The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#2451
Stephen G. Post
#39170
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stephen Garrard Post has served on the Board of the John Templeton Foundation , which focuses on virtue and public life. He is a researcher, opinion leader, medical school professor, and best-selling author who has taught at the University of Chicago Medical School, Fordham University-Marymount, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Stony Brook University School of Medicine . He is widely known for his research on the ways in which giving can enhance the health and happiness of the giver, how empathy and compassionate care contribute to patient outcomes, ethical issues in ca...
Go to Profile#2452
Joseph Sung
#8323
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Joseph Sung Jao-yiu is a Hong Kong physician and gastroenterologist, and the current Dean of Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at the Nanyang Technological University , also serving as the Senior Vice President of NTU. Previously, he was the Vice-Chancellor and President of the Chinese University of Hong Kong .
Go to Profile#2453
Samantha Brennan
#65273
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Samantha J. Brennan is a British-born philosopher and scholar of women's studies who is currently dean of the College of Arts and faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. She was previously a professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research at Western University, Canada. She remains a member of Western's Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the graduate faculty of the Departments of Political Science and of Philosophy. Brennan was Department Chair of Philosophy at Western from 2002 to 2007, and 2008–2011. She is a past president of the Canad...
Go to Profile#2454
Kathleen Lennon
#57703
Overall Influence
Kathleen Lennon, a former Ferens Professor of Philosophy, is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hull, England. Career After studying for her undergraduate degree at the University of Kent, Lennon obtained her master's degree and doctorate from the University of Oxford. In 1979, she was employed as a lecturer by the University of Hull. Lennon was a founder of the university's Centre for Gender Studies in 1986, and of the Society for Women in Philosophy in 1989.
Go to Profile#2455
Igor Yefimov
#43802
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Igor Markovich Yefimov or Igor Efimov was an American philosopher, historian, writer and publisher of Russian origin. Some of his works were published under the pen name Andrei Moscovit. Together with , Sergei Dovlatov, , and , he founded the Leningrad writers' group "Townspeople" , whose works circulated in samizdat. He was also the founder of Hermitage Publishers; a company specializing in Russian writers.
Go to Profile#2456
Edward H. Kass
#73733
Overall Influence
#2457
Robert Jensen
#22740
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robert William Jensen is a former professor of journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. From 1992 to 2018 he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in media law, ethics, and politics. He has focused much of his work on the critique of pornography and of masculinity, developed in his 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men. He also has written about white privilege and institutional racism. He also sits on the editorial board of the academic journal Sexualization, Media, and Society.
Go to Profile#2458
Raja Halwani
#46442
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Raja Fouad Halwani is an American-Lebanese philosopher and professor of philosophy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is known for his works on philosophy of sex. Philosophy Being gay, he started with some ethical questions related to homosexuality and some sexual acts related to gay men - unrestrained, casual sex and open relationships. In fact, his first two publications, in the days when he was a graduate student, were: “Are One Night Stands Morally Problematic?” and “The Morality of Adultery.” Convinced by the work of Alan Soble that thinking about sex is one of the most ...
Go to Profile#2459
Felicia Nimue Ackerman
#44499
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Felicia Nimue Ackerman is an American author, poet, and philosopher and professor of philosophy at Brown University. She is a prolific writer of letters to the editor of The New York Times. Early life and education Ackerman, the daughter of Willis and Rachel Ackerman, was born in Ohio in 1947.
Go to Profile#2460
Tore Nordenstam
#70311
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Tore Nordenstam is a Swedish philosopher, with higher degrees from Gothenburg and the University of Khartoum ; he also studied at Uppsala and Oxford. Between 1961 and 1998, Nordenstam held teaching positions at the Universities of Khartoum, Umeå, and Bergen. In Bergen, he was first Reader in Philosophy and later Professor of Philosophy . He is currently Professor Emeritus from Bergen.
Go to Profile#2461
Prof. P. Rutgeerts
#73800
Overall Influence
#2462
Mary Leng
#42553
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mary Leng is a British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. She is a professor at the University of York. Career Leng studied as an undergraduate at Balliol College, University of Oxford and as postgraduate student at the University of Toronto. She worked at the University of Cambridge from 2002 to 2006, and then the University of Liverpool from 2006 to 2011. In 2007, she co-edited a collection called Mathematical Knowledge with Alexander Paseau and Michael Potter, which was published by Oxford University Press, and, in 2010, she published a monograph called Mathematics and Reality, again with Oxford University Press.
Go to Profile#2463
Barton Haynes
#58211
Overall Influence
Barton Ford Haynes is an American physician and immunologist internationally recognized for work in T-cell immunology, retrovirology, and HIV vaccine development. Haynes is a Frederic M. Hanes Professor of Medicine and Immunology at Duke University Medical Center. He is the director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Duke Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and Immunogen Discovery , which was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 2012. In addition, Haynes directs the B-cell Lineage Envelope Design Study, the Centralized Envelope Phase I Study, and...
Go to Profile#2464
Lynne Tirrell
#56310
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lynne Tirrell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where she is also affiliated with the Human Rights Institute. Much of the body of her work focuses on hate speech, especially the practical effects of linguistic practices in shaping the social conditions that make genocide and other significant acts of oppression possible. Her research started in the United States but quickly branched in to other regions of the world, and now focuses on Rwanda and the surrounding region. From 2014 to 2017, she also served as the chair of the APA Committee on Public Philosophy. Her cur...
Go to Profile#2465
Mark Wallinger
#4861
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mark Wallinger is an English artist. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his installation State Britain. His work Ecce Homo was the first piece to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Labyrinth , a permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. In 2018, the permanent work Writ in Water was realized for the National Trust to celebrate the Magna Carta at Runnymede.
Go to Profile#2466
Paul Glasziou
#47954
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Paul Philip Glasziou is an Australian academic physician known for his research in evidence-based medicine. He is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University, where he is also Director of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. He was the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in England from 2003 to 2010. In July 2010, he received an NHMRC Australia Fellowship at Bond University. In March 2015, he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the...
Go to Profile#2467
Sherwood L. Gorbach
#73863
Overall Influence
#2468
Lilian Silburn
#33794
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Lilian Silburn was a French Indologist specialising in Kashmir Shaivism, Tantra and Buddhism. Silburn studied philosophy and Indology under Paul Masson-Oursel and others. During World War II, she joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research and remained associated with it since. Her students included André Padoux.
Go to Profile#2469
Robert Peter Gale
#8647
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Peter Gale is an American physician and medical researcher. He is known for research in leukemia and other bone marrow disorders . Education Gale received his A.B. degree with honors in biology and chemistry from Hobart College in 1966 and his M.D. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1970 . His postgraduate medical training was at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1970 to 1973. In 1976 he received a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of California at Los Angeles following doctoral work focusing on cancer immunology . His postdoctoral studies at UCLA were funded by the U.S.
Go to Profile#2470
Garrett Cullity
#67751
Overall Influence
Garrett Michael Cullity is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. He was Hughes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide between 2007 and 2020. He is known for his research on moral philosophy. Cullity is a Fellow of Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a former president of Australasian Association of Philosophy .
Go to Profile#2471
Martin Stokhof
#64875
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Martin Stokhof is a Dutch logician and philosopher. Stokhof wrote a joint Ph.D. dissertation with Jeroen Groenendijk on the semantics of questions, under the supervision of Renate Bartsch and Johan van Benthem. He was also an important figure in the development of dynamic semantics . He is also known for his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Go to Profile#2472
David Crocker
#40776
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David A. Crocker , is Research Professor in the School of Public Policy, at the University of Maryland, he is also the founder and former president of the International Development Ethics Association . His work has been cited by the United Nations Human Development Report.
Go to Profile#2473
George Sher
#46469
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
George Sher is a moral philosopher and political philosopher who has taught at Rice University since 1991. Education and career Sher earned his bachelor's degree at Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1972. He taught at the University of Vermont before moving to Rice.
Go to Profile#2474
Søren Gosvig Olesen
#63611
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Søren Gosvig Olesen is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and has written extensively in the tradition of continental philosophy as well as translating a number of philosophers central to this tradition: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Olesen is a graduate from Université de Paris I-Sorbonne, and defended his doctorate degree with Wissen und Phänomen from Université de Nice. Olesen has notably advanced the notion of transcendental history.
Go to Profile#2475
Louis R. Caplan
#38817
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Louis R. Caplan is an American physician who is a senior member of the Division of Cerebrovascular Disease at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston. He is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and the founder of the Harvard Stroke Registry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Caplan is the author or editor of 51 books and more than 700 articles in medical journals.
Go to Profile#2476
Franklin I. Gamwell
#35370
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Franklin I. Gamwell is a scholar of the philosophy of religion, Christian theology, and philosophical ethics. He is the Shailer Mathews Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Religious Ethics, the Philosophy of Religions, and Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he also has served as dean. He is a Presbyterian minister with a strong interest in democracy and justice.
Go to Profile#2477
Peggy DesAutels
#56156
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peggy DesAutels is an American academic working as a professor of philosophy at the University of Dayton. Her research focuses on moral psychology, feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
Go to Profile#2478
Dario Antiseri
#38209
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Dario Antiseri is a Philosophy professor. He holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Perugia and for many years he has been Full Professor of Methodology of the Social Sciences at LUISS, in Rome. He taught in Siena, Padova and Rome, where he was also the Dean of the Faculty of Political Science. He retired from academia in 2010. He is an important scholar of Karl R. Popper and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in many works he tries to show the links between fallibilism and hermeneutics. In 1996, he published a book about Gianni Vattimo's weak thought. With the Italian philosoph...
Go to Profile#2479
Pierre‐alain Clavien
#73974
Overall Influence
#2480
Jonathan Craig
#73995
Overall Influence
#2481
Alex Comfort
#36739
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Alexander Comfort was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex . He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, and conscientious objector.
Go to Profile#2482
Gabriel Nuchelmans
#61238
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Gabriel Nuchelmans was a Dutch philosopher, who focused on the history of philosophy as well as on logic and the philosophy of language more in particular. Biography After completing high school at the Episcopal School of Roermond, Nuchelmans studied at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, where he also earned his PhD in 1950. During the PhD he spent a year in Freiburg/Switzerland with Olof Gigon and Joseph Maria Bocheński. In 1947/48 he attended courses by Alfred Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, at University College London. He also heard, at the London School of Economics, Karl Popper and J.O.Wisdom.
Go to Profile#2483
Donald Phillip Verene
#46232
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Donald Phillip Verene is an American philosophy professor and author. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University. Early life and education Donald Verene was born in Galesburg, Illinois. He studied at Knox College in his hometown, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1959. He earned his doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis in 1964.
Go to Profile#2484
Richard Sugarman
#20570
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Sugarman is an American academic and political consultant. He is a professor of religion at the University of Vermont and "a world-renowned expert on the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas." He was an advisor to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on his 2016 presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#2485
Phanto of Phlius
#51160
Overall Influence
Phanto of Phlius, was a Pythagorean philosopher, and one of the last of the school until the Neopythagorean revival in the Roman era. He was a disciple of Philolaus and Eurytus, and, probably in his old age, contemporary with Aristoxenus, the Peripatetic philosopher, c. 320 BC.
Go to Profile#2486
Aresas
#51159
Overall Influence
Aresas of Lucania, and probably of Croton in Magna Graecia, was the head of the Pythagorean school, and the sixth head of the school in succession from Pythagoras himself. Diodorus of Aspendus was one of his students. He lived around the 4th or 5th century BCE.
Go to Profile#2487
Klaus Pantel
#74157
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#2488
Justus Buchler
#49691
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Justus Buchler was an American philosopher, author and professor. He made contributions to the subjects of naturalism and metaphysics, introducing the concept of the natural complex. Biography Buchler was born in New York City, the eldest of three children of rabbi Samuel Buchler and Ida Frost Buchler. Buchler's sister, Beatrice Buchler Gotthold, was the founding editor of Working Woman magazine, and the first female vice president of the New York Times Company.
Go to Profile#2489
Jeffrey Bishop
#46766
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jeffrey Paul Bishop is a philosopher, bioethicist, author and the Tenet Endowed Chair of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. The director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, he is most widely recognized and cited for work in medical ethics as relating to death and dying in addition to contributions in the field of medical humanities. Bishop is a physician, holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Dallas and serves on the editorial boards of both the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and the Journal of Christian Bioethics for Oxford University Press.
Go to Profile#2490
Anselm Haverkamp
#43152
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Anselm Haverkamp is a German-American professor of literature and philosophy. Biography He received his academic education in Freiburg/Brsg, Zurich, Bonn and Konstanz. After his PhD in Heidelberg and his Habilitation in the Konstanz School of Criticism, he moved from Konstanz to Yale; since 1989 he has taught as professor of English at New York University, where he also founded the Poetics and Theory Program. Since 1994 he has served as founding member of the newly established European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, East of Berlin. In 2009, he was made an honorary professor of...
Go to Profile#2491
Ron Polansky
#69957
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ron Polansky is an American philosopher and educator. A Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, he edits the journal Ancient Philosophy. He also edits Mathesis Publications. Polansky teaches and works widely in ancient philosophy, but also has worked and taught bioethics and early modern political philosophy. He is married to Susan Polansky who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#2492
Stylianos Antonarakis
#28142
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stylianos E. Antonarakis is a Greece-born human geneticist. Antonarakis is Professor of Genetic Medicine at the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland. From 2012 to 2017 he was the director of the iGE3 institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva, which he co-founded. He is the President of the Human Genome Organization , a member of the scientific council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and chair of the Genetics panel of the European Research Council. Previously he was the President of the European Society of Human Genetics.
Go to Profile#2493
Katherine Hawley
#69367
Overall Influence
1971 - 2021 (50 years)
Katherine Jane Hawley was a British philosopher specialising in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of physics. Hawley was a professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She was the author of How Things Persist , Trust: a Very Short Introduction , and How To Be Trustworthy . Hawley was elected a Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020, and she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship .
Go to Profile#2494
Alison Simmons
#57511
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Alison Simmons is an American philosopher and Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. Her primary scholarly interests are in early modern theories of mind , the relationship between mind and body, natural philosophy, and sensory perception. With Barbara Grosz, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
Go to Profile#2495
Bernard Charbonneau
#25619
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Bernard Charbonneau was a French writer who authored about twenty books and numerous articles, published in La Gueule Ouverte, Foi et Vie, La République des Pyrénées. An apolitical and independent thinker, he is considered to be a major inspiration for the various French ecological movements. His name is regularly mentioned by French academics. as well French green party leaders.
Go to Profile#2496
Alessandro Liberati
#74490
Overall Influence
#2497
Fabienne Brugère
#44427
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Fabienne Brugère is a French philosopher specializing in aesthetics and philosophy of art, history of modern philosophy , moral and political philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy studies and feminist theory. She was a professor at the Bordeaux Montaigne University and vice-president for international relations at this university. She joined the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis since September 2014, as chair of "philosophy of modern and contemporary arts". She has been president of the Paris Lumières University Group since November 2019, after having chaired the academic council of th...
Go to Profile#2498
Alia Al-Saji
#64606
Overall Influence
Alia Al-Saji is an associate professor of philosophy at McGill University. Her work focuses on bringing 20th century phenomenology and French philosophy into dialogue with critical race and feminist theories. Al-Saji believes that feminist phenomenology must take an intersectional approach to its work, one that accounts for the fact that gender cannot be treated in a vacuum apart from other axes of oppression.
Go to Profile#2499
Charis Eng
#53529
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Charis Eng is a Singapore-born physician-scientist and geneticist at the Cleveland Clinic, notable for identifying the PTEN gene. She is the Chairwoman and founding Director of the Genomic Medicine Institute of the Cleveland Clinic, founding Director and attending clinical cancer geneticist of the institute’s clinical component, the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, and Professor and Vice Chairwoman of the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2500
Ali H. Mokdad
#74633
Overall Influence
