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,
#2501
Sydney M. Finegold
#41600
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Sydney "Sid" Martin Finegold was an American physician, medical school professor, and medical researcher, specializing in anaerobic bacteriology. Biography Born in New York City to Russian, Jewish immigrant parents who worked as pharmacists, Sydney Finegold had a sister and an older brother. The family moved to Los Angeles in the early 1930s. Sydney Finegold graduated in 1943 from the University of California, Los Angeles with a bacteriology major and served from 1943 to 1945 in the US Marine Corps. After WWII ended, he matriculated at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, where he graduated in 1949 with an M.D.
Go to Profile#2502
Nancy J. Nersessian
#34064
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Nancy J. Nersessian is the Regents' Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work tends to be in the areas of the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the psychology of science.
Go to Profile#2503
Jonathan D. Moreno
#16454
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jonathan D. Moreno is an American philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2504
Nijaz Ibrulj
#55532
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nijaz Ibrulj is a Bosnian philosopher and a professor at the University of Sarajevo's Department of Philosophy and Sociology. He lectures on logic, analytic philosophy, methodology of social sciences, theory of knowledge, and cognitive science. His interests also extend to the field of social ontology. Ibrulj was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship during the 2000-2001 academic years to visit the University of California, Berkeley. His application was sponsored by John Searle and Donald Davidson.
Go to Profile#2505
David Sobel
#19020
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Sobel is an American educator and academic, responsible for developing the philosophy of place-based education. He has written extensively on the topic in books and numerous articles. He is currently a Core Faculty member and Director of Certificate Programs at Antioch University New England.
Go to Profile#2506
Helmut Kohlenberger
#51021
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Helmut Kohlenberger is a German philosopher, translator, editor and university lecturer at both the Universities of Vienna and Salzburg. He is the author of several works, including The European Idea and Culture, Theoretical issues of the Middle Ages and Modernism.
Go to Profile#2507
Nythamar de Oliveira
#62452
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Nythamar de Oliveira is a Brazilian philosopher, theologian, and university teacher. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he is full professor at the School of Humanities of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre.
Go to Profile#2508
Roger S. Gottlieb
#53611
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Roger S. Gottlieb is professor of philosophy and Paris Fletcher Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has written and edited 21 books, including two Nautilus Book Awards winners, and over 150 papers on philosophy, political theory, environmental ethics, religious studies, religious environmentalism, religious life, contemporary spirituality, the Holocaust, and disability. He is internationally known for his work as a leading analyst and exponent of religious environmentalism, for his passionate and moving account of spirituality in an age of environm...
Go to Profile#2509
S. Debono
#69750
Overall Influence
S. Debono was a Maltese scientist, linguist and minor philosopher. In philosophy he mostly specialised in ontology. His exact Christian name is unknown. Neither do we possess as yet a portrait of him.
Go to Profile#2510
Susannah Heschel
#20115
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Susannah Heschel is an American scholar and professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. The author and editor of numerous books and articles, she is a Guggenheim Fellow Heschel's scholarship focuses on Jewish and Christian interactions in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Hubert Schleichert
#39398
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Hubert Schleichert was an Austrian emeritus philosopher . His works have emphasized political philosophy, theory of argument and non-European philosophy, especially Chinese philosophy. Working with Urs Egli, Schleichert contributed to erotetics by assembling an annotated bibliography of works in philosophy, linguistics, automatic answering, and psychology/pedagogy.
Go to Profile#2512
Josef Mitterer
#45493
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Josef Mitterer is an Austrian philosopher, and a retired professor at the University of Klagenfurt Department of Philosophy. Mitterer studied psychology and sociology in Innsbruck and Linz and philosophy in Graz. His studies also took him to the London School of Economics , to Heidelberg University , IUC Dubrovnik and in 1976 to Berkeley where he studied with Paul Feyerabend. Mitterer received his doctorate at the University of Graz in 1978. He then worked as a Tour Director in Europe and Asia and as a Management Consultant for the Travel Industry in the USA. Since 1990 Mitterer has been tea...
Go to Profile#2513
Michael Wyschogrod
#37210
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Michael Wyschogrod was a Jewish German-American philosopher of religion, Jewish theologian, and activist for Jewish–Christian interfaith dialogue. During his academic career he taught in philosophy and religion departments of several universities in the United States, Europe and Israel.
Go to Profile#2514
Craig Bartholomew
#51585
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Craig G. Bartholomew is the director of the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. He was senior research fellow at the University of Gloucestershire and H. Evan Runner Professor of philosophy at Redeemer University.
Go to Profile#2515
D. P. Chattopadhyaya
#35663
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Professor Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya , was educated at the University of Calcutta and was Deputy Minister of Health of India and Union Minister of Commerce and Industry. He founded the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, New Delhi, and served as its Chairman. Till the end of his life, he served as the Chairman of the Centre for Studies in Civilizations, and General Editor of the Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture, which produced a multi-volume cultural history of India.
Go to Profile#2516
Ingrid Robeyns
#42595
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ingrid A.M. Robeyns holds the Chair Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities and the associated Ethics Institute. Robeyns is also a Fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association and was elected the associations eighth president in April 2017. She is a notable advocate of economic limitarianism .
Go to Profile#2517
Liang-pei Zhang
#74927
Overall Influence
#2518
Victor Skumin
#10037
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Victor Andreevich Skumin is a Russian and Soviet scientist, psychiatrist, philosopher and writer. After graduating from the Kharkiv National Medical University in 1973, he became a psychotherapist in Kiev Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery. In 1978, he described a new disease, the Skumin syndrome. He introduced a method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion for psychological rehabilitation of cardiosurgical patients .
Go to Profile#2519
Rita Charon
#12946
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Rita Charon , is a physician, literary scholar and the founder and executive director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She currently practices as a general internist at the Associates in Internal Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and is a professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.
Go to Profile#2520
Soren Holm
#65255
Overall Influence
Søren Holm is a bioethicist and philosopher of medicine. He holds a chair in bioethics at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, part of the School of Law at the University of Manchester in Great Britain and the University of Oslo. With Professor John Harris Holm served as co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics from 2004-2011. Holm holds a master's degree in health care ethics from the University of Manchester and two doctoral degrees in medical ethics from the University of Copenhagen. He was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics from 2006 to 2012 and a member of the Co...
Go to Profile#2521
Leon Knopoff
#32758
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Leon Knopoff was an American geophysicist and musicologist. He received his education at Caltech, graduating in 1949 with a PhD in physics, and came to UCLA the following year. He served on the UCLA faculty for 60 years. His research interests spanned a wide variety of fields and included the physics and statistics of earthquakes, earthquake prediction, the interior structure of the Earth, plate tectonics, pattern recognition, non-linear earthquake dynamics and several other areas of solid Earth geophysics. He also made contributions to the fields of musical perception and archaeology.
Go to Profile#2522
Alf Brodal
#75127
Overall Influence
#2523
Theodore George
#62391
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Theodore D. George is an American philosopher and professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University. He is known for his expertise on post-Kantian philosophy and hermeneutics, in particular, his work on Hans-Georg Gadamer. George is the editor of Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. He was the president of North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics between 2013 and 2016.
Go to Profile#2524
Hiro Sachiya
#33696
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Hiro Sachiya was a Japanese religious scholar and a popular contemporary writer of Buddhism. His birth name is Yoshihiko Masuhara. He was born in Osaka Prefecture and studied Indian philosophy at University of Tokyo, graduating in 1960. Under the pen name Hiro Sachiya , he has written more than 400 books and articles. His interest in religion is not limited to Buddhism. He is mostly known for his comparative studies in all religions including Buddhism, Shinto, Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism.
Go to Profile#2525
Tad Schmaltz
#54036
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Tad M. Schmaltz is a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to that, he was a professor of philosophy at Duke University, where he began his teaching career in 1989. He graduated magna cum laude with a BA in philosophy from Kalamazoo College in 1983, received his doctorate in 1988 from the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Malebranche's Theory of the Soul and Radical Cartesianism . He is editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#2526
Willem B. Drees
#42623
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Willem Bernard "Wim" Drees is a Dutch philosopher. As of the 1st of November 2014 he is professor of philosophy of the humanities at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. From 2008 until 2018 he was the editor-in-chief of Zygon, Journal of Religion & Science and professor of philosophy of religion at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#2527
David Carr
#75212
Overall Influence
#2528
John Wendell Severinghaus
#75215
Overall Influence
#2529
Dimitrios Trichopoulos
#20257
Overall Influence
1938 - 2014 (76 years)
Dimitrios Trichopoulos , was a Mediterranean Diet expert and tobacco harms researcher. He was Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention and Professor of Epidemiology, and a past chair of the Department of Epidemiology, in the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
Go to Profile#2530
Edward S. Reed
#27884
Overall Influence
1954 - 1997 (43 years)
Edward Steven Reed was an American philosopher of science and an ecological psychologist in the vein of James J. Gibson. Reed was born in New York, New York. He died in Mohnton, Pennsylvania. Partial bibliography Reed, E.S. & Jones, R. . . Reasons for Realism: Selected essays of James J. Gibson. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Reed, E.S. . James Gibson's ecological revolution in perceptual psychology: A case study in the transformation of scientific Ideas. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 17, 65–99.Reed, E.S. . James Gibson's Ecological Approach to Cognition . In A. Costall & A.
Go to Profile#2531
Bjørn Hofmann
#57085
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Bjørn Morten Hofmann is a Norwegian researcher in philosophy of medicine and ethics with special interest for the relationship between epistemology and ethics. His main subjects in the philosophy of medicine have been the concepts of health and disease. In the philosophy of the health sciences he has studied causation, rationality, evidence, diagnosis, overdiagnosis, medicalization and futility. Reproductive technologies, biobanks and organ transplantation have been his main topics in the ethics of biotechnologies. Additionally, Hofmann has published in research ethics, ethics in health techn...
Go to Profile#2532
Daniel Sulmasy
#51871
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Daniel Sulmasy is an American medical ethicist and former Franciscan friar. He has been Acting Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and on the faculty of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioetics was also named He is the inaugural Andre Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Medicine at Georgetown.
Go to Profile#2533
Domenico Ribatti
#75369
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#2534
Lawrence Stark
#56790
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Lawrence W. Stark was an American neurologist and a recognized authority in the use of engineering analysis to characterize neurological systems. He was a longtime professor of physiological optics and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Stark was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. His father Edward Stark was a chemical engineer trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lawrence credited his early interest in engineering to him.
Go to Profile#2535
Leonard I. Zon
#34696
Overall Influence
Leonard I. Zon, M.D., is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Director of the Stem Cell Program, Children’s Hospital Boston.
Go to Profile#2536
Eberhard Nieschlag
#75428
Overall Influence
#2537
Piet Borst
#75434
Overall Influence
#2538
Carla Cordua
#29826
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Carla Cordua is a Chilean philosopher. Life Cordua was born in Los Ángeles, Chile on Christmas Day, 1925. She entered the University of Chile in 1948 and studied under Bogumil Jasinowski and Oscar Marín.
Go to Profile#2539
John MacFarlane
#52753
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
John MacFarlane is an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley interested in logic and metaphysics. He has made influential contributions to truth-value theory inferential semantics. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also known for his contributions to open source software, especially the Pandoc document converter and other Markdown parsers and verifiers. MacFarlane was among the group of people that helped launch the CommonMark standardization effort for Markdown.
Go to Profile#2540
David Sidransky
#75471
Overall Influence
#2541
Thom Brooks
#19445
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Thomas "Thom" Brooks, is an American-British political philosopher and legal scholar. He has been Professor of Law and Government at Durham University since 2014, and was the Dean of Durham Law School from 2016 to 2021. He was previously a lecturer then Reader at Newcastle University. He has been a visiting scholar at several Ivy League and Russell Group universities. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.
Go to Profile#2542
Tom Stoneham
#62756
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Thomas William Charles Stoneham is a British philosopher. He has published on a range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of George Berkeley. Currently, Stoneham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Head of the Department of Philosophy at York . He is Honorary Treasurer of the UK Council for Graduate Education , an Editorial Board member of White Rose University Press, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College .
Go to Profile#2543
Christopher W. Morris
#63129
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christopher Warren Morris is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Maryland, where he is also a member of the Faculty of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Policy. His main research areas are moral, legal and political philosophy as well as practical rationality.
Go to Profile#2544
Leslie Armour
#49997
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Leslie Armour was a Canadian-born philosopher and writer on social economics. He is the father of the cellist and impresario Julian Armour. Academic career Armour completed a BA at the University of British Columbia in 1952 and a PhD at the University of London in 1956. At the time of his death, he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Research Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Adjunct Professor of Philosophical Theology at St. Paul University, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He taught at universities in Montana, California, and Ohio.
Go to Profile#2545
Radhika Ramana Dasa
#18477
Overall Influence
#2546
Marta Petreu
#52004
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marta Petreu is the pen name of Rodica Marta Vartic, née Rodica Crisan , a Romanian philosopher, literary critic, essayist and poet. A professor of philosophy at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, she has published eight books of essays and seven of poetry, and is the editor of the monthly magazine Apostrof. Petreu is also noted as a historian of fascism, which she notably dealt with in her book about the controversial stances of philosopher Emil Cioran .
Go to Profile#2547
Paul Bruce Beeson
#66915
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
Paul Bruce Beeson was an American physician and professor of medicine, specializing in infectious diseases and the pathogenesis of fever. Biography After undergraduate study at the University of Washington in Seattle, Paul Beeson studied medicine at McGill University Medical School, where he received his MD in 1933. After two years as an intern at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he joined his father's and elder brother's practice in Wooster, Ohio. In 1937 he became a research fellow at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There he worked for two years in the laboratory of Oswald Avery.
Go to Profile#2548
Nima Rezaei
#43064
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Nima Rezaei is an Iranian scientist, a professor of clinical immunology and allergy at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Associate Dean of International Affairs in the School of Medicine and the Director of Global Academic Program . Nima Rezaei is the mastermind, founder and current president of the Universal Scientific Education and Research Network . Rezaei is known for his research in Primary Immunodeficiencies, characterization and treatment. He initiated the Iranian Primary Immunodeficiency Diseases Registry in 1999 under supervision of Professor Asghar Aghamohammadi, which earned...
Go to Profile#2549
John N. Warfield
#9569
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
John Nelson Warfield was an American systems scientist, who was professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences at George Mason University, and president of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society.
Go to Profile#2550
Alain Deneault
#31114
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Alain Deneault is a French Canadian author from Quebec. He is known for his book Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique and the legal proceedings that followed its publishing. Biography Deneault was born in Outaouais, Quebec. He has a research doctorate from Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, and a PhD in philosophy from Paris 8 University under the supervision of Jacques Rancière. His studies focused on philosophy from nineteenth-century Germany and twentieth-century France, particularly the work of Georg Simmel. He lives in Petite-Rivière-de-l’Île, and he teaches philosophy at t...
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