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,
#2351
Leila Haaparanta
#34179
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Leila Tuulikki Haaparanta is a Finnish philosopher who works in analytic philosophy and the philosophy of logic. She is retired from the University of Tampere as a professor emerita. Education and career Haaparanta was born on 20 October 1954 in Kalvola. She studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki, earning a bachelor's degree in 1976, a master's degree in 1978, a licenciate in 1979, and a Ph.D. in 1985; her dissertation was Frege's Doctrine of Being.
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Peter Forrest
#28659
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Richard Haddow Forrest is an Australian philosopher. Early life and education Forrest was born in 1948 in Liverpool, England, and was educated at Ampleforth College. His undergraduate work was at Balliol College, Oxford, in mathematics, and he gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in mathematics from Harvard University. After moving to Australia he gained a Master of Arts degree in philosophy at the University of Tasmania, then in 1984 a PhD degree at the University of Sydney, where he was influenced by philosophers David Stove and David Armstrong. He was Professor of Philosophy at the...
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Borden Parker Bowne
1847 - 1910 (63 years)
Borden Parker Bowne was an American Christian philosopher, Methodist minister and theologian. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. Life Bowne was born on January 14, 1847, near Leonardville in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In 1876 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he taught for more than thirty years. He later served as the first dean of the graduate school. Bowne was an acute critic of mechanistic determinism, positivism, and naturalism. He categorized his views as Kantianizedianized Berkeleyanismanism, transcendental empiricism, and, fi...
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Thomas Young
1773 - 1829 (56 years)
Thomas Young FRS was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
Go to Profile#2355
David A. Kolb
#3249
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Allen Kolb is an American educational theorist whose interests and publications focus on experiential learning, the individual and social change, career development, and executive and professional education. He is the founder and chairman of Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc. , and an Emeritus Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
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Thomas Metzinger
#15476
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. , he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the Barbara Wengeler Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2008 to 2009, he served as a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study; from 2014 to 2019, he was a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College; from 2019 to 2022, he was awarded a Senior-Forschungsprofessur by the Ministry of Science, Education and Culture.
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Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
1744 - 1811 (67 years)
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was a Spanish neoclassical statesman, author, philosopher and a major figure of the Age of Enlightenment in Spain. Life and influence of his works Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was born at Gijón in Asturias, Spain. Selecting law as his profession, he studied at Oviedo, Ávila, and the University of Alcalá, before becoming a criminal judge at Seville in 1767.
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François Recanati
#23128
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
François Recanati is a French analytic philosopher and research fellow at the College de France, and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Many of his works focus on the philosophy of language and mind.
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Antoine Destutt de Tracy
1754 - 1836 (82 years)
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". Biography The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born in Paris. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France in 1420 and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army and when the French Revolution broke out he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais.
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Rudolf Seydel
1835 - 1892 (57 years)
Rudolf Seydel was a German philosopher and theologian born in Dresden. In 1860 he received his habilitation at the University of Leipzig, where in 1867 he became an associate professor of philosophy. He was a disciple of Christian Hermann Weisse , and is remembered for his studies involving parallels between Buddhism and Christianity. Seydel died in Leipzig on December 8, 1892.
Go to Profile#2361
Alain Daniélou
#4978
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Alain Daniélou was a French historian, Indologist, intellectual, musicologist, translator, writer, and notable Western convert to and expert on the Shaivite branch of Hinduism. In 1991 he was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour conferred by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama.
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Ilsetraut Hadot
#28677
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Ilsetraut Hadot in Berlin, is a philosopher and historian of philosophy who specialised in Stoicism, Neoplatonism and more generally in Ancient Philosophy. Biography In 1978, Hadot won the Victor Cousin prize of the Académie française for her work The problem of Alexandrian Neoplatonism. Hierocles and Simplicius. In 2015, she received the François-Millepierres prize by the Académie for her work Seneca. Spiritual Direction and Practice of Philosophy.
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Arran Gare
#21519
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Arran Emrys Gare is an Australian philosopher known mainly for his work in environmental philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of culture and the metaphysics of process philosophy. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
Go to Profile#2364
Tina Fernandes Botts
#32268
Overall Influence
Tina Fernandes Botts is an American legal scholar and philosophy professor currently teaching at the San Joaquin College of Law. She is known for her work in legal hermeneutics, intersectionality, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race . Previous posts include Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College; Visiting Professor of Law at University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law; Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno; Visiting Assistant Professor of philosophy at Oberlin College; Fellow in Law and Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and A...
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James Tully
#13762
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
James Hamilton Tully is a Canadian philosopher who is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Law, Indigenous Governance and Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada. Tully is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Emeritus Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation.
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Mike Sandbothe
#19122
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Mike Sandbothe is a German intellectual, philosopher and professor of culture and media at University of Applied Sciences Jena. He is co-founder of the new branch of media philosophy and one of the main proponents of philosophical pragmatism in Europe. He held professorships for Media Culture Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena as well as for Media Philosophy at Berlin University of the Arts and at Aalborg University Copenhagen. The certified trainer in Mindfulness-based stress reduction is one of the two founders of the German Network of Mindful Universities "Achtsame Hochschulen".
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Freya Mathews
#25024
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Freya Mathews is an Australian environmental philosopher whose main work has been in the areas of ecological metaphysics and panpsychism. Her current special interests are in ecological civilization; indigenous perspectives on "sustainability" and how these perspectives may be adapted to the context of contemporary global society; panpsychism and critique of the metaphysics of modernity; and wildlife ethics and rewilding in the context of the Anthropocene.
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Iris Murdoch
#13672
Overall Influence
1919 - 1999 (80 years)
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net , was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Wiebe Bijker
#6604
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Wiebe E. Bijker is a Dutch professor Emeritus, former chair of the Department of Social Science and Technology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Early life Bijker's father was an engineer involved in implementing the Delta Plan after a disastrous dike breach in the Netherlands in 1953 when young Bijker was two years old and later became deputy director of the Delft Hydraulics Laboratory. Presumably, the unique fact of parts of the Netherlands being below sea level, the well-known concerns in innovation surrounding this condition for centuries, and his father's involvement all contr...
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Étienne de La Boétie
1530 - 1563 (33 years)
Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie was a French magistrate, classicist, writer, poet and political theorist, best remembered for his intense and intimate friendship with essayist Michel de Montaigne. His early political treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was posthumously adopted by the Huguenot movement and is sometimes seen as an early influence on modern anti-statist, utopian and civil disobedience thought.
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Theon of Smyrna
70 - 135 (65 years)
Theon of Smyrna was a Greek philosopher and mathematician, whose works were strongly influenced by the Pythagorean school of thought. His surviving On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato is an introductory survey of Greek mathematics.
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Edward Bullough
1880 - 1934 (54 years)
Edward Bullough was an English aesthetician and scholar of modern languages, who worked at the University of Cambridge. He did experimental work on the perception of colours, and in his theoretical work introduced the concept of psychical distance: that which "appears to lie between our own self and its affections" in aesthetic experience. In languages, Bullough was a dedicated teacher who published little. He came to concentrate on Italian, and was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in 1933.
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George Molnar
#29141
Overall Influence
1934 - 1999 (65 years)
George Molnar was a Hungarian-born philosopher whose principal area of interest was metaphysics. He worked mainly in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney but resided in England from 1976 to 1982. He published four philosophical papers in two separate spells; the first two in the 1960s and the second two after a return to the profession in the 1990s. His book Powers: A Study in Metaphysics was published posthumously in 2003.
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Ian Buruma
#3269
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ian Buruma is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the United States. In 2017, he became editor of The New York Review of Books, but left the position in September 2018. Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan. He was the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College from 2003 to 2017.
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Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari
838 - 870 (32 years)
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari , was a Persian Muslim scholar, physician and psychologist, who produced one of the first Islamic encyclopedia of medicine titled Firdaws al-Hikmah . Ali ibn Sahl spoke Syriac and Greek, the two sources of the medical tradition of Antiquity which had been lost by medieval Europe, and transcribed in meticulous calligraphy. His most famous student was the physician and alchemist Abu Bakr al-Razi . Al-Tabari wrote the first encyclopedic work on medicine. He lived for over 70 years and interacted with important figures of the time, such as Muslim caliphs, governors, and eminent scholars.
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Mario Vegetti
#28117
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Mario Vegetti was an Italian historian of philosophy. Education Mario Vegetti was born in Milan in 1937. He graduated with a thesis on Thucydides' historiography at the University of Pavia, as a student at Collegio Ghislieri.
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George Derwent Thomson
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
George Derwent Thomson was an English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language. Classical scholar Thomson studied Classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he attained First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos and subsequently won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin. At TCD he worked on his first book, Greek Lyric Metre, and began visiting Na Blascaodaí in the early nineteen-twenties. He became lecturer and then Professor of Greek at University College Galway.
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John Q. Trojanowski
#17231
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Quinn Trojanowski was an American academic research neuroscientist specializing in neurodegeneration. He and his partner, Virginia Man-Yee Lee, MBA, Ph.D., are noted for identifying the roles of three proteins in neurodegenerative diseases: tau in Alzheimer's disease, alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease, and TDP-43 in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and frontotemporal degeneration.
Go to Profile#2379
Miriam Solomon
#28252
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Miriam Solomon is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department as well as Affiliated Professor of Women's Studies at Temple University. Solomon's work focuses on the philosophy of science, social epistemology, medical epistemology, medical ethics, and gender and science. Besides her academic appointments, she has published two books and a large number of peer reviewed journal articles, and she has served on the editorial boards of a number of major journals.
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Elisa Aaltola
#25785
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Elisa Aaltola is a Finnish philosopher, specialised in animal philosophy, moral psychology and environmental philosophy. Biography She was a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Ethics, Environment, and Public Policy at Lancaster University and submitted her doctoral thesis to the University of Turku on Animal Individuality: Moral and Cultural Categorisations.
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Zaki al-Arsuzi
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Zaki al-Arsuzi was a Syrian philosopher, philologist, sociologist, historian, and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement. He published several books during his lifetime, most notably The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue .
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Herrlee G. Creel
#2877
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Herrlee Glessner Creel was an American Sinologist and philosopher who specialized in Chinese philosophy and history, and was a professor of Chinese at the University of Chicago for nearly 40 years. On his retirement, Creel was praised by his colleagues as an innovative pioneer on early Chinese civilization and as one who could write both for specialists and for the interested general public with cogency, lucidity, and grace.
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Scott Buchanan
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Scott Buchanan was an American philosopher, educator, and foundation consultant. He is best known as the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College, at Annapolis, Maryland. Buchanan's various projects and writings may be understood as an ambitious program of social and cultural reform based on the insight that many crucial problems arise from the uncritical use of symbolism. In this sense, his program was similar to and competed with a number of contemporary movements such as Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, Otto Neurath's "Unity of Science" project, the semiotics of Charles Morris and the "orthological" projects of Charles Kay Ogden.
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Catherine Larrère
#29650
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Catherine Larrère is a French philosopher and academic. She is a professor of philosophy emeritus . She is a specialist in Montesquieu's philosophy and an advocate for environmental ethics. Biography Catherine Delafoss was born in La Rochelle in 1944. She first became interested in the history of economics, then in the philosopher Montesquieus ideas. In the 1990s, she met and was inspired by John Baird Callicott the American academic concerned with environmental ethics. She became an expert and was an advocate for similar British and American research. She translated works by John Baird Cal...
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Albert Schweitzer
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by faith as secondary.
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Thomas Tymoczko
#19516
Overall Influence
1943 - 1996 (53 years)
A. Thomas Tymoczko was a philosopher specializing in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. He taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1971 until his death from stomach cancer in 1996, aged 52.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
1809 - 1894 (85 years)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. Grouped among the fireside poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table . He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to his work as an author and poet, Holmes also served as a physician, professor, lecturer, inventor, and, although he never practiced it, he received formal training in law.
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Émile Bréhier
1876 - 1952 (76 years)
Émile Bréhier was a French philosopher. His interest was in classical philosophy, and the history of philosophy. He wrote a Histoire de la Philosophie, translated into English in seven volumes. This work inspired Freddie Copleston's own History of Philosophy , initially comprising nine volumes.
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Alexander Campbell Fraser
1819 - 1914 (95 years)
Alexander Campbell Fraser was a Scottish theologian and philosopher. Life He was born in the manse at Ardchattan, Argyll, the son of the parish minister, Rev Hugh Fraser, and his wife, Maria Helen Campbell. He was the eldest of twelve children.
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Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
#16567
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is a German philosopher and writer specializing in aesthetics and intercultural philosophy. He is professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait and director of the Global Studie Center.
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Paul Woodruff
#25457
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Paul Bestor Woodruff was an American classicist, professor of philosophy, and was dean at The University of Texas at Austin, where he once chaired the department of philosophy and has more recently held the Hayden Head Regents Chair as director of Plan II Honors program, which he resigned in 2006 after 15 years of service. On September 21, 2006, University President William C. Powers, Jr. named Dr. Woodruff the inaugural dean of undergraduate studies. He is best known for his work on Socrates, Plato, and philosophy of theater. A beloved professor, he taught courses outside his Ancient Greek ...
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Paul R. Patton
#26180
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Robert Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, where he has been since 2002. Patton is known for his publications and conference presentations on Australian Continental political philosophy.
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Timaeus of Locri
500 BC - 500 BC (0 years)
Timaeus of Locri is a character in two of Plato's dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. In both, he appears as a philosopher of the Pythagorean school. If there ever existed a historical Timaeus of Locri, he would have lived in the fifth century BC, but his historicity is dubious since he only appears as a literary figure in Plato's works; all other ancient sources are either based on Plato or are fictional accounts.
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Stephen Gaukroger
#23373
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stephen Gaukroger was a British historian of philosophy and science who spent the majority of his academic career in Australia. Gaukroger was Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney.
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Juliet Floyd
#29417
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Juliet Floyd is professor of philosophy at Boston University. Her strongest research interests lie in early analytic philosophy and she has used early analytic philosophy as a lens to examine a diverse array of topics.
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Mary Hesse
#20186
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Mary Brenda Hesse FBA was an English philosopher of science, latterly a professor in the subject at the University of Cambridge. Biography Mary Hesse was born in Reigate, Surrey, to Ethelbert Thomas Hesse and Brenda Hesse .
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Paul Chamberlain
#29135
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Paul Chamberlain is a Canadian philosopher and professor. He teaches in the areas of Christian Apologetics, Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, and is also the Director of TWU's Institute of Christian Apologetics.
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Haridas Chaudhuri
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Haridas Chaudhuri was an Indian integral philosopher. He was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo and the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies . Early life and career He was born in May 1913 in Shyamagram in East Bengal . He studied at the Scottish Church College and later at the University of Calcutta from where he earned his doctorate in Indian philosophy. He became a professor and later the chair of philosophy at the Krishnagar College, then a constituent college of the University of Calcutta.
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Derk Pereboom
#20236
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Cornell University. He specializes in free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and the work of Immanuel Kant.
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R. Jay Wallace
#26335
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
R. Jay Wallace is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and William and Trudy Ausfahl Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specialization include moral philosophy and philosophy of action. He is most noted for his work on practical reason, moral psychology, and meta-ethics.
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