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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#251

Georg Simmel

1858 - 1918 (60 years)

Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was influential in the field of sociology. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking what is society?—directly alluding to Kant's what is nature?—presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomen...

#252

Ian Hacking

#614

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Ian MacDougall Hacking was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and was a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.

#253

Kitaro Nishida

1870 - 1945 (75 years)

Kitarō Nishida was a Japanese moral philosopher, philosopher of mathematics and science, and religious scholar. He was the founder of what has been called the Kyoto School of philosophy. He graduated from the University of Tokyo during the Meiji period in 1894 with a degree in philosophy. He was named professor of the Fourth Higher School in Ishikawa Prefecture in 1899 and later became professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. Nishida retired in 1927. In 1940, he was awarded the Order of Culture . He participated in establishing the Chiba Institute of Technology from 1940.

#254

Tom Beauchamp

#1475

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Tom Lamar Beauchamp is an American philosopher specializing in the work of David Hume, moral philosophy, bioethics, and animal ethics. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University, where he was Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

#255

Nick Bostrom

#186

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

#256

Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach

1804 - 1872 (68 years)

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

#257

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

1452 - 1519 (67 years)

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artis...

#258

Sandra Harding

#1035

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science .

#259

José Ortega y Gasset

José Ortega y Gasset

1883 - 1955 (72 years)

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism, and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" that "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce."

#260

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard

1884 - 1962 (78 years)

Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter, he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break . He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour.

#261

14th Dalai Lama

14th Dalai Lama

#10

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

The 14th Dalai Lama , known to the Tibetan people as Gyalwa Rinpoche, is, as the incumbent Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader and head of Tibet. He is considered a living Bodhisattva; specifically, an emanation of Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit, and Chenrezig in Tibetan. He is also the leader and a monk of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa. The central government of Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, invested the Dalai Lama with temporal duties until his exile in 1959.

#262

Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley

#1046

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

#263

Gerhard Gentzen

Gerhard Gentzen

1909 - 1945 (36 years)

Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.

#264

William L. Rowe

#1886

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

William Leonard Rowe was a professor of philosophy at Purdue University who specialized in the philosophy of religion. His work played a leading role in the "remarkable revival of analytic philosophy of religion since the 1970s". He was noted for his formulation of the evidential argument from evil.

#265

Ray Brassier

#1408

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

#266

J. M. E. McTaggart

J. M. E. McTaggart

1866 - 1925 (59 years)

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was an English idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists. McTaggart is known for "The Unreality of Time" , in which he argues that time is unreal. The work has been widely discussed through the 20th century and into the 21st.

#267

Xenophanes

560 BC - 478 BC (82 years)

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer from Ionia who travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early Classical Antiquity. As a poet, Xenophanes was known for his critical style, writing poems that are considered among the first satires. He also composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories. He also criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak. His poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his w...

#268

Zoroaster

628 BC - 551 BC (77 years)

Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, is regarded as the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. He is said to have been an Iranian prophet who founded a religious movement that challenged the existing traditions of ancient Iranian religion, and inaugurated a movement that eventually became a staple religion in ancient Iran. He was a native speaker of Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain. He founded the first documented monotheistic religion in the world and also had an impact on Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions – Judais...

#269

Steven Best

#885

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Steven Best is an American philosopher, writer, speaker and activist. His concerns include animal rights, species extinction, human overpopulation, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media and culture, globalization, and capitalist domination. He is Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has published 13 books and over 200 articles and reviews.

#270

John D. Caputo

#1021

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.

#271

Antony Flew

#869

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.

#272

Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff

#1256

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Leonard Sylvan Peikoff is a Canadian American philosopher. He is an Objectivist and was a close associate of Ayn Rand, who designated him heir to her estate. He is a former professor of philosophy and host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show. He co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985 and is the author of several books on philosophy.

#273

David Chalmers

#652

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

#274

Donna Haraway

#257

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.

#275

Sidney Hook

1902 - 1989 (87 years)

Sidney Hook was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth, Hook was later known for his criticisms of totalitarianism, both fascism and Marxism–Leninism. A social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism. After World War II, he argued that members of such groups as the Communist Party USA and Leninists like democratic centralists could ethically be barred from holding the offices of publ...

#276

Michael Walzer

#604

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic.

#277

Augustus De Morgan

Augustus De Morgan

1806 - 1871 (65 years)

Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. Biography Childhood Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, in the Carnatic region of India in 1806. His father was Lieut.-Colonel John De Morgan , who held various appointments in the service of the East India Company, and his mother, Elizabeth , was the daughter of John Dodson and granddaughter of James Dodson, who computed a table of anti-logarithms . Augustus De Morgan became blind in one eye a month or two after he was born.

#278

William Whewell

William Whewell

1794 - 1866 (72 years)

William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master at Trinity College, Cambridge. In his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics.

#279

Gabriel Marcel

1889 - 1973 (84 years)

Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist. The author of over a dozen books and at least thirty plays, Marcel's work focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society. Though often regarded as the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, preferring the term philosophy of existence or neo-Socrateanism to define his own thought. The Mystery of Being is a well-known two-volume work authored by Marcel.

#280

Ernest Nagel

1901 - 1985 (84 years)

Ernest Nagel was an American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement. His 1961 book The Structure of Science is considered a foundational work in the logic of scientific explanation.

#281

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

1729 - 1781 (52 years)

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. He is widely considered by theatre historians to be the first dramaturg in his role at Abel Seyler's Hamburg National Theatre.

#282

Ernest Sosa

#2201

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. Since 2007 he has been Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, but he spent most of his career at Brown University.

#283

Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem

1897 - 1982 (85 years)

Gershom Scholem , was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

#284

Roger Penrose

#26

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

#285

Frank Cameron Jackson

#1056

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Frank Cameron Jackson is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University where he had spent most of the latter part of his career. His primary research interests include epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind. In the latter field he is best known for the "Mary's room" knowledge argument, a thought experiment that is one of the most discussed challenges to physicalism.

#286

Jaakko Hintikka

Jaakko Hintikka

#1694

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic. Life and career Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta .

#287

Bruno Bauer

1809 - 1882 (73 years)

Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and theologian. As a student of G. W. F. Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and, beginning with Hegel's analysis of Christianity's Hellenic as well as Jewish roots, concluded that early Christianity owed more to ancient Greek philosophy than to Judaism.

#288

Arthur Danto

#970

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Arthur Coleman Danto was an American art critic, philosopher, and professor at Columbia University. He was best known for having been a long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action. His interests included thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.

#289

Rosalind Hursthouse

Rosalind Hursthouse

#2552

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Rosalind Hursthouse is a British-born New Zealand moral philosopher noted for her work on virtue ethics. She is one of the leading exponents of contemporary virtue ethics, though she has also written extensively on philosophy of action, history of philosophy, moral psychology, and biomedical ethics. Hursthouse is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Auckland and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

#290

Peter Abelard

1079 - 1142 (63 years)

Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, poet, composer and musician. In philosophy, he is celebrated for his logical solution to the problem of universals via nominalism and conceptualism and his pioneering of intent in ethics. Often referred to as the "Descartes of the twelfth century", he is considered a forerunner of Rousseau, Kant, and Spinoza. He is sometimes credited as a chief forerunner of modern empiricism.

#291

Alexandre Kojève

Alexandre Kojève

1902 - 1968 (66 years)

Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into twentieth-century continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the formation of the European Union.

#292

Graham Priest

#1744

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

#293

Ibn Arabi

1165 - 1240 (75 years)

Ibn ʿArabī was an Andalusi Muslim scholar, mystic, poet, and philosopher, extremely influential within Islamic thought. Out of the 850 works attributed to him, some 700 are authentic while over 400 are still extant. His cosmological teachings became the dominant worldview in many parts of the Muslim world.

#294

Carl Stumpf

1848 - 1936 (88 years)

Carl Stumpf was a German philosopher, psychologist and musicologist. He is noted for founding the Berlin School of experimental psychology. He studied with Franz Brentano at the University of Würzburg before receiving his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1868. He also tutored the modernist literature writer Robert Musil at the University of Berlin, and worked with Hermann Lotze, who is famous for his work in perception, at Göttingen. Stumpf is known for his work on the psychology of tones. He had an important influence on his students Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka who were instru...

#295

John the Baptist

John the Baptist

4 BC - 32 (36 years)

John the Baptist was a Judaean preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early 1st century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, John the Immerser in some Baptist Christian traditions, Saint John by certain Catholic churches, and Prophet Yahya in Islam. He is sometimes alternatively referred to as John the Baptiser.

#296

Zeno of Citium

334 BC - 263 BC (71 years)

Zeno of Citium was a Hellenistic philosopher from Citium , Cyprus. He was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in accordance with nature. It proved very popular, and flourished as one of the major schools of philosophy from the Hellenistic period through to the Roman era, and enjoyed revivals in the Renaissance as Neostoicism and in the current era as Modern Stoicism.

#297

Gilbert Harman

#1288

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.

#298

Scott Soames

#2630

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

#299

Alexius Meinong

Alexius Meinong

1853 - 1920 (67 years)

Alexius Meinong Ritter von Handschuchsheim was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology. He also made contributions to philosophy of mind and theory of value. Life Alexius Meinong's father was officer Anton von Meinong , who was granted the hereditary title of Ritter in 1851 and reached the rank of Major General in 1858 before retiring in 1859.

#300

Giorgio Agamben

#310

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life homo sacer, and indifference. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings.

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