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,
#2501
G. Spencer-Brown
#9216
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
George Spencer-Brown was an English polymath best known as the author of Laws of Form. He described himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet".
Go to Profile#2502
Charles Bell
1774 - 1842 (68 years)
Sir Charles Bell was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist, and philosophical theologian. He is noted for discovering the difference between sensory nerves and motor nerves in the spinal cord. He is also noted for describing Bell's palsy.
Go to Profile#2503
Georg Anton Friedrich Ast
1778 - 1841 (63 years)
Georg Anton Friedrich Ast was a German philosopher and philologist. Biography Ast was born in Gotha. Educated there and at the University of Jena, he became a privatdozent at Jena in 1802. In 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the University of Landshut, where he remained until 1826, when it was transferred to Munich. He lived there until his death in 1841.
Go to Profile#2504
François Hemsterhuis
1721 - 1790 (69 years)
François Hemsterhuis was a Dutch writer on aesthetics and moral philosophy. The son of Tiberius Hemsterhuis, he was born at Franeker in the Netherlands. He was educated at the University of Leiden, where he studied Plato. Failing to obtain a professorship, he entered the service of the state, and for many years acted as secretary to the state council of the United Provinces. He died at the Hague on 7 July 1790. Through his philosophical writings he became acquainted with many distinguished persons—Goethe, Herder, Princess Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin, and especially Jacobi, with whom he had much in common.
Go to Profile#2505
Ai Siqi
1910 - 1966 (56 years)
Ài Sīqí is the pen name of Li Shengxuan , a Yunnan Mongol Chinese philosopher and author. He was born in Tengchong, Yunnan, later traveling to Hong Kong, where he studied English and French at a Protestant school and was exposed to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People and Marxism. He read a great deal of Marxism, including the Communist Manifesto, in Japanese translation. This reading is the root of Ai’s most important works, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism and Philosophy for the Masses . He was a delegate to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd National People's Congress.
Go to Profile#2506
Grace Jantzen
#41983
Overall Influence
1948 - 2006 (58 years)
Grace Marion Jantzen was a Canadian feminist philosopher and theologian. She was professor of religion, culture and gender at Manchester University from 1996 until her death from cancer at the age of 57.
Go to Profile#2507
Howard Robinson
#25214
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Howard Robinson is a British philosopher, specialising in various areas of philosophy of mind and metaphysics, best known for his work in the philosophy of perception. His contributions to philosophy include a defense of sense-datum theories of perception and a variety of arguments against physicalism about the mind. He published an alternative version of the popular Knowledge Argument in his book Matter and Sense independently and in the same year as Frank Jackson, but Robinson's thought experiment involves sounds rather than colors. He is Professor of Philosophy at Central European Universi...
Go to Profile#2508
Franjo Marković
1845 - 1914 (69 years)
Franjo Marković was a Croatian philosopher and writer. He was an academician, the first professor of philosophy at the renovated University of Zagreb in 1874. The defender of the identity of philosophy as a metaphysical discipline, as opposed to scholasticism on one side, and positivism and materialism on the other side.
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Béla Juhos
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Béla Juhos was a Hungarian-Austrian philosopher and member of the Vienna Circle. Life Juhos was born on 22 November 1901 in Vienna into a Hungarian family of low nobility . His father was a Hungarian tradesman and entrepreneur owning an iron wholesale in Vienna and Budapest. Juhos attended primary school in Budapest and spoke Hungarian as a child. In 1909 he moved to Vienna, where he learned German and completed Realgymnasium in 1920.
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Vincent Brümmer
#31000
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Vincent Brümmer was a South African-born Christian theologian who worked for most of his career in the Netherlands. From 1967 to 1997 he was the Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Utrecht.
Go to Profile#2511
John Veitch
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
John Veitch , Scottish philosopher, poet and historian. He was born in Peebles, the only son of Peninsular War veteran James Veitch and his wife Nancy Ritchie, a woman steeped in the folk traditions of the Borders. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh.
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Abraham Moles
#7145
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Abraham Moles was a pioneer in information science and communication studies in France, He was a professor at Ulm school of design and University of Strasbourg. He is known for his work on kitsch. Biography Moles studied electrical and acoustics engineering at the University of Grenoble while preparing a bachelor in sciences of nature. He became a research assistant at the Laboratory of metal physics, under the direction of Félix Esclangon, then of Louis Néel. There he learned techniques of metal work, then electric and electronic tools. He wrote reports on material properties or technical analysis.
Go to Profile#2513
Christian Thomasius
1655 - 1728 (73 years)
Christian Thomasius was a German jurist and philosopher. Biography He was born in Leipzig and was educated by his father, Jakob Thomasius , at that time a junior lecturer in Leipzig University . Through his father's lectures, Christian came under the influence of the political philosophy of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, and continued the study of law at the University of Frankfurt in 1675, completing his doctorate in 1679. In 1680, he married Anna Christine Heyland and started a legal practice in Leipzig; the following year he began teaching at the university’s law school as well. In 1...
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William J. Abraham
#20871
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
William James Abraham was a Northern Irish theologian, analytic philosopher, and Methodist pastor known for his contributions to the philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, evangelism, and church renewal. Abraham spent most of his career in the United States and was the Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He previously taught at Seattle Pacific University and was a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. Abraham was associated with the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church and was a propone...
Go to Profile#2515
Peter-Paul Verbeek
#14737
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Peter-Paul Verbeek is Rector Magnificus of the University of Amsterdam and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Science and Technology in a Changing World since 1 October 2022. Prior to his appointment in Amsterdam, Verbeek, a Dutch philosopher of technology, has been chair of the philosophy department at the University of Twente. He was a member of the Dutch council for the Humanities and chair of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. Since 2018, he has also been University Professor of Philosophy of Humans and Technology and scientific codirector of the DesignLab at the University of Twente.
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Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, he held the ...
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George Ohsawa
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
George Ohsawa was a Japanese educator who was the founder of the macrobiotic diet. When living in Europe he went by the pen names of Musagendo Sakurazawa, Nyoiti Sakurazawa, and Yukikazu Sakurazawa. He also used the French first name Georges while living in France, and his name is sometimes also given this spelling. He wrote about 300 books in Japanese and 20 in French. He defined health on the basis of seven criteria: lack of fatigue, good appetite, good sleep, good memory, good humour, precision of thought and action, and gratitude.
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Keith Frankish
#18520
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Keith Frankish is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science. He is an Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. He is known for his "illusionist" stance in the theory of consciousness. He holds that the conscious mind is a virtual system, a trick of the biological mind. In other words, phenomenality is an introspective illusion. This position is in opposition to dualist theo...
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Arthur Fine
#21255
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Arthur Isadore Fine is an American philosopher of science now emeritus at the University of Washington. Education and career Having studied physics, philosophy, and mathematics, Fine graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958 with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. He then, in 1960, earned a Master of Science in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a thesis supervised by Karl Menger,
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Herbert Y. Meltzer
#44389
Overall Influence
Herbert Y. Meltzer is an American scientist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, pharmacology and physiology and director of the Translational Neuropharmacology Program at Northwestern University, best known for his research on the treatment of schizophrenia. He is the author of over 1,000 publications.
Go to Profile#2521
William C. Dement
#9095
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
William Charles Dement was an American sleep researcher and founder of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University. He was a leading authority on sleep, sleep deprivation and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy. For this pioneering work in a previously uncharted field in the United States, he is sometimes referred to as the American father of sleep medicine.
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Michael Williams
#35279
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Williams is a British philosopher who is currently Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, noted especially for his work in epistemology. Education and career He received his BA from the University of Oxford and his PhD from Princeton University under the direction of Richard Rorty. He taught at Yale University, the University of Maryland, and Northwestern University prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins.
Go to Profile#2523
George Woodcock
#22409
Overall Influence
1912 - 1995 (83 years)
George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, a philosopher, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements .
Go to Profile#2524
Michael R. Ayers
#36770
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Michael Richard Ayers is a British philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and was a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1965 until 2002. Among his students are Colin McGinn and William Child.
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Henry E. Kyburg Jr.
#29691
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Henry E. Kyburg Jr. was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida. His first faculty posts were at Rockefeller Institute, University of Denver, Wesleyan College, and Wayne State University.
Go to Profile#2526
Johann Bernhard Basedow
1723 - 1790 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Basedow was a German educational reformer, teacher and writer. He founded the Philanthropinum, a short-lived but influential progressive school in Dessau, and was the author of "Elementarwerk", a popular illustrated textbook for children.
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Gilbert Shelton
#4759
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Gilbert Shelton is an American cartoonist and a key member of the underground comix movement. He is the creator of the iconic underground characters The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog.
Go to Profile#2528
James Martineau
1805 - 1900 (95 years)
James Martineau was a British religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism. He was the brother of the atheist social theorist, abolitionist Harriet Martineau. James Martineau's children included the Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist Edith Martineau, and painter and woodcarver Gertrude Martineau.
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Gail Fine
#38634
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gail Fine is a professor of philosophy emerita at Cornell University. She was also a visiting professor of ancient philosophy at Oxford University, and a senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford University.
Go to Profile#2530
Frederick Mayer
#20191
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Frederick Mayer was an educational scientist and philosopher of the University of Redlands, California and one of the leading creativity experts. One of his most important aims was a global humanism. Until the very last days of his life he was active as an author. More than sixty books deal with creativity, education and humanism. Internationally recognized creativity researcher Frederick Mayer in Vienna died. Mayer was particularly affected by the quote "Pride is not for him who loves his country, but for him who loves the whole world."
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Linji Yixuan
850 - 866 (16 years)
Linji Yixuan was the founder of the Linji school of Chán Buddhism during Tang dynasty China. Línjì yǔlù Information on Linji is based on the Línjì yǔlù , the Record of Linji. The standard form of these sayings was not completed until two hundred fifty years after Linji's death, and likely reflects the teaching of Chán in the Linji school at the beginning of the Song dynasty rather than that of Linji in particular.
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Gustav Teichmüller
1832 - 1888 (56 years)
Gustav Teichmüller was a German philosopher. His works, particularly his notion of perspectivism, influenced Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. Biography Teichmüller was born in Braunschweig in the Duchy of Brunswick. He was the son of August Teichmüller and Charlotte Georgine Elisabeth Teichmüller, née von Girsewaldt. His father was a lieutenant in the Prussian army. His mother also came from a soldier's family.
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Kristo Ivanov
#5582
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Kristo Ivanov is a Swedish-Brazilian information scientist and systems scientist of ethnic Bulgarian origin. He is professor emeritus at the Department of informatics of Umeå University in Sweden. Biography Ivanov was born in Belgrade in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but grew up and was educated in Italy and later in Brazil where he graduated in electronic engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica. In 1961 he moved to Sweden, where he worked as an electronic engineer in the telecommunications and computer industries, with assignments in France and the USA. In 1972 he obtained a PhD...
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Rainer Forst
#18243
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Rainer Forst is a German philosopher and political theorist, and was called the "most important political philosopher of his generation" in 2012, when he won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. Currently he is Professor of Political Theory at the Department for Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt. He is often identified with the newest generation of scholars associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He received his doctorate under the supervision of Jürgen Habermas in 1993, with additional supervision by John Rawls from 1991 to 1992.
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Marc Sautet
#26533
Overall Influence
1947 - 1998 (51 years)
Marc Sautet was a French writer, teacher, translator , and philosopher. He was a Doctor of Philosophy at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Sautet was a former Trotskyist who however edited two books on the German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche. Marc Sautet emphasised that Nietzsche was a precursor of his time.
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Otto Mencke
1644 - 1707 (63 years)
Otto Mencke was a 17th-century German philosopher and scientist. Work Mencke obtained his doctorate at the University of Leipzig in August 1666 with a thesis entitled: Ex Theologia naturali – De Absoluta Dei Simplicitate, Micropolitiam, id est Rempublicam In Microcosmo Conspicuam.
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Mikael Rothstein
#5711
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Mikael Rothstein is an associate professor of religious history at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rothstein earned his PhD in 1993 and became a Lector at the University of Copenhagen in 2001. He has been on the board of the Danish Association for the History of Religions and the editorial boards of the publications Renner Studies on New Religions and Nye Religioner .
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Christopher Phillips
#13964
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Christopher Phillips is an American author, educator, consultant, lecturer, and pro-democracy advocate. He is best known for his 2001 book Socrates Café. Public Radio International called Phillips the "Johnny Appleseed of Philosophy."
Go to Profile#2539
Berit Brogaard
#27013
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Berit Oskar Brogaard is a Danish–American philosopher specializing in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Her recent work concerns synesthesia, savant syndrome, blindsight and perceptual reports. She is professor of philosophy and runs a perception lab at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She was also co-editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report until 2021.
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Caspar Neher
1897 - 1962 (65 years)
Caspar Neher was an Austrian-German scenographer and librettist, known principally for his career-long working relationship with Bertolt Brecht. Neher was born in Augsburg. He and Brecht were school friends who were separated for a time by the First World War, during which Neher was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class . In 1919, he studied under Angelo Jank at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He was first engaged professionally by the Munich Kammerspiele in 1922, although his designs for its production of Brecht's Drums in the Night were rejected. On 18 August 1923, Neher married Erika Tornquist in Graz.
Go to Profile#2541
Debra Nails
#34708
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Debra Nails is an American philosophy professor who taught at Michigan State University. Nails earned her M.A. in philosophy and classical Greek from Louisiana State University before going on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1993. Previously, she taught in the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion at Mary Washington College. Nails taught courses on the history of philosophy, continental rationalism, metaphysics, and modern philosophy.
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Edward Spencer Beesly
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Edward Spencer Beesly was an English positivist, trades union activist, and historian. Life He was born on 23 January 1831 in Feckenham, Worcestershire, the eldest son of the Rev. James Beesly and his wife, Mary Fitzgerald, of Queen's county, Ireland. After reading Latin and Greek with his father, in the autumn of 1846 Beesly was sent to King William's College on the Isle of Man, an evangelical establishment whose inadequate instruction and low moral tone were later depicted in Eric, or, Little by Little, by his school friend F. W. Farrar.
Go to Profile#2543
Pieranna Garavaso
#9864
Overall Influence
Pieranna Garavaso is an analytic philosopher and professor emerita at the University of Minnesota Morris. Her areas of interest include epistemological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and feminist epistemology. She received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is the recipient of two distinguished teaching awards: the University of Minnesota, Morris Alumni Association Teaching Award in 2003 and the Horace T. Morse University of Minnesota Alumni in 2004.
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Arturo Reghini
1878 - 1946 (68 years)
Arturo Reghini was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and esotericist. Biography Arturo Reghini was born in Florence on 12 November 1878. In 1898, he became a member of the Theosophical Society for which he founded a section in Rome. In 1903, he published in Palermo the first books of the editorial series named Biblioteca Teosofica and later Biblioteca filosofica
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Joseph Murray
#1398
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Joseph Edward Murray was an American plastic surgeon who performed the first successful human kidney transplant on identical twins Richard and Ronald Herrick on December 23, 1954. Murray shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 with E. Donnall Thomas for "their discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease."
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Martin J. Blaser
#27376
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martin J. Blaser is the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.
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Francisco Giner de los Ríos
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Francisco Giner de los Ríos was a philosopher, educator and one of the most influential Spanish intellectuals at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Biography He studied philosophy in Barcelona and Granada and eventually became professor of the philosophy of law and of international law at the University of Madrid. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Kantian German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
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Robert Kurz
#13799
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
Robert Kurz was a German philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal Exit! He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of value criticism. Life and work Robert Kurz was born on 24 December 1943 in Nuremberg to a German working-class family. During his military service he was involved in pacifist propaganda and participated in the "Ostermärschen," protest marches against atomic weapons in the 1960s. Kurz studied philosophy, history and paedagogy at the university of Erlangen without taking a degree. He participated in the "student revolt" in 1968 and took part in the intense discussions within the New Left.
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Anita L. Allen
#17090
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#2550
Paul Copan
#21043
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Paul Copan is a Christian theologian, analytic philosopher, apologist, and author. He is currently a professor at the Palm Beach Atlantic University and holds the endowed Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics. He has written and edited over 40 books in the area of philosophy of religion, apologetics, theology, and ethics in the Bible. He has contributed a great number of articles to various professional journals and has written many essays for edited books. For six years he served as the president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.
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