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,
#2451
Zdeněk Neubauer
#13689
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Zdeněk Neubauer was a Czech philosopher and biologist, remarkable especially for original interpretations in science history and epistemology. Biography Born in Brno to family of the Brno normative legal school representative Zdeněk Neubauer , Neubauer graduated from Charles University in Prague . During his activity in Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Naples he made several discoveries in genetics. In 1982 left the university because of nonconformist attitudes . After that, he was mainly a philosopher , publishing underground. Since 1990, he has been a member of the dep...
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Mihailo Đurić
#16840
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Mihailo Đurić was one of Serbia's most prominent philosophers. He was a professor at the University of Belgrade's Law School and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Within the frame of ancient Greek culture, he studied philosophy, law, politics and history, but also modern political theory and ethics. A majority of his works are within the field of philosophy and method of sociology, history of political theories and political science. In the past two decades, his work was mainly devoted to the study of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
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Henrik Steffens
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Henrik Steffens , was a Norwegian philosopher, scientist, and poet. Early life, education, and lectures He was born at Stavanger. At the age of fourteen he went with his parents to Copenhagen, where he studied theology and natural science. In 1796 he lectured at the University of Kiel, and two years later went to the University of Jena to study the natural philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. He went to Freiberg in 1800, and there came under the influence of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1801, he published a volume on geology called Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde. which became his most successful and influential work as a scientist.
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Gaius Marius Victorinus
290 - 364 (74 years)
Gaius Marius Victorinus was a Roman grammarian, rhetorician and Neoplatonic philosopher. Victorinus was African by birth and experienced the height of his career during the reign of Constantius II. He is also known for translating two of Aristotle's books from ancient Greek into Latin: the Categories and On Interpretation . Victorinus had a religious conversion, from being a pagan to a Christian, "at an advanced old age" .
Go to Profile#2455
Bolívar Echeverría
#14215
Overall Influence
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Bolívar Echeverría was a philosopher, economist and cultural critic, born in Ecuador and later nationalized Mexican. He was professor emeritus on the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico .
Go to Profile#2456
Dorothy Edgington
#28325
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dorothy Margaret Doig Edgington FBA is a philosopher active in metaphysics and philosophical logic. She is particularly known for her work on the logic of conditionals and vagueness. Life and education Dorothy Edgington was born on 29 April 1941 to Edward Milne and his wife Rhoda née Blair. She attended St Leonards School before going to St Hilda's College, Oxford to read PPE. She obtained her BA in 1964, followed in 1967 by a BPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford.
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Pierre Laromiguière
1756 - 1837 (81 years)
Pierre Laromiguière was a French philosopher. Life He was born at Livinhac-le-Haut, Rouergue, and died in Paris. As professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse, he was unsuccessful and incurred the displeasure of the French parliament by his thesis on the rights of property in connection with taxation. Subsequently, he came to Paris, where he was appointed professor of logic in the École Normale and lectured in the Prytanée. In 1799 he was made a member of the Tribunate, and in 1833 of the Academy of Moral and Political Science. In 1793 he published Projet d'éléments de métaphysique, a work characterized by lucidity and excellence of style.
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Fyodor Shcherbatskoy
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Fyodor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoy or Stcherbatsky , often referred to in the literature as F. Th. Stcherbatsky, was a Russian Indologist who, in large part, was responsible for laying the foundations in the Western world for the scholarly study of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. He was born in Kielce, Poland , and died at the Borovoye Resort in northern Kazakhstan.
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Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
#27903
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is an American philosopher specializing in ethics, epistemology, neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is the Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.
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David Barker
#16755
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
David James Purslove Barker was an English physician and epidemiologist and originator of the Barker Hypothesis that foetal and early infant conditions have a permanent conditioning effect on the body's metabolism and chronic conditions later in life.
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Jean Mayer
#12394
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Jean Mayer was a French-American scientist best known for his research on the physiological bases of hunger and the metabolism of essential nutrients, and for his role in shaping policy on world hunger at both the national and international levels. As a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayer directed a laboratory that did groundbreaking work on the hypothalamic regulation of obesity and various metabolic disorders. In 1968-69, having worked as an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, he was appointed principal organizer and chair of the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health.
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Henry Odera Oruka
#24871
Overall Influence
1944 - 1995 (51 years)
Henry Odera Oruka was a Kenyan philosopher who is best known for "Sage Philosophy". It was a project started in the 1970s in an attempt to preserve the knowledge of the indigenous thinkers in traditional African communities.
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John Oulton Wisdom
#21190
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
John Oulton Wisdom , cousin of Cambridge professor John Wisdom was "an important contributor to philosophy and to psychoanalysis" who made "original contributions to the mind-body problem, to philosophy of science, to cybernetics, to the theory of psychosomatic disorder, and to psychoanalytic theory".
Go to Profile#2464
Harriet Baber
#21464
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Harriet Baber is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego. She holds a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University, 1980. Her research interests are in analytic metaphysics, philosophical theology, feminism and philosophy of economics. In addition, Baber writes for The Guardian and is a regular columnist for Church Times . She is an Episcopalian.
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Ron McClamrock
#19114
Overall Influence
Ronald Albert McClamrock is an associate professor of philosophy at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. His primary areas of research are the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive science.
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Nasrollah Pourjavady
#20377
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nasrollah Pourjavady is an Iranian philosopher, Sufi scholar and a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran in Tehran, Iran. He is the founder and former head of the Iran University Press and a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.
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C. Robert Mesle
#15095
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charles Robert Mesle is an American process theologian and was professor of philosophy and religion at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, until his retirement in 2016. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion at Graceland University and a Master of Arts degree in Christian theology at University of Chicago Divinity School , Mesle received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in philosophy and religion from Northwestern University .
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Gilles Lipovetsky
#10802
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gilles Lipovetsky is a French philosopher, writer, and sociologist, professor at Stendhal University in Grenoble, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France. Life and career Lipovetsky was born in Millau in 1944. He studied philosophy at University of Grenoble, and participated in the 1968 student uprising in Paris to change the French educational model. However he criticizes the model that came from that as producing alienated individuals with fragile personalities prone to emotional disorder due to hedonism and immediate gratification.
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C. J. F. Williams
#29245
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Christopher John Fardo Williams was a British philosopher. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, on which topic he did most of his original work, and ancient philosophy, as an editor and translator.
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Aurel Kolnai
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Aurel Thomas Kolnai was a 20th-century philosopher and political theorist. Life Kolnai was born Aurel Stein in Budapest, Hungary to Jewish parents but moved to Vienna before his twentieth birthday to enter Vienna University, where he studied under Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Bühler, and Ludwig von Mises. It was also at this time that he became attracted to the thinking of Franz Brentano and the phenomenological thought of Brentano's student Edmund Husserl. Kolnai studied under Husserl briefly in 1928 in Freiburg. During the early 1920s, Kolnai wrote as an independent scholar with little success.
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William Wollaston
1659 - 1724 (65 years)
William Wollaston was a school teacher, Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a major Enlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated. He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
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Mylan Engel
#30205
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mylan Engel Jr. is a full professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Biography Born in Alabama and educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of Arizona, he was hired by Northern Illinois University in 1988. Engel has also served as guest professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and University of Maribor, Slovenia .
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Hassan Hanafi
#19370
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Hassan Hanafi was a professor and chaired the philosophy department at Cairo University. He was a leading authority on modern Islam. As a young man motivated by a revolutionary political activism, Hanafi associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Later Hanafi studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1967, he was a professor of philosophy in Cairo, as well as a visiting professor at universities in France, the United States, Belgium, Kuwait and Germany. He has been categorized as among "the big names" of the post-1967 Arab intellectual tradition.
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C. Ronald Kahn
#23010
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Carl Ronald Kahn is an American physician and scientist, best known for his work with insulin receptors and insulin resistance in diabetes and obesity. He is the Chief Academic Officer at Joslin Diabetes Center, the Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1999.
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John M. Cooper
#26855
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
John Madison Cooper was an American philosopher who was the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and an expert on ancient philosophy. Education and career Cooper earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1967 and taught there until 1971, when he accepted a tenured position in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught until he moved to Princeton in 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001.
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Michel Bitbol
#18855
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michel Bitbol is a French researcher in philosophy of science. He is "Directeur de recherche" at CNRS, previously in the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée of École polytechnique . He is now a member of Archives Husserl, École Normale Superieure .
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John Macquarrie
#10441
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
John Macquarrie was a Scottish-born theologian, philosopher and Anglican priest. He was the author of Principles of Christian Theology and Jesus Christ in Modern Thought . Timothy Bradshaw, writing in the Handbook of Anglican Theologians, described Macquarrie as "unquestionably Anglicanism's most distinguished systematic theologian in the second half of the 20th century."
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James Griffin
#27539
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
James Patrick Griffin was an American-born philosopher, who was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2019. Education Griffin was educated at Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and Yale University, obtaining a BA in 1955. He was then a Rhodes Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford , then a senior scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford , obtaining his doctorate under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle in 1960.
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Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Stilpo
359 BC - 279 BC (80 years)
Stilpo was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school. He was a contemporary of Theophrastus, Diodorus Cronus, and Crates of Thebes. None of his writings survive, but he is described in the writings of others as being interested in logic and dialectic, and he argued that the universal is fundamentally separated from the individual and concrete. His ethical teachings approached that of the Cynics and Stoics. His most important followers were Pyrrho, the founder of Pyrrhonism, and Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Gaius Musonius Rufus
25 - 95 (70 years)
Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD. He taught philosophy in Rome during the reign of Nero and so was sent into exile in 65 AD, returning to Rome only under Galba. He was allowed to stay in Rome when Vespasian banished all other philosophers from the city in 71 AD although he was eventually banished anyway, returning only after Vespasian's death. A collection of extracts from his lectures still survives. He is also remembered for being the teacher of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom.
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Douglas Rushkoff
#4187
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Douglas Mark Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open-source solutions to social problems.
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Mir Damad
1561 - 1631 (70 years)
Mir Damad , known also as Mir Mohammad Baqer Esterabadi, or Asterabadi, was a Twelver Shia Iranian philosopher in the Neoplatonizing Islamic Peripatetic traditions of Avicenna. He also was a Suhrawardi, a scholar of the traditional Islamic sciences, and foremost figure of the cultural renaissance of Iran undertaken under the Safavid dynasty. He was also the central founder of the School of Isfahan, noted by his students and admirers as the Third Teacher after Aristotle and al-Farabi.
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Jean Houston
#3955
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jean Houston is an American author involved in the human potential movement. Along with her husband, Robert Masters, she co-founded the Foundation for Mind Research. Biography Early life and education Houston was born in New York City to Mary Todaro Houston who was of Sicilian descent, and Jack Houston who was related to Sam Houston of Texas. Her father was a comedy writer who developed material for stage, television and the movies, including for comedians Bob Hope and George Burns. His work required him, and the family, to move frequently. After the breakup of her parents' marriage, she spe...
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Ernest Newman
1868 - 1959 (91 years)
Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective approach of other critics, such as Neville Cardus, was reflected in his books on Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and others. He was music critic of The Sunday Times from 1920 until his death nearly forty years later. His other positions included chief music critic of The Birmingham Post from ...
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Estanislao Zuleta
1935 - 1990 (55 years)
Estanislao Zuleta was a Latin American philosopher, writer and professor from Colombia. He was known especially for his works on the universities being a professor for all his life. More important than his writings, Zuleta is remembered by his conferences that were carefully recorded by his colleagues and pupils and published several times during his life and after his death in 1990. He dedicated especially to philosophy, Latin American economy, psychology and education. He let treaties on ancient and modern thinkers of a rich social and historical analysis over the Latin American cultural context.
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Syed Zafarul Hasan
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Syed Zafarul Hasan was a prominent twentieth-century Pakistani Muslim philosopher. Biography He was the eldest son of Khan Sahib Syed Diwan Mohammad. Hasan was educated at Aligarh and obtained doctorates from the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg, Germany, and Oxford University. Dr Zafarul Hasan was the first Muslim Scholar of the Indian sub-continent to secure a PhD from Oxford in Philosophy. His doctoral thesis Realism is a classic on the subject. Prominent philosophers and educationists lauded his work, among them, his teacher Prof. John Alaxander Smith , and Allama Mohammad Iqbal.
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Richard Sorabji
#21826
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Sir Richard Rustom Kharsedji Sorabji, is a British historian of ancient Western philosophy, and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at King's College London. He has written his 'Intellectual Autobiography' in his Festschrift: R. Salles ed., Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought , 1–36. He is the nephew of Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to practice law in Britain and India.
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William Shaw
#29559
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
William H. Shaw was born on July 31, 1948. He is a professor and former Chair of the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University. He is the author of Marx's Theory of History, Business Ethics, 4th ed., Moral Issues in Business, 8th ed. , and Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism.
Go to Profile#2491
Giuseppe Lippi
#43887
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#2492
Timothy J. McGrew
#22370
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Timothy Joel McGrew is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, and the chair of the department of philosophy there. His research interests include epistemology, the history and philosophy of science, and the philosophy of religion. He is a specialist in the philosophical applications of probability theory.
Go to Profile#2493
Mikael Stenmark
#32372
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mikael Stenmark is a Swedish philosopher who is Dean of the Faculty of Theology since 2008 and Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published papers in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and environmental ethics and on science-religion issues. Stenmark is the author of "Rationality in Science, Religion and Everyday Life" , for which he was awarded The John Templeton Foundation Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences in 1996.
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Ira Shor
#4541
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ira Shor is a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. He is also doctoral faculty in the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Hermann Ulrici
1806 - 1884 (78 years)
Hermann Ulrici was a German philosopher. He was co-editor of the philosophical journal Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. He also wrote under the pseudonym of Ulrich Reimann. Life Ulrici was born at Pförten, in the Niederlausitz region of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was educated at the in Berlin. He initially studied law, but gave up his profession on the death of his father, and devoted four years to the study of literature, philosophy and science. In 1834 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Halle, where he remained till his death.
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Thomas Baldwin
#21124
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Thomas R. Baldwin is a British philosopher and has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York since 1995. He has written generally on 20th century analytic and Continental philosophy, as well as bioethics, the philosophy of language and of mind, particularly with regard to G. E. Moore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bertrand Russell.
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Ruth Anna Putnam
#29979
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Ruth Anna Putnam was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. Biography Ruth Anna Jacobs was born in Berlin on 20 September 1927. Her father, born Karl Adolf Rudolf Hermann Jacobs in 1901 in Gotha, was Hermann Jacobs, the great great grandson of the German scholar Friedrich Jacobs. Her mother Marie Jacobs, born Marie Kohn in 1901, was the daughter of Hans Nathan Kohn, the German physician after whom the "Pores of Kohn" were named. Ruth was the couple's only child.
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Kerry S. Walters
#15866
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kerry S. Walters is Professor emeritus of Philosophy at Gettysburg College and author of numerous books on philosophy, religion, and American history as well as over 200 articles in academic journals, trade magazines, and newspapers. His special fields of interests include Christian mysticism, atheism, the ethics of diet, Christian pacifism, critical thinking, deism in early America, and the history of the early republic.
Go to Profile#2499
Philip L. Quinn
#30097
Overall Influence
1940 - 2004 (64 years)
Philip L. Quinn was a philosopher and theologian. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1962 and went on to earn a master's degree in physics from the University of Delaware in 1966. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy. Quinn joined the faculty of Brown University. At Brown, he was very popular and taught courses in the philosophy of physics, ethics, and related fields. In 1985, he assumed a position as the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Quinn served in 1994–1995 a...
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Jan Faye
#30882
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jan Faye is a Danish philosopher of science and metaphysics. He is currently associate professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. Faye has contributed to a number of areas in philosophy including explanation, interpretation, philosophy of the humanities and the natural sciences, evolutionary naturalism, philosophy of Niels Bohr, and topics concerning time, causation, and backward causation .
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