosopher. At the time of his death, he was Professor Ordinarius of Philosophy at the University of Bern. Jacquette had previously served on the faculty of Penn State University. He received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in 1975, and his PhD in the same subject from Brown University in 1983, writing a dissertation on the logic of intention supervised by Roderick Chisholm. Jacquette had broad research interests in the philosophy of intentionality, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy.
Go to Profile#2053
Yuk Hui
#28735
Overall Influence
Yuk Hui is a Hong Kong philosopher and professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is known for his writings on philosophy and technology. Hui has been described as one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers of technology.
Go to Profile#2054
Scott L. Friedman
#32584
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Scott L. Friedman is an American scientist, professor and physician who works in the field of hepatology. Friedman has conducted pioneering research into the underlying causes of scarring, or fibrosis, associated with chronic liver disease, by characterizing the key fibrogenic cell type, the hepatic stellate cell His laboratory has also discovered a novel tumor suppressor gene, KLF6 that is inactivated in a number of human cancers including primary liver cancer. Friedman is the Fishberg Professor of Medicine, and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Go to Profile#2055
Paul Werbos
#2176
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul John Werbos is an American social scientist and machine learning pioneer. He is best known for his 1974 dissertation, which first described the process of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. He also was a pioneer of recurrent neural networks.
Go to Profile#2056
Shlomit C. Schuster
#28098
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Shlomit C. Schuster was an Israeli Philosophical Counselor, and considered a pioneer in the Philosophical counseling field. Her first book is considered a source of learning and teaching Philosophical counseling .
Go to Profile#2057
Bente Klarlund Pedersen
#63728
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#2058
Yves Agid
#22141
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Yves Agid is a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, cell biologist, neurochemist, academician, university professor, hospital doctor, researcher in biology and scientist specializing in neurosciences. Early life and education Yves Agid is the son of university professor Rene Agid and Swedish artist painter Sylvia Stave. Rene Agid was a close friend of Romain Gary. The latter dedicated his novel The Promise at Dawn to Rene and Sylvia Agid.
Go to Profile#2059
Julio Cabrera
#52244
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Julio Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brazil. He is a retired professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brasília and former head of the department. Previously he taught in Argentina, at the National University of Córdoba, the University of Belgrano and then in Brazil at the Federal University of Santa Maria. He is best known for his works on "negative ethics" and cinema and philosophy. Other areas of philosophy that he deals with are philosophy of language, logic and Latin American philosophy.
Go to Profile#2060
Egon Diczfalusy
#63852
Overall Influence
#2061
Fred Poché
#40083
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Fred Poché is a French philosopher. Bachelor of philosophy , higher degree in language sciences from the University of Paris III : Sorbonne nouvelle, PhD in philosophy , and accreditation awarded by the University of Strasbourg as supervisor of doctoral students. He is professor of contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of the West in Angers. His research concerns social philosophy and covers the following fields: recognition, dignity, vulnerability, memories, wounds, racism, contextuality and politics .
Go to Profile#2062
Stanley Plotkin
#14793
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Stanley Alan Plotkin is an American physician who works as a consultant to vaccine manufacturers, such as Sanofi Pasteur, as well as biotechnology firms, non-profits and governments. In the 1960s, he played a pivotal role in discovery of a vaccine against rubella virus while working at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Plotkin was a member of Wistar’s active research faculty from 1960 to 1991. Today, in addition to his emeritus appointment at Wistar, he is emeritus professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, Vaccines, is the standard reference on the subject. He is a...
Go to Profile#2063
Leonard Linsky
#58909
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Leonard Linsky was an American philosopher of language. He was an Emeritus Professor of the University of Chicago. Philosophical work Linsky was best known for work on the theory of reference, and also as an historian of early analytical philosophy. He is often cited as an example of the "orthodox view" in the theory of reference. He questioned the "intensional isomorphism" concept of Rudolf Carnap.
Go to Profile#2064
M. C. Chang
#63951
Overall Influence
#2065
Bruce Ellis Benson
#50063
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Bruce Ellis Benson is a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College in Illinois. Bibliography Books written Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Go to Profile#2066
Juan David García Bacca
#27290
Overall Influence
1901 - 1992 (91 years)
Juan David García Bacca was a Spanish-Venezuelan philosopher and university professor. He was born in Pamplona on June 26, 1901, and passed away on August 5, 1992, in Quito, Ecuador. Bacca began his education under the Claretians and was ordained as a priest in 1925. He continued his studies at the University of Munich, the University of Zurich, and the University of Paris. However, during the 1930s, he left the Church and pursued philosophy at the University of Barcelona. In 1936 after criticizing Francisco Franco, Bacca was forced to live in exile. He first traveled to Ecuador where he taught at the Central University of Ecuador .
Go to Profile#2067
John Zerzan
#30066
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Edward Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocates drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication and symbolic thought .
Go to Profile#2068
Markku Laakso
#55239
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Markku Laakso is a Finnish professor of medicine and a type 2 diabetes researcher. He was awarded the Matti Äyräpää Prize in 2007, the Kelly West Award in 2008, and the Finnish Science Award in 2015.
Go to Profile#2069
Margaret Dauler Wilson
#56495
Overall Influence
1939 - 1998 (59 years)
Margaret Dauler Wilson was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at Princeton University between 1970 and 1998. Biography Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wilson earned a BA from Vassar College in 1960 and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University five years later. While at Harvard she was a student of Burton Dreben. Wilson was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard in 1960–61 and then studied at Oxford University in 1963–64. Wilson spent the early years of her career as an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University , and went on to teach at the Rocke...
Go to Profile#2070
Jay W. Richards
#21390
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jay Wesley Richards is an American analytic philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. He serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Business at the Catholic University of America and the executive editor of The Stream and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. A former Presbyterian, Richards is now a Catholic.
Go to Profile#2071
Chin Liew Ten
#22394
Overall Influence
Chin Liew Ten , also known as C. L. Ten, is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and former Head of the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore. Before that, he was Professor of Philosophy and Acting Head of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Bioethics at Monash University, Australia.
Go to Profile#2072
Roméo Dallaire
#685
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Roméo Antonius Dallaire is a Canadian retired politician and military officer who was a senator from Quebec from 2005 to 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. He notably was the force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against Tutsis. Dallaire is a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.
Go to Profile#2073
Calvin Normore
#55383
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Calvin Normore is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an expert in medieval philosophy and the history of logic. Life and career Normore was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, the son of former Newfoundland and Labrador New Democratic Party leader Calvin Normore. He earned a PhD at the University of Toronto in 1976. He has taught philosophy at Princeton University, University of Toronto and McGill University, where he held the Macdonald Chair in Moral Philosophy, before joining the UCLA faculty.
Go to Profile#2074
Jean-Marc Ferry
#24263
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Marc Ferry is a French philosopher who is best known for his book Les puissances de l'expérience , described by Paul Ricoeur as "one of the most important works recently published in the field of social and political philosophy". He has also translated the work of Jürgen Habermas, by whom he was influenced, into French.
Go to Profile#2075
Ken Goldberg
#7050
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences , Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Go to Profile#2076
Robert Denoon Cumming
#52369
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Robert Denoon Cumming was a Canadian-American philosopher and historian of twentieth-century Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology. He taught at Columbia University from 1948 to 1985, when he retired as Frederick E. Woodbridge professor emeritus of philosophy.
Go to Profile#2077
Anthony E. Pegg
#64231
Overall Influence
#2078
Prof. Per Björntorp
#64247
Overall Influence
#2079
Eberhardt Ritz
#64296
Overall Influence
#2080
Branko Bošnjak
#51306
Overall Influence
1923 - 1996 (73 years)
Branko Bošnjak was a Croatian philosopher, member of the Praxis school in the former Yugoslavia. Bošnjak was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb and for a period a head of the Department for History of Philosophy and a dean of the faculty. He was a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He died in Zagreb and was buried in Mirogoj Cemetery.
Go to Profile#2081
Ross J. Baldessarini
#61184
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Ross J. Baldessarini , a psychopharmacologist, is the Director, International Consortium for Bipolar & Psychotic Disorders Research at McLean Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#2082
Sarvajna
#8748
Overall Influence
Sarvajña was a Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher of the 16th century. The word "Sarvajna" in Sanskrit literally means "the all knowing". His father was Kumbara Malla and his mother was Mallaladevi. His birth anniversary is celebrated on February 20 every year. He belongs to the caste of Kumbara. He is famous for his pithy three-lined poems called tripadi . He is also referred as Sarvagna in modern translation.
Go to Profile#2083
Zoltan Istvan
#19148
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Zoltan Istvan Gyurko, professionally known as Zoltan Istvan , is an American transhumanist, journalist, entrepreneur, political candidate, and futurist. Formerly a reporter for the National Geographic Channel, Istvan now writes futurist, transhumanist, secular and political-themed articles for major media, including The New York Times. He believes transhumanism will grow into a mainstream social movement in the 2020s. Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, a philosophical science fiction novel.
Go to Profile#2084
Robert L. Holmes
#40546
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Robert L. Holmes is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, and an expert on issues of peace and nonviolence. Holmes specializes in ethics, and in social and political philosophy. He has written numerous articles and several books on those topics, and has been invited to address national and international conferences.
Go to Profile#2085
Eduardo Rabossi
#32437
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Eduardo Rabossi was an Argentine philosopher and human rights activist. Biography Eduardo Rabossi was born in Buenos Aires on March 20, 1930 and graduated in Law at the University of Buenos Aires in 1955. Afterwards, he obtained his M.A. on philosophy at Duke University. The UBA was intervened by the military government in 1966, so he resigned to his work as a teacher and worked in investigations at the Oxford university instead.
Go to Profile#2086
Meera Nanda
#7015
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Meera Nanda is an Indian writer and historian of science, who has authored several works critiquing the influence of Hindutva, postcolonialism and postmodernism on science, and the flourishing of pseudoscience and vedic science. In 2019–2020, she was a Guest Faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Pune.
Go to Profile#2087
Frigga Haug
#20110
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Frigga Haug is a German socialist-feminist sociologist and philosopher. Life Frigga Langenberger was born in Mülheim. She studied sociology and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. In 1963, she interrupted her studies to move to Cologne and give birth to a daughter. In 1965 she married a second time to the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug. She graduated in sociology in 1971, and gained a PhD in sociology and social psychology in 1976.
Go to Profile#2088
Geert De Schutter
#64742
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#2089
Robert Ulanowicz
#7398
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Edward Ulanowicz is an American theoretical ecologist and philosopher of Polish descent who in his search for a unified theory of ecology has formulated a paradigm he calls Process Ecology. He was born September 17, 1943, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Go to Profile#2090
Renford Bambrough
#41747
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
John Renford Bambrough was a British philosopher. He was fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 1950-1999, where he held the positions of Dean and President . Life John Renford Bambrough was born in Silksworth, Sunderland, England on 29 April 1926. He was born into a mining background, his father having been an electrician at Silksworth Colliery. And he himself worked, as part of his national service, in a coalmine at Wearmouth Colliery from 1944 to 1945 as a Bevin Boy.
Go to Profile#2091
Luiz Felipe Pondé
#32488
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Luiz Felipe de Cerqueira e Silva Pondé is a Brazilian writer and professor of philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. He was awarded a Doctor's Degree by the University of Sao Paulo, together with an exchange program with the University of Paris. He finished his Post-Doctorate at the University of Tel Aviv. Currently, he works as a professor in the Brazilian Educational Institution Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado and Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.
Go to Profile#2092
Joel Roth
#13545
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joel Roth is a prominent American rabbi in the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the rabbinical body of Conservative Judaism. He is a former member and chair of the assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which deals with questions of Jewish law and tradition, and serves as the Louis Finkelstein Professor of Talmud and Jewish Law at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, where he formerly served as dean of the Rabbinical School. He is also Rosh Yeshiva of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Israel, an institution founded and maintained by the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and under the academic auspices of JTS.
Go to Profile#2093
Alison McIntyre
#57019
Overall Influence
Alison McIntyre is the Virginia Onderdonk '29 Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. McIntyre received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Tufts University, before going on to receive a doctoral degree from Princeton.
Go to Profile#2094
Dafna D. Gladman
#26754
Overall Influence
Dafna D. Gladman, MD, FRCPC, is a Canadian doctor and medical researcher working in the fields of psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and rheumatoid arthritis. She is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Senior Scientist at the Krembil Research Institute. She is Deputy Director, Centre for Prognosis Studies in the Rheumatic Diseases , Co-Director, Lupus Clinic, Toronto Western Hospital and Director, Psoriatic Arthritis Program, Toronto Western Hospital.
Go to Profile#2095
David Malament
#26269
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David B. Malament is an American philosopher of science, specializing in the philosophy of physics. Biography Malament attended Stuyvesant High School and received a B.A. in mathematics 1968 at Columbia College, Columbia University, and Ph.D. in philosophy 1975 at Rockefeller University. After teaching for nearly a quarter-century at the University of Chicago, Malament left to become Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is now emeritus. His book Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Th...
Go to Profile#2096
Dan Wikler
#39046
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Isaac Wikler is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health . His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transpl...
Go to Profile#2097
Robert P. Crease
#10747
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert P. Crease is a philosopher and historian of science best known for his work in performance theory and historical research on Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is currently the chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#2098
Kathleen Carley
#4235
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kathleen M. Carley is an American computational social scientist specializing in dynamic network analysis. She is a professor in the School of Computer Science in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds appointments in the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#2099
Noretta Koertge
#12208
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Noretta Koertge is an American philosopher of science noted for her work on Karl Popper and scientific rationality. Career She worked since 1981 as a Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University and is now an Emeritus Professorship. She was editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophy of Science, her election as a Fellow, in 1999, by American Association for the Advancement of Science and her being Editor-in-Chief of The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography . She is also a novelist.
Go to Profile#2100
Richard L. Simmons
#65092
Overall Influence
