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,

#2301

Paul E. Marik

#27400

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Paul Ellis Marik is a medical doctor and former professor of medicine who until his resignation in January 2022 served as chair of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia, and was also a critical care doctor at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. His research interests include sepsis and tissue oxygenation. In August 2023 the American Board of Internal Medicine informed Marik his certification was to be revoked for spreading misinformation.

#2302

Lucio Colletti

#60476

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

Lucio Colletti was an Italian Western Marxist philosopher. Colletti started to be known outside Italy because of a long interview with him that Marxist historian Perry Anderson published in the New Left Review in 1974.

#2303

Ulrich Libbrecht

Ulrich Libbrecht

#30473

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Ulrich Libbrecht was a Belgian philosopher and author in the field of comparative philosophy. His magnum opus consists of four books in Dutch - called "Introduction to Comparative Philosophy". An abbreviated version of these works in English, entitled "Within the Four Seas... Introduction to Comparative Philosophy" was published by Peeters Ed. This book explains how a comparative model, based on the paradigm-free axes of energy and information, accommodates the current world-views of Taoism, Buddhism and Rationalism – representing the Chinese, Indian and Western heritage - and shows how scie...

#2304

Stephen E. Braude

#27120

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Stephen E. Braude is an American philosopher and parapsychologist. He is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

#2305

Christopher Gauker

#66352

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Christopher Gauker is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Salzburg. He is known for his works on philosophy of language. Life Gauker grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota and attended the University of Chicago, where Donald Davidson directed his bachelor's thesis. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Pittsburgh, where Wilfrid Sellars directed his dissertation. Before coming to Salzburg, he was a professor at the University of Cincinnati.

#2306

He Guanghu

#24791

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

He Guanghu is a Chinese scholar of philosophy of religion and Christian theology. He is considered one of the leading "cultural Christians" in China, intellectuals who see Christian culture as a key to rebuilding Chinese civilization.

#2307

Franco Volpi

#46967

Overall Influence

1952 - 2009 (57 years)

Franco Volpi , was a philosopher, historian of philosophy and a professor at Padua University, who wrote regularly to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Volpi was an expert in German philosophy; in particular, Martin Heidegger and Arthur Schopenhauer. He investigated the relation between nihilism and the nothing, and between philosophy and current psychology. In one of his works, he stated that "real philosophical questions have a history but have no answer." For him, nihilism undermines truth, weakens religion, and dissolves dogmatism.

#2308

Mark Musen

#40189

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Alan Musen is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, and Division Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Musen's research focuses on open science, data stewardship, intelligent systems, and biomedical decision support. Since the late 1980s, Musen has led the development of Protégé, which is currently the most "widely used domain-independent, freely available, platform-independent technology for developing and managing terminologies, ontologies, and knowledge bases" in a range of application domains.

#2309

Dominique Janicaud

#43340

Overall Influence

1937 - 2002 (65 years)

Dominique Janicaud was a French philosopher, known for his critical approach to the philosophy of Heidegger. He was the director of its Center for the History of Ideas at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis until 1998, when he was succeeded by André Tosel.

#2310

Christian Lotz

#56625

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Christian Lotz is a German-American professor of philosopher at Michigan State University. Lotz's work primarily focuses on 19th and 20th Century European philosophy , continental aesthetics, critical theory, Marxism, and contemporary European political philosophy.

#2311

Clinton Heylin

#5255

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Clinton Heylin is an English author. Heylin has written extensively about popular music, especially on the life and work of Bob Dylan. Education Heylin attended Manchester Grammar School. He studied history at Bedford College, University of London, followed by an MA in history at the University of Sussex.

#2312

Telauges

#32331

Overall Influence

Telauges was a Samian Pythagorean philosopher and, according to tradition, the son of Pythagoras and Theano. Little is known about his life and works other than a scattering of remarks from much later writers.

#2313

Michael Northcott

#44836

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael Stafford Northcott is Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is best known for his contributions to environmental theology and ethics. Life Born in London on 13 May 1955 to James and Betty Northcott, Michael Northcott was raised in Kent, England, and attended schools in Beckenham and Cranbrook. He was married in 1977 to Jill Benz, with whom he has two daughters and a son.

#2314

K. Satchidananda Murty

K. Satchidananda Murty

#51439

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Kotha Satchidananda Murty was an Indian philosopher and professor. Murty served as the Professor of Philosophy, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam and Vice-Chancellor of Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati in the state of Andhra Pradesh, South India. He specialized in Buddhist philosophy and contributed extensively to Mahayana Buddhism. His treatise on the teachings of Nagarjuna is well acclaimed.

#2315

Naomi Alderman

#11215

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.

#2316

Tomoko Masuzawa

#8071

Overall Influence

Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and History at the University of Michigan. In 1979, she received her MA in religious studies at Yale University. Masuzawa received her PhD in Religious Studies from University of California Santa Barbara in 1985. European intellectual history , discourses on religion, history of religion, and psychoanalysis are Masuzawa’s fields of study.

#2317

Panagiotis Kondylis

Panagiotis Kondylis

#34518

Overall Influence

1943 - 1998 (55 years)

Panagiotis Kondylis was a Greek philosopher, intellectual historian, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek. He can be placed in a tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber.

#2318

Werner Marx

#63863

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Werner Marx was a German philosopher and expert on Heidegger's thought. He taught at the University of Freiburg. Works The Meaning of Aristotle's "Ontology", Den Haag 1954Heidegger und die Tradition. Eine problemgeschichtliche Einführung in die Grundbestimmungen des Seins, Stuttgart 1961 Die Bestimmung der Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus, Stuttgart 1964 Absolute Reflexion und Sprache, Frankfurt am Main 1967Verstehen und Auslegen, Freiburg 1967Das Spiel. Wirklichkeit und Methode, Freiburg i. Br. 1967Vernunft und Welt. Zwischen Tradition und anderem Anfang, Den Haag 1970 Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, Stuttgart 1971 Einführung in Aristoteles' Theorie vom Seienden, Freiburg i.

#2319

Robert F. Spetzler

#70610

Overall Influence

#2320

Reinhart Maurer

#33503

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Reinhart Klemens Maurer is a philosopher and professor from Xanten, Germany. Maurer studied philosophy, German and English at the universities of Münster, Kiel and Vienna. In 1964, he made his Ph.D. Maurer later wrote his post-doctoral research in 1969 at the University of Stuttgart under the supervision of Robert Spaemann. Between 1962 and 1975, he was a research assistant and then a lecturer at the Institute for Philosophy and Pedagogy at the University of Stuttgart and from 1975 to 1997, he served as a professor at the Institute for Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin .

#2321

Richard McKirahan

#56371

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Richard D. McKirahan Jr. is an American philosopher and Edwin Clarence Norton Professor of Classics and Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is known for his works on Pre-Socratics.

#2322

David Efird

#47478

Overall Influence

1974 - 2020 (46 years)

David Hampton Efird was an American philosopher and Anglican priest. As an academic, he specialised in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of religion. Efird worked at the University of York from 2002. He was a lecturer between 2002 and 2007, and was a senior lecturer from 2007 until his death. He was head of two of York's colleges: Provost of Vanbrugh College, York from 2008 to 2013, and Principal of James College, York from 2013 to 2020.

#2323

Dean Towle Mason

#70686

Overall Influence

#2324

Vincent Dole

#40430

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

Vincent Dole was an American doctor, who, along with his wife, Marie Nyswander , developed the use of methadone to treat heroin addiction. Dole and Nyswander, in establishing methadone maintenance treatment , improved treatment options in addiction medicine which for a century had been based on the conventional view that narcotic addiction was the result of an intractable moral defect. His work resulted in the partial re-legalization of opioid maintenance in the United States. For this contribution he was a recipient of the 1970 Canada Gairdner International Award, and the 1988 Albert Laske...

#2325

Kirk Ludwig

#49653

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kirk Alan Ludwig is an American philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Education and career Ludwig graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981 and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, where he worked with Donald Davidson. He joined the faculty at the University of Florida in 1990, where he taught until 2010 when he joined Indiana University Bloomington.

#2326

Robert Bonow

#48337

Overall Influence

Robert O. Bonow is an American cardiologist, currently the Max and Lilly Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and also Editor-in-Chief of JAMA's JAMA Cardiology. He received his MD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973.

#2327

Sean Dorrance Kelly

#38468

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sean Dorrance Kelly is an American philosopher, currently the Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Dean of Dunster House. He is an expert on phenomenology and philosophy of mind.

#2328

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

#70797

Overall Influence

#2329

Mitch Pacwa

#16126

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mitchell Pacwa is an American Jesuit priest. He is president and founder of Ignatius Productions and is now the senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. Education Pacwa completed high school at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in 1967 with the intention of becoming a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago. He decided that he wanted to be a Jesuit in high school and was accepted after his freshman year at Loyola University Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and theology from University of Detroit Mercy and was ordained a priest of the Society of Jesus in 1976.

#2330

Robert Sokolowski

#37103

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Monsignor Robert Sokolowski is a philosopher and Roman Catholic priest who serves as the Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. Sokolowski's philosophical research is focused primarily on the discipline of phenomenology and interrelated sub-disciplines, though he has also written works from a theological perspective. He is known for his interpretation of Husserl, commonly known as "East-Coast Husserlianism" in academic circles. His Introduction to Phenomenology has been translated into seven other languages.

#2331

Richard Polt

#36578

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Richard F. H. Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has written about and translated works by Martin Heidegger. Polt is a typewriter enthusiast active on the Typosphere and a former editor of the quarterly ETCetera publication about manual typewriters. He is the author of three books, and he also contributed to the 2016 documentary California Typewriter that features Tom Hanks.

#2332

Jim A. Kuypers

#6240

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.

#2333

King K. Holmes

#70034

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

King Kennard Holmes is an American physician, microbiologist, epidemiologist, and medical school professor. He is an internationally recognized expert on sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

#2334

Bensalem Himmich

#28821

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Bensalem Himmich is a Moroccan novelist, poet and philosopher with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris, who teaches at the Mohammed V University, Rabat. He served as Minister of Culture from 29 July 2009 to 3 January 2012.

#2335

William de Groat

#70912

Overall Influence

William de Groat is an American bioscientist, focusing in neuropharmacology and pharmacology of cell and nervous systems, currently Distinguished Professor at University of Pittsburgh.

#2336

Etel Adnan

#8192

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

#2337

Aryeh Kosman

#53609

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Aryeh Kosman was a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy and a professor of philosophy at Haverford College. Kosman was born in 1935 in Oakland, California. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Harvard University. He came to Haverford as an assistant professor in 1962, was promoted to full professor in 1973, and was appointed John Whitehead Professor of Philosophy at Haverford in 1984. He retired in 2010.

#2338

Joan Mitchell

#11553

Overall Influence

1925 - 1992 (67 years)

Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.

#2339

Angelika Krebs

#58997

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Angelika Krebs is a German philosopher. Education and career Angelika Krebs studied philosophy, German literature and musicology in Freiburg, Oxford, Konstanz and Berkeley. She did her PhD with Friedrich Kambartel, Bernard Williams and Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt in 1993. Her dissertation thesis on environmental ethics won the Wolfgang Stegmüller award of the German Society for Analytical Philosophy. From 1993 to 2001 she was an assistant professor in Frankfurt, writing her habilitation thesis on work, justice and love. In 2001, she was appointed to the chair for practical philosophy at the University of Basel.

#2340

Anjan Chakravartty

#41065

Overall Influence

Anjan Chakravartty is an analytic philosopher and the Appignani Foundation Professor at the University of Miami. Previously, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Toronto. His work focuses on topics in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology.

#2341

Ludwig. Wittgenstein

#71187

Overall Influence

#2342

Anil Gupta

#46518

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Anil K. Gupta is an Indian-American philosopher who works primarily in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Gupta is the Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.

#2343

François Noudelmann

#29130

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

François Noudelmann is a contemporary French philosopher, university professor and radio producer. François Noudelmann is currently a professor at New York University, and regularly at the University of Paris VIII , and European Graduate School in Saas-Fee . He is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Between 2001 and 2004, he was the director of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Since 2019, he runs La Maison française at NYU.

#2344

Werner Beierwaltes

#44721

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Werner Beierwaltes was a German academic best known as a historian of philosophy. His most important areas of specialization were Neoplatonism and German Idealism. He was an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#2345

Alasdair Cochrane

Alasdair Cochrane

#41480

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation . His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals.

#2346

György Bence

#40139

Overall Influence

1941 - 2006 (65 years)

György Bence was a university professor, philosopher, dissident and political consultant. In 1979 he was among the first Hungarians who criticized together with Andrei Sakharov and others the Soviet crackdown on the Czech Charter 77 signatories.

#2347

Sidney Charles Truelove

#71317

Overall Influence

#2348

Alexandru Dragomir

#41268

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Alexandru Dragomir was a Romanian philosopher. He made his doctoral studies under Martin Heidegger's direction, in 1940. Philosophy Dragomir refused to publish any of his writing. He always maintained that publishing was of no importance to him; instead, genuine understanding was all that mattered. Thus he never got involved with the public cultural milieu. Before his death, no one even knew whether he had actually written anything, or not.

#2349

Len Doyal

#19138

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Len Doyal FRSA FRSocMed is emeritus professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary, University of London and a medical ethicist. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1944 and studied philosophy and sociology at Georgia State University, earning his undergraduate degree in 1966. That same year he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Karl Popper at the London School of Economics.

#2350

David Hollenbach

#23059

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Rev. David Hollenbach, S.J. is a Jesuit priest, professor, author, and moral theologian currently serving as the Pedro Arrupe Distinguished Research Professor of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is a consultant to the Jesuit Refugee Service and is the recipient of the John Courtney Murray Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1998.

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