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,

#2151

Sarane Alexandrian

#27178

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Sarane Alexandrian was a French philosopher, essayist, and art critic. Early life Alexandrian was born to a French mother and Armenian father, Vartan Alexandrian, a stomatologist under the service of Faisal I. At the age of six, he was sent to Paris to stay with his maternal grandmother.

#2152

Jens Timmermann

#53923

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jens Timmermann is a German philosopher and the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is best known for his research on Kant’s ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law.

#2153

Laurence Thomas

#36815

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Laurence Thomas is an American philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science at Syracuse University. Thomas is noted for his work on moral luck, social philosophy and American Blacks and Jews.

#2154

Thomas B. Warren

#30613

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Thomas Bratton Warren was an American professor of philosophy of religion and apologetics at the Harding School of Theology in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, and was an important philosopher and theologian in the Churches of Christ during the latter half of the twentieth century.

#2155

Alan J. Wein

#66716

Overall Influence

#2156

Walpola Rahula Thero

Walpola Rahula Thero

#14823

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Walpola Rahula Thero was a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, scholar and writer. In 1964, he became the Professor of History and Religions at Northwestern University, thus becoming the first bhikkhu to hold a professorial chair in the Western world. He also once held the position of Vice-Chancellor at the then Vidyodaya University . He has written extensively about Buddhism in English, French and Sinhala. He wrote the book What the Buddha Taught about Theravada Buddhism.

#2157

Nathan Rotenstreich

#40303

Overall Influence

1914 - 1993 (79 years)

Nathan Rotenstreich was an Israeli professor of philosophy. Biography Nathan Rotenstreich was born in Sambir, Galicia, then in Austria-Hungary, later in Poland, now in Ukraine. His father, Ephraim Fischel Rotenstreich, was a Zionist leader and a member of the Polish two houses of Parliament. In 1932, at the age of 18, Rotenstreich emigrated to Mandate Palestine.

#2158

Madis Kõiv

#18158

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Madis Kõiv was an Estonian writer, philosopher and physicist. Education Kõiv attended school in Tartu after the second World War, graduating in the early 1950s with a degree in nuclear physics. Kõiv worked as a scientist and lecturer until 1991.

#2159

Robert Crouse

#28300

Overall Influence

1930 - 2011 (81 years)

Robert Darwin Crouse was a Canadian religious philosopher and Anglican priest. Early life and education Crouse received his primary and secondary education in the village school of Crousetown and at King’s Collegiate School in Windsor. He arrived at Dalhousie University and King’s College in 1947, the year James Doull began teaching in the Classics Department. He graduated in Classics in 1951 and then spent a year studying philosophy at Dalhousie and theology at King’s.

#2160

Andreas Urs Sommer

Andreas Urs Sommer

#40543

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Andreas Urs Sommer is a German philosopher of Swiss origin. He specializes in the history of philosophy and its theory, ethics, philosophy of religion, and Skepticism. His historical studies center on the philosophy of Enlightenment and Nietzsche, but they also deal with Kant, Max Weber, Pierre Bayle, Jonathan Edwards, and others.

#2161

Hiroshi Aramata

Hiroshi Aramata

#6205

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Hiroshi Aramata is a Japanese author, polymath, critic, translator and specialist in natural history, iconography and cartography. His most popular novel was Teito Monogatari , which has sold over 5 million copies in Japan alone.

#2162

Paul Hoyningen-Huene

#40711

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Paul Hoyningen-Huene is a German philosopher who specializes in general philosophy of science and research ethics. He is best known for his Neo-Kantian interpretation of Thomas S. Kuhn's ideas. Hoyningen-Huene, until 2014, held the chair for theoretical philosophy, particularly philosophy of science at Leibniz Universität Hannover and was director of the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science.

#2163

Luc Montagnier

#487

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

Luc Montagnier was a French virologist and joint recipient, with and , of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus . He worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

#2164

Esperanza Guisán

#51193

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Esperanza Guisán was a Spanish moral and political philosopher. She was a professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her work was devoted mainly to classical utilitarian theory. A list of many of her works appears at her Google Scholar Web page, including treatises on ethics, democracy, ethics without religion, and Kant.

#2165

Mario Sergio Cortella

Mario Sergio Cortella

#28353

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mario Sergio Cortella is a Brazilian philosopher, writer, educator and speaker most known for putting into the public sphere and helping popularize in questions related to philosophy in Brazilian contemporary society. He is also known as a prominent educator. Having studied with Paulo Freire, Cortella applied Freire's approach to education while he was secretary of education of São Paulo city during the '90s. He is professor of theological philosophy at PUC-SP.

#2166

Deborah Black

#42399

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Deborah Black is a Canadian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is known for her works on Islamic philosophy. Books Logic and Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990

#2167

Jenann Ismael

#50351

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Jenann T. Ismael is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Foundational Questions Institute Ismael's work has been influential in the scholarship of metaphysics and the philosophy of physics.

#2168

Vladimir Bibikhin

Vladimir Bibikhin

#45490

Overall Influence

1938 - 2004 (66 years)

Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin was the most prominent Soviet and Russian religious thinker of the New Russia and continued the Russian tradition of early 20th century religious thinking. He was known as a translator, philologist, and philosopher. He is best known for translations of Martin Heidegger, which caused mixed reactions among specialists. He lectured in authors' courses at the philosophy faculty of Moscow State University. Bibikhin undertook a sufficient number of translations to enable him to formulate his own theory of Europe. This theory consisted in part of a return to the past,...

#2169

Benjamin Wiker

#19608

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Benjamin Wiker is a Roman Catholic ethicist and professor of political science and Human Life studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Biography Benjamin Wiker obtained his PhD in theological ethics from Vanderbilt University then went on to teach at a variety of institutions including Marquette University, Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, Thomas Aquinas College, and the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He came to attention in 2002 with the publication of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists. In this book, Wiker aims to show how Darwinism by its very nature completely ...

#2170

Michael Gelven

#63120

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Michael Gelven, was a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, where he taught for 46 years. Gelven held a Ph.D. in philosophy from Washington University, penned a well known commentary on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and wrote several books as well as numerous scholarly articles. Gelven was primarily interested in continental philosophy and had a wide range of specialties including: ontology, metaphysics, Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, philosophy in literature, and the philosophy of war.

#2171

Helmut Sturm

#41698

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Helmut Sturm was a German painter. He was born in Furth im Wald. From 1952 to 1958, he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. After this he joined Heimrad Prem, Lothar Fischer and Hans-Peter Zimmer in founding Gruppe SPUR, which in 1959 entered the Situationist International. He had a six-month scholarship in Paris before returning to Munich for the SPUR exhibition in Galerie van de Loo. He collaborated with Hans Platschek, Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Constant, Maurice Wyckaert, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Guy Debord. In 1961 he stayed with Nash at Oerkelljunga, Sweden with Prem, ...

#2172

James Otteson

#34638

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

James R. Otteson is an American philosopher and political economist. He is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. Formerly, he was the Thomas W. Smith Presidential Chair in Business Ethics, Professor of Economics, and executive director of the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. He is also a Senior Scholar at The Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C., a Research Professor in the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, a Visitor of Ralston College, a Research Fellow for t...

#2173

Charlie Gere

#33542

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Charlie Gere is a British academic who is professor of media theory and history at The Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, The University of Lancaster and previously, director of research at the Institute for Cultural Research at The University of Lancaster. He is author of several books and articles on new media art, art and technology, continental philosophy and technology. His main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to post-conceptual art and philosophy.

#2174

Henry Johnstone Jr.

#36477

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Henry Johnstone Jr. was an American philosopher and rhetorician known especially for his notion of the "rhetorical wedge" and his re-evaluation of the ad hominem fallacy. He was Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University and began studying Classics in the late 1970s. He was the founder and longtime editor of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric and edited the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

#2175

Michael Roizen

#18273

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michael Fredric Roizen is an American anesthesiologist and internist, an award-winning author and the chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic. Roizen became famous for developing the RealAge concept and has authored or coauthored five number one New York Times best sellers.

#2176

Casimir Lewy

#47731

Overall Influence

1919 - 1991 (72 years)

Casimir Lewy was a Polish philosopher of Jewish descent. He worked in philosophical logic but published scantly. He was an influential teacher; several of his students went on to be prominent philosophers, including Simon Blackburn, Edward Craig, Ian Hacking, and Crispin Wright.

#2177

Deborah Tannen

#2814

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Deborah Frances Tannen is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

#2178

Elizabeth Harman

#42094

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Harman is an American philosopher and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Biography Harman's father is Gilbert Harman, professor of philosophy. Harman's mother was Lucy Harman, a psychotherapist at Princeton University.

#2179

Robert Proulx Heaney

#67204

Overall Influence

#2180

Remo Bodei

#48093

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Remo Bodei was an Italian philosopher. He was a professor of the history of philosophy at the UCLA University, Los Angeles California, and also had taught at the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

#2181

Edmund Catharina Jason Husserl

#67256

Overall Influence

#2182

Gerhard Streminger

#54111

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Gerhard Streminger is an Austrian Philosopher and author, born in Graz in 1952 . From 1970, he studied philosophy and mathematics in Graz, Goettingen, Edinburgh with G.E.Davie and Oxford with J. L. Mackie. He gained his PhD in 1978 at the University of Graz, where he held posts from 1975 until 1997. In 1981 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Streminger was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Graz in 1988 and received the title of University Professor in 1995.

#2183

Masayuki Yamamoto

#67271

Overall Influence

#2184

Frank E. Speizer

#41760

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Frank Erwin Speizer is an American physician and epidemiologist, currently Professor of Environmental Health and Environmental Science at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Edward H. Kass Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on two major epidemiological cohort studies: the Nurses' Health Study, which explored women's illnesses and health risk factors, and the Harvard Six Cities study, which definitively linked air pollution to higher death rates in urban areas.

#2185

Agnes Callard

#37114

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Agnes Callard is an American philosopher and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Her primary areas of specialization are ancient philosophy and ethics. She is also noted for her popular writings and work on public philosophy.

#2186

Kuruvilla Pandikattu

Kuruvilla Pandikattu

#31500

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Kuruvilla Pandikattu Joseph, SJ, is an Indian Jesuit priest. He is Chair Professor of JRD Tata Foundation on Business Ethics at XLRI, Jamshedpur and Professor of Philosophy, Science and Religion at Jnana Deepa, Institute of Philosophy and Theology, Pune, Maharashtra, India. He is also Director of JDV Centre for Science-Religion Studies and Association of Science, Society and Religion , Pune.

#2187

Jennifer Nagel

#59586

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jennifer Nagel is a Canadian philosopher at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. She has also written on 17th century philosophy, especially John Locke and René Descartes.

#2188

Dudley Andrew

#13883

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

James Dudley Andrew is an American film theorist. He is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he has taught since the year 2000. Before moving to Yale, he taught for thirty years at the University of Iowa. Andrew has been called, on the occasion of one of his invited lecture series, "one of the most influential scholars in the areas of theory, history and criticism". He particularly specializes in world cinema, film theory and aesthetics, and French cinema. He has also written on Japanese cinema, especially the work of Kenji Mizoguchi. He has b...

#2189

Walter Carnielli

Walter Carnielli

#47396

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Walter Alexandre Carnielli is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher, full professor of Logic at the State University of Campinas . With Bachelor and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics at the State University of Campinas in Campinas he obtained his Ph.D. in 1984 from the same university under the supervision of Newton da Costa and subsequently worked as a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley as a Research Fellow, following an invitation by Leon Henkin.

#2190

Gene Youngblood

Gene Youngblood

#14965

Overall Influence

1942 - 2021 (79 years)

Gene Youngblood was an American theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His best-known book, Expanded Cinema, was the first to consider video as an art form and has been credited with helping to legitimate the fields of computer art and media arts. He is also known for his pioneering work in the media democracy movement, a subject on which he taught, wrote, and lectured, beginning in 1967.

#2191

Ernest Eugene Moore

#67413

Overall Influence

#2192

James T. Willerson

#67439

Overall Influence

#2193

Leszek Nowak

#22188

Overall Influence

1943 - 2009 (66 years)

Leszek Nowak was a Polish philosopher and legal theoretician. Biography Education In 1965, he graduated in law from Adam Mickiewicz University's Faculty of Law and Administration, having written Master of Jurisprudence thesis under the supervision of Zygmunt Ziembiński, who introduced Nowak to the field of legal theory and convinced him to major in the subject. In 1966 he completed his Master of Philosophy degree in philosophy at the University of Warsaw under the supervision of . In 1967 he obtained a Doctor of Law degree, writing a dissertation on the legal interpretation, the rule of law and semiotic functions of language.

#2194

Vinciane Despret

#23174

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher of science, associate professor, at the University of Liège, Belgium. Biography Vinciane Despret first graduated in philosophy. She then studied psychology and graduated in 1991. She is most known for having provided a reflexive account on ethologists, observing babblers in the Negev desert and the way they would interpret those birds' complex dance moves.

#2195

James Robert Brown

#44116

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

James Robert Brown is a Canadian philosopher of science. He is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. In the philosophy of mathematics, he has advocated mathematical Platonism, visual reasoning, and in the philosophy of science he has defended scientific realism mostly against anti-realist views associated with social constructivism. He has also argued for the socialization of medical research . He is largely known for his work on thought experiments.

#2196

R. Lanier Anderson

#49536

Overall Influence

R. Lanier Anderson is an American philosopher and J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities at Stanford University. He is an expert on Kant and post-Kantian philosophy, and has published widely on both Kant and Nietzsche.

#2197

Niall Shanks

#27504

Overall Influence

1959 - 2011 (52 years)

Niall Shanks was an English philosopher and critic of intelligent design. Career Shanks was born in Cheshire, England, was educated at Rossall School, and later at the University of Leeds and the University of Liverpool. Shanks left England for Canada in 1981 and earned his PhD at the University of Alberta, Canada in 1987. Shanks moved to the United States in 1987. For a number of years Shanks was a member of the Department of Philosophy at East Tennessee State University, where he also held positions in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He then moved to Wichita State University where he was the Curtis D.

#2198

Wolfgang Müller-Lauter

#47098

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

Wolfgang Müller-Lauter was a German philosopher and scholar. He is particularly known for his groundbreaking work on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, considered to be one of the most important contributions to the study of Nietzsche in the twentieth century. He was Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Kirchliche Hochschule Berlin and from 1993 Emeritus Professor in the Theological Faculty of the Humboldt University Berlin.

#2199

Richard Bing

#36950

Overall Influence

1909 - 2010 (101 years)

Richard John Bing was a cardiologist who made significant contributions to his field of study. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. Early life and education Born in Nuremberg to a hops merchant and a professional singer, he studied at the Conservatory at the Nuremberg Gymnasium but also took an interest in medicine. Trying to determine which path to take, after an indifferent reception from Richard Strauss and being inspired by Arrowsmith, he went into medicine, earning a degree at the University of Munich in 1934. His family—who were Jewish—left Nazi Germany shortly ...

#2200

Jean‐françois Bach

#67671

Overall Influence

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