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.

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,

#2551

Donatella Di Cesare

Donatella Di Cesare

#54885

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Donatella Ester Di Cesare is an Italian political philosopher, essayist, and editorialist. She currently serves as professor of theoretical philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome. Di Cesare collaborates with various Italian newspapers and magazines, including L'Espresso and il manifesto. Her books and essays have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Croatian, Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, and Chinese.

#2552

Jeffrey Beall

#1910

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

#2553

David Braybrooke

#43769

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

David Braybrooke was a political philosopher and professor emeritus at both Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and the University of Texas at Austin. Early life and education Braybrooke was born on October 18, 1924, in Hackettstown, New Jersey. He graduated from Boonton High School in 1942 and volunteered for the army. After the war, he received a BA in economics from Harvard in 1948, followed by a MA in philosophy from Cornell University and a PhD in philosophy at Cornell in 1953, where he wrote a dissertation on welfare and happiness. He also studied English for a term under F. R.

#2554

Shannon Sullivan

#36927

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Shannon Sullivan is chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches and writes on feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy.

#2555

Michael Prof. Dr. Weller

#75786

Overall Influence

#2556

Marc Crépon

#42165

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Marc Crépon is a French philosopher and academic who writes on the subject of languages and communities in the French and German philosophies and contemporary political and moral philosophy. He has also translated works by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Franz Rosenzweig and Leibniz.

#2557

Michael P. Lynch

Michael P. Lynch

#42048

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Michael Patrick Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also the director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. As director of the Humanities Institute, he has headed a Templeton-funded project on humility and conviction in public life.

#2558

Varol Akman

#19273

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Varol Akman is Professor of Computer Engineering in Bilkent University, Ankara. An academic of engineering background, Akman obtained his B.A in Electrical Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He then continued his graduate studies and obtained his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the tutelage of influential logician William Randolph Franklin.

#2559

Susanne Sreedhar

#65724

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Susanne Sreedhar is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. Sreedhar's work on social contract theory has been influential, and has mostly been aimed at the nature and scope of obligation within political systems, and the possibility of ethical civil disobedience within a Hobbesian system.

#2560

Samuel Guttenplan

#75383

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Samuel D. Guttenplan is a professor in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Guttenplan earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford with a dissertation directed by John McDowell. He has interests in the philosophies of mind, language, philosophical logic and ethics. His current work centres on the origins of human conceptual thought, and he is contracted to produce The Roots of Categorization for Oxford University Press in 2009–10.

#2561

Yoshitaka Fujii

#19232

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Yoshitaka Fujii is a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology, who in 2012 was found to have fabricated data in at least 219 scientific papers, of which 172 have been retracted. Summary of professional career Fujii graduated from Tokai University School of Medicine in 1987 and holds an M.D. degree. He attended the Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, where he majored in anesthesiology and received his Ph.D. in 1991. During his career, he worked at institutions including Tokyo Medical and Dental University, the University of Tsukuba, and Toho University.

#2562

Lennart Åqvist

#56445

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Lennart Åqvist is a Swedish logician. He was a founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of Philosophical Logic. Åqvist received his PhD from Uppsala University in 1960 and has subsequently worked at Uppsala as Docent of Practical Philosophy. On 5 June 1992 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University, Sweden He is currently a Reader in Practical Philosophy in the College of Law at Uppsala.

#2563

Peter Morris

#53316

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Sir Peter John Morris, AC, FRS, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCS was an Australian surgeon and Nuffield professor of surgery at the University of Oxford. Morris was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, founder of the Oxford Transplant Centre and director of the Centre for Evidence in Transplantation at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

#2564

Philip A. Wolf

#76053

Overall Influence

#2565

Truls Lie

#29636

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

#2566

Andrew B. Newberg

#6691

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Andrew Newberg is an American neuroscientist who is a professor in the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences and the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, previously an adjunct professor of religious studies and a lecturer in psychology in the Biological Basis of Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

#2567

Terry Flew

#8330

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Terry Flew is an Australian media and communications scholar, and Professor of Digital Communication and Culture in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was formerly the Professor and Assistant Dean in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He has produced award-winning research in creative industries, media and communications, and online journalism. He is primarily known for his publication, New Media: An Introduction, which is currently in its fourth edition . His research interests include digital media,...

#2568

Susan Redline

#73746

Overall Influence

Susan Redline is an American pulmonary specialist. She is the Peter C. Farrell Professor of Sleep Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Early life and education Redline completed her medical degree in 1979 at Boston University School of Medicine and her Master's degree in public health in 1984 from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

#2569

Lê Quát

#40178

Overall Influence

Lê Quát was a 14th-century Vietnamese Confucian mandarin of the Trần dynasty. He is best known for his proposal in 1370 to have Buddhism in Vietnam, the favoured religion of the Trần dynasty, deemed as heretical. This was the first such attempt, and it failed, although Confucianism came to be the ruling doctrine under the subsequent Lê dynasty.

#2570

Lisa Nakamura

#14980

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.

#2571

Tim Lewens

#40095

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Tim Lewens is a professor in the history and philosophy of biology, medicine, and bioethics at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Lewens is a Fellow of Clare College, where he serves as Director of Studies in Philosophy and he is a member of the academic staff and lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science .

#2572

James Pryor

#69179

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

James Vincent Pryor is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He is known for his expertise on epistemology and philosophy of language. Before teaching at UNC, Pryor was a faculty member in the philosophy department of New York University. He has also taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.

#2573

Simon Soloveychik

Simon Soloveychik

#22373

Overall Influence

1930 - 1996 (66 years)

Simon L'vovich Soloveychik was a Russian publicist, educator and social philosopher. Brief biography Simon Soloveychik was born in a Jewish family. His father, Lev I. Soloveychik, was editor, writer and administrator at the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, and later managed the Moscow-based Voienizdat publishing house. After graduating from the Philology Department of Moscow State University in 1953 Simon worked as a boys and girls scouts leader, a secondary school teacher, and a correspondent of Pioneer magazine. In 1960 he worked for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, where he launched a wide t...

#2574

Clay Shirky

#3434

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism. In 2017 he was appointed Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University , after serving as Chief Information Officer at NYU Shanghai from 2014 to 2017. He also is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Associate Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program. His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technologi...

#2575

Enrique Herrera Viedma

#75225

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Enrique Herrera Viedma is the Vice-Rector for Research and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Granada , Spain. He is also Professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the same university since 1994.

#2576

Dan Roden

#62380

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dan Roden is a Canadian-born American medical researcher known for his work in personalized medicine. He is Professor of Medicine, Pharmacology and Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he holds the Sam L. Clark Endowed Chair and serves at the Senior Vice President for Personalized Medicine. He is also the director of Vanderbilt University's BioVU project, which is a biobank linking individuals' DNA samples to their medical records.

#2577

Henry S. Richardson

#53833

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Henry Shattuck Richardson is an American philosopher, author, Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Early life and education Henry Shattuck Richardson is the son of Anne Richardson, who was once the chair of Reading is Fundamental, and the politician and lawyer Elliot Richardson, who served as United States Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, and Secretary of Commerce.

#2578

Louis Narens

#9791

Overall Influence

Louis Narens was the Graduate Director of Mathematical Behavioral Science, Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Logic and the Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine.

#2579

Werner Creutzfeldt

Werner Creutzfeldt

#44052

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Werner Otto Carl Creutzfeldt was a German professor of internal medicine and an expert in gastrointestinal endocrinology. Biography Creutzfeldt was born in Berlin and raised in Kiel. During the Second World War, he served in the German Navy from 1942 to 1945. He studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg before completing an MD at the University of Kiel's Institute of Anatomy in 1950.

#2580

Victor D. Herbert

#76326

Overall Influence

#2581

Marcelo Dascal

#56852

Overall Influence

1940 - 2019 (79 years)

Marcelo Dascal was a Brazilian-born Israeli philosopher and linguist, who was a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University since 1967. He also served as a Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1995 to 2000.

#2582

Dr. Donald O. Castell

#76350

Overall Influence

#2583

Ward Jones

#36092

Overall Influence

Ward E. Jones is a scholar at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he is a professor of philosophy. He joined the department in 1999. His DPhil. thesis, entitled The View from Here: A First-person Constraint on Believing was completed in 1998 at Oxford University. While finishing his thesis, Jones spent three years teaching philosophy at various colleges in Oxford.

#2584

Harvey Douglas White

#76373

Overall Influence

#2585

Helen Steward

#68442

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Helen Catherine Steward, is a British philosopher and academic. She is currently Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Action at the University of Leeds. Her research focusses on Philosophy of Action, Free Will, Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics.

#2586

Margaret Morrison

#46935

Overall Influence

1954 - 2021 (67 years)

Margaret C. "Margie" Morrison was a Canadian philosopher. She worked in the philosophy of science. She was elected to the Leopoldina in 2004, the Royal Society of Canada in 2015, the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences in 2016, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.

#2587

Peg Birmingham

#72399

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Peg Birmingham is an American professor of philosophy at DePaul University. Much of Birmingham's work has focused on the work of Hannah Arendt, to whose thought she is considered to have made a profound contribution, although her interest has also ranged widely through other subjects, primarily in modern social and political philosophy, as well as feminist theory.

#2588

Djamila Ribeiro

Djamila Ribeiro

#32890

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Djamila Taís Ribeiro dos Santos is a Brazilian Black feminist philosopher and journalist. She graduated in political philosophy from the Federal University of São Paulo, where she also earned a master's degree on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Ribeiro is a collaborating editor of weekly magazine CartaCapital, as well as a columnist for CartaCapital and Folha de S.Paulo.

#2589

James R. Griesemer

#23407

Overall Influence

James R. Griesemer is an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Davis in Davis, California specializing in philosophy of biology. Education and career Griesemer received his PhD in 1983 in the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago under the supervision of William C. Wimsatt. He joined the faculty at University of California, Davis in 1984, and has taught there ever since. He is currently a "Distinguished Professor."

#2590

Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh

#36376

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh is an Iranian-American physician doing research in nephrology, kidney dialysis, nutrition, and epidemiology. He is best known as a specialist in kidney disease nutrition and chronic kidney disease and for his hypothesis about the longevity of individuals with chronic disease states, also known as reverse epidemiology including obesity paradox. According to this hypothesis, obesity or hypercholesterolemia may counterintuitively be protective and associated with greater survival in certain groups of people, such as elderly individuals, dialysis patients, or those with chro...

#2591

Radim Palouš

#21320

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

Radim Palouš was a Czech dissident, philosopher, educator, and former spokesman for Charter 77, and from 1990 to 1994, was the rector of Charles University in Prague. Life Palouš was born into a family of journalists and active athletes. After graduating in Prague, he was placed in forced labor during World War II. From 1945 onwards, he studied philosophy at Charles University , and in 1948 he defended his doctoral thesis on Masarykss philosophy of youth. He worked as a teacher and studied chemistry at the pedagogical branch in Charles University, where, since 1957, he worked as an assistant....

#2592

Justin Oakley

#66258

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Justin Oakley is a bioethicist and moral philosopher. He has been part of the revival of the ethical doctrine known as virtue ethics, an Aristotelian doctrine which has received renewed interest in the past few decades.

#2593

Walter Berns

#13065

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Walter Berns was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University. Early life and career Berns was raised in Chicago, where, as late as 1926, he was impressed by "Union soldiers in the [Memorial Day] parade feebly carrying the standard." He attended Reed College and the General Course at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "where [he] learned little, other than to love London," and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa. World...

#2594

Hein J. J. Wellens

#76503

Overall Influence

#2595

Richard Raatzsch

#57372

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Richard Raatzsch is a German philosopher. Since 2008, he has been Chair of Ethics within the European Business School at Reichartshausen Castle in Oestrich-Winkel/Rheingau . Life Raatzsch studied philosophy and history at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg . After earning his Ph.D. at that institution, he pursued a teaching and research career at the University of Leipzig, first at the Institute for Logic and Philosophy of Science , and subsequently at the Institute for Philosophy . In 1999, he earned the habilitation degree for a study of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations; the study was published in book form under the title Eigentlich Seltsames.

#2596

Menachem Brinker

#27909

Overall Influence

1935 - 2016 (81 years)

Menachem Brinker was an Israeli philosopher, literary scholar and activist. Background Menachem Brinker was born in Jerusalem in 1935. Before entering university, Brinker worked as a shepherd in a left-wing kibbutz. In 1956, he received his B.A. in literature and philosophy from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1960, he earned his M.A. in philosophy at Hebrew University, and in 1973, he received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. Brinker's early academic career included teaching in the philosophy and literature departments at Tel Aviv University, editing an Israeli literary journal , and founding and editing a journal for culture and social affairs .

#2597

Gökhan S. Hotamisligil

#17420

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Gökhan S. Hotamisligil is a Turkish-American physician scientist; James Stevens Simmons Chair of Genetics and Metabolism at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health ; Director of the Sabri Ülker Center for Metabolic Research and associate member of Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Joslin Diabetes Center.

#2598

Erik Wielenberg

#48947

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Erik J. Wielenberg is an American author and professor of philosophy at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. As an atheist, Wielenberg defends nontheistic moral realism. Selected publications Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2005, .God and the Reach of Reason: C.S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell, Cambridge University Press, 2008, .New Waves in Philosophy of Religion with Yujin Nagasawa. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, .Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism, Oxford University Press, 2014, .A Debate on God and M...

#2599

Emily Grosholz

#39615

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Emily Rolfe Grosholz is an American poet and philosopher. She is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, African American Studies and English, and a member of the Center for Fundamental Theory / Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, at the Pennsylvania State University.

#2600

Larry Temkin

#36983

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Larry Temkin is an American philosopher specializing in normative ethics and political philosophy. His research into equality, practical reason, and the nature of the good has been very influential. His work on the intransitivity of the "all things considered better than"-relation is groundbreaking and challenges deeply held assumptions about value, practical reasoning, and the goodness of outcomes. His 1993 book Inequality was described by the Times Literary Supplement as "brilliant and fascinating," and as offering the reader more than any other book on the same subject.

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