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,
#2101
Thomas Naum James
#41677
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Thomas Naum James was a leading American cardiologist during the last half of the twentieth century. He was chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and then president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He is best known for his research in the anatomy of the coronary arteries and the electrical conduction system of the heart. He served as president of the American Heart Association, the International Society and Federation of Cardiology, and the Tenth World Congress of Cardiology. He retired in 2004, and returned to Birmingham, Alabama, where he died in 2010.
Go to Profile#2102
Walter Jaeschke
#55724
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Walter Jaeschke was a German philosopher, educated at Freie Universität Berlin and at the Technischen Universität Berlin, where he studied philosophy, history of religion, and sinology. He directed the critical Gesammelte Werke edition of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He also co-directed critical editions of the works of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Jaeschke is known in particular for his scholarship on Hegel's philosophy of religion.
Go to Profile#2103
Peter A. Singer
#36633
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Peter Alexander Singer, OC, FRSC, is special advisor to the director general of the World Health Organization, and also adjunct professor of medicine at University of Toronto. From 2008-2018 Singer was chief executive officer of Grand Challenges Canada and Director of the Sandra Rotman Centre, University Health Network. From 1996-2006 Singer was director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.
Go to Profile#2104
Christopher Tindale
#40150
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christopher William Tindale is a Canadian philosopher specializing in rhetoric, argumentation theory, and ancient Greek philosophy. Tindale is an editor of the journal Informal Logic, and currently serves as the chair of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric. He has published numerous books and articles, translated into several languages, with a focus on argumentation and rhetoric.
Go to Profile#2105
Roman Frigg
#37429
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Roman Frigg is a Swiss philosopher, Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and director of its Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. In 2016 he was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award.
Go to Profile#2106
Robert Kirk
#32446
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Robert Kirk is a British philosopher. He is emeritus professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Kirk is best known for his work on philosophical zombies—putatively unconscious beings physically and behaviourally identical to human beings. Although Kirk did not invent this idea, he introduced the term zombie in his 1974 papers "Sentience and Behaviour" and "Zombies v. Materialists". In the latter he offered a formulation of physicalism that aimed to make clear that if zombies are possible, physicalism is false: an argument that was not much noticed until David Chalmers's development of it in The Conscious Mind.
Go to Profile#2107
Francis Jeanson
#12602
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Francis Jeanson was a French political activist known for his commitment to the FLN during the Algerian war. Life Although his father's name was Henri, Francis Jeanson was not related to the Henri Jeanson who was a journalist at Le Canard enchaîné, Le Crapouillot, and a screenwriter.
Go to Profile#2108
Øystein Linnebo
#53308
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Øystein Linnebo is a Norwegian philosopher. As of 2020 he is currently employed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, having earlier held a position as Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Go to Profile#2109
Ryan T. Anderson
#24754
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Ryan Timothy Anderson is an American conservative political philosopher who is best known for his opposition to same-sex marriage. He is currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was previously the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Discourse, the Witherspoon Institute's online journal.
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James F. Fries
#63012
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
James Franklin Fries was an American rheumatologist and author.
Go to Profile#2111
Burghart Schmidt
#25732
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Burghart Schmidt was a German philosopher. He was professor at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Education He was born in Wildeshausen, Oldenburg, Germany. Schmidt was educated in biology, chemistry, physics and then philosophy and history of art at the University of Tübingen. He was coworker for many years of Ernst Bloch, over whom he submitted later also numerous publications, among them the standard work Ernst Bloch . From 1968 to 1977 he worked as a scientific coworker of the philosopher and published his complete work at Suhrkamp. After the graduation in 1982 at the University of Tübingen as a Dr.
Go to Profile#2112
Martin B. Leon
#65509
Overall Influence
#2113
Diderik Batens
#46042
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Diderik Batens , is a Belgian logician and epistemologist at the University of Ghent, faculty of Arts and Philosophy, department of Philosophy and moral sciences. Known chiefly for his work on adaptive and paraconsistent logics, his epistemological views may be broadly characterized as fallibilist.
Go to Profile#2114
Francis J. Beckwith
#16934
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Francis J. "Frank" Beckwith is an American philosopher, professor, scholar, speaker, writer, and lecturer. He is currently Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies, Affiliate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy, at Baylor University, where he first served as Associate Director of Baylor's J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies.
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Jacques Aumont
#23094
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jacques Aumont is a French academic and writer on film theory. Born in Avignon he initially trained as an engineer but started contributing film criticism to Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1960s. He is professor emeritus at University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Go to Profile#2116
Magdi Yacoub
#3392
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub , is an Egyptian retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London, best known for his early work in repairing heart valves with surgeon Donald Ross, adapting the Ross procedure, where the diseased aortic valve is replaced with the person's own pulmonary valve, devising the arterial switch operation in transposition of the great arteries, and establishing the heart transplantation centre at Harefield Hospital in 1980 with a heart transplant for Derrick Morris, who at the time of his death was Europe's longest-surviving heart transplant recipient. Y...
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Arundhati Roy
#2015
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things , which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
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Severino Antinori
#16921
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Severino Antinori is an Italian gynecologist and embryologist. He has publicly taken controversial positions over in vitro fertilisation and human cloning. On 13 May 2016 Antinori was arrested and accused of kidnapping a woman, and stealing her ovules.
Go to Profile#2119
Ofelia Schutte
#43059
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ofelia Schutte is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where she had served as Professor of Philosophy since 2004, and as Professor of Women's Studies from 1999 until 2004. Schutte is recognized by many as a senior Latina feminist philosopher, who has played a crucial role in launching the field of Latin American Philosophy and Latinx philosophy within the United States.
Go to Profile#2120
Ian Rumfitt
#52007
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ian Rumfitt is a British philosopher specializing in the philosophy of language and philosophy of math, who is currently Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Education and career He was educated at Victoria College, Jersey, at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was also a junior research fellow, and at Princeton University. His graduate studies at Oxford were supervised by Sir Michael Dummett. He has taught at Keele University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University College, Oxford, where he served as a tutorial fellow from 1998 until 2005, Birkbeck College, Univer...
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Patricia Blanchette
#44408
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Patricia A. Blanchette is an American philosopher and logician, the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in the history of philosophy, history of logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and is the author of a book on the logic of Gottlob Frege.
Go to Profile#2122
Carlos Andrés Segovia
#45290
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Carlos Andrés Segovia y Corral, 2nd Marquis of Salobreña , is a Spanish nobleman and academic specialising in philosophy and religious studies. Segovia y Corral is an independent philosopher and scholar, formerly associate professor of religious studies at Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, and currently lecturer in philosophy at that same university.
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Tomas Ganz
#45816
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Tomas Ganz is an American physician-scientist who has made important contributions to innate immunology and the pathophysiology of iron regulation. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1948, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. He studied physics at University of California, Los Angeles and obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1976 and an M.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. In 1983, after receiving training in pulmonology and internal medicine, he became a faculty member at UCLA in the department of medicine.
Go to Profile#2124
Mostafa Malekian
#56834
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mostafa Malekian is a prominent Iranian philosopher, thinker, translator and editor. He is working on a project called Rationality and Spirituality. His most important book, that is about spirituality and wisdom, is A Way to Freedom.
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Gary Dorrien
#28254
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gary John Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.
Go to Profile#2126
Carlo Lottieri
#31030
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Carlo Lottieri is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Verona. He holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Genoa, a M.A. from the Institut Universitaire d’Etudes Européens , a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Paris-Sorbonne University. His research interests cover Philosophy of Law, Federalism, Libertarianism, political theology, Religion and Public Life, Military Ethics, Elitism, Evolutionary Theory of Law, Commons and Private Property, Modern State. He edited many works by Bruno Leoni in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Czech.
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Frederik Stjernfelt
#15768
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Frederik Stjernfelt is a Danish professor and writer. As a professor, he lectures in science studies, history of ideas, and semiotics, at Aalborg University's Copenhagen department. Career Stjernfelt has been working as a reviewer and writer at 'Weekendavisen' since 1994. Earlier in his career, he was employed as an editor at Gyldendal's cultural journal 'Kritik' between 1993 and 2012. Stjernfelt has been a member of 'Danish Academy' since 2001. Also, he is cofounder of the political network 'Fri debat', which functions to promote freedom of speech. Subsequently, he has published a number of...
Go to Profile#2128
Stephen H. Webb
#27419
Overall Influence
1961 - 2016 (55 years)
Stephen H. Webb was a theologian and philosopher of religion. Webb graduated from Wabash College in 1983, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and taught at Wabash College as Professor of Religion and Philosophy from 1988 to 2012. Born in 1961 and reared in Indianapolis, Indiana, he grew up at Englewood Christian Church, an evangelical church in the Restoration Movement. He recounts his experiences there in Taking Religion to School and in an essay, "Recalling: A Theologian Remembers His Church," in Falling Toward Grace: Images of Religion and Culture from the Heartland, ed. Kent Calder and Susan Neville .
Go to Profile#2129
Marilyn Frye
#44826
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Marilyn Frye is an American philosopher and radical feminist theorist. She is known for her theories on sexism, racism, oppression, and sexuality. Her writings offer discussions of feminist topics, such as: white supremacy, male privilege, and gay and lesbian marginalization. Although she approaches the issues from the perspective of justice, she is also engaged with the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology of social categories.
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Javad Tabatabai
#15729
Overall Influence
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Seyyed Javad Tabatabai was an Iranian philosopher and political scientist. He was Professor and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran. Biography Tabatabai, an Iranian Azeri, was born on 14 December 1945 in Tabriz, Iran. His father was a merchant in Bazaar of Tabriz. After pursuing studies in theology, law and philosophy in Tabriz and Tehran, he earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, with a dissertation on Hegel's political philosophy.
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Donald Gotterbarn
#31488
Overall Influence
Donald William Gotterbarn is a computer ethics researcher. Gotterbarn received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1971 from the University of Rochester. He also earned his M. Div. from the Colgate Rochester Divinity School.
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Gerald Berenson
#56333
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Gerald Sanders Berenson was an American cardiologist, heart researcher, and public health specialist who specialized in researching the causes of heart diseases. Berenson's fundamental research revealed that adult heart disease arises from practices and behaviors that begin in childhood. He also discovered that atherosclerosis was significantly more pronounced in individuals who had three or four cardiovascular risk factors compared to those who had none.
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Stuart F. Schlossman
#65942
Overall Influence
#2134
Brian Greenwood
#48304
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sir Brian Mellor Greenwood, CBE, FRCP, FRS is a British physician, biomedical research scientist, academic, and recipient of the first Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize. Greenwood is the Manson Professor of Clinical Tropical Medicine, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Go to Profile#2135
Martin Cohen
#35148
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Martin Cohen is a British philosopher, an editor and reviewer who writes on philosophy, philosophy of science and political philosophy. Biography He studied philosophy and social science at Sussex University where his tutors included some of the early group of philosophers who launched the university's pioneering language and values programme, including Terry Diffey and Bernard Harrison. He obtained a teaching qualification at Keele University and his PhD in philosophy of education from the University of Exeter. After research posts at universities in Britain and Australia, Cohen moved to Fra...
Go to Profile#2136
Michele Marsonet
#59491
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michele Marsonet is professor of philosophy of science and methodology of the human sciences, chairman of the philosophy department and vice-rector for international relations at the University of Genoa in Italy. Having worked as associate professor, first of logic and then of philosophy of science, at the University of Genoa from 1992 to 1999, he was then a full professor of theoretical philosophy and institutions of philosophy. He was also dean of the faculty of arts and humanities of the University of Genoa from 2002 to 2008. His main areas of study are in pragmatism, philosophy of science, metaphysics, methodology of the social sciences, political philosophy and philosophical logic.
Go to Profile#2137
Andrew Pyle
#45263
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Andrew Pyle is a British philosopher on the history of philosophical atomism. Pyle is professor Emeritus in Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where he also received his doctorate. His dissertation was titled Atomism and its Critics: Democritus to Newton. Pyle also writes on the history of science and has given talks within the university on the nature of science historically. Pyle is one of the editors of the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy. Andrew Pyle engaged in an apologetics debate with William Lane Craig in 2008 on the topic: Does the Christian God Exist...
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Paul Sugarbaker
#43620
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Paul Hendrick Sugarbaker is an American surgeon at the Washington Cancer Institute. He is known for developments in surgical oncology of the abdomen, including cytoreductive surgery followed by hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, or HIPEC, a treatment alternately referred to as the Sugarbaker Procedure.
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Michael S. Gottlieb
#8657
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Stuart Gottlieb is an American physician and immunologist known for his 1981 identification of acquired immune deficiency syndrome as a new disease, and for his HIV/AIDS research, HIV/AIDS activism, and philanthropic efforts associated with HIV/AIDS treatment.
Go to Profile#2140
Robert R Redfield III
#66093
Overall Influence
#2141
Yiannis N. Moschovakis
#24984
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Yiannis Nicholas Moschovakis is a set theorist, descriptive set theorist, and recursion theorist, at UCLA. His book Descriptive Set Theory is the primary reference for the subject. He is especially associated with the development of the effective, or lightface, version of descriptive set theory, and he is known for the Moschovakis coding lemma that is named after him.
Go to Profile#2142
Henri Atlan
#8125
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Henri Atlan is a French biophysicist and philosopher. Early life and education Born to a Jewish family in French Algeria, Atlan gained degrees in medicine and biophysics at the University of Paris . He married Liliane Atlan in 1952; they had two children while living in Paris, Miri in 1953 and Michael in 1956. He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley working on ageing and mutation.
Go to Profile#2143
Lori Gruen
#53702
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lori Gruen is an American philosopher, ethicist, and author who is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Gruen is also Professor of Science in Society, and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan.
Go to Profile#2144
José Baselga
#23764
Overall Influence
1959 - 2021 (62 years)
Josep Baselga i Torres, known in Spanish as José Baselga , was a Spanish medical oncologist and researcher focused on the development of novel molecular targeted agents, with a special emphasis in breast cancer. Through his career he was associated with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology, and the Massachusetts General Hospital in their hematology and oncology divisions. He led the development of the breast cancer treatment Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody, that targets the HER2 protein, which is impacted in aggressive breast cancers.
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Richard Bett
#57073
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Richard Arnot Home Bett holds a joint appointment in Philosophy and Classics at Johns Hopkins University. He received his BA from Oxford University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He spent 1994-5 as a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C. From January 2000 to June 2001 he was Acting Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association, and he was Secretary-Treasurer of its Eastern Division from 2003 to 2013.
Go to Profile#2146
Victor Dubowitz
#8437
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Victor Dubowitz, FRCP, Hon FRCPCH is a British neurologist and professor emeritus at Imperial College London. He is principally known along with his wife Lilly Dubowitz for developing two clinical tests, the Dubowitz Score to estimate gestational age and the other for the systematic neurological examination of the newborn.
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Herbert Stachowiak
#28214
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Herbert Stachowiak was a German philosopher. From 1973 to 1986 he taught as a full professor at the University of Paderborn. Life After a commercial apprenticeship in the aircraft industry, Stachowiak obtained his Abitur in 1941 through the second educational path. He continued to work in industry and as a teacher at a night school before he was drafted for military service in 1944. From 1946, he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Berlin, first at what is now Humboldt University and later at the Free University, which had been newly founded in 1948 because of the political conditions in the west of the city.
Go to Profile#2148
Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood
#12013
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Stewart Ross Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood, was a Scottish academic and public servant and one of Britain's most distinguished philosophers of religion. He sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
Go to Profile#2149
Kathryn Sophia Belle
#61012
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Kathryn Sophia Belle, formerly known as Kathryn T. Gines , is an American philosopher. She is associate professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Much of her work has focused on increasing diversity within philosophy, and she is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.
Go to Profile#2150
Columba Ryan
#53904
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Columba Ryan was a British priest of the Dominican Order and a philosophy teacher, university chaplain, and pastor. He was the brother of John Ryan, the British animator and cartoonist. Life Patrick Ryan was born in Hampstead in 1916, the second son of Sir Andrew Ryan, a British diplomat who was the last dragoman in Constantinople, and his wife Ruth. Patrick was educated at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire. In 1935 he entered the Dominican Order at Woodchester Priory in Gloucestershire where he was given the name Columba. His uncle was Patrick Finbar Ryan OP, Archbishop of Port of Spain, Trinid...
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