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,

#2601

David Denning

#75570

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

David W. Denning is a British retired professor of infectious diseases and global health and medical mycology at the University of Manchester. He was the founding president, executive director and chief executive of Global Action For Fungal Infections , which focusses on the global impact of fungal disease.

#2602

David O. Brink

#62083

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

David O. Brink is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He works in the areas of moral, political, and legal philosophy. Education and career He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell University where he worked with Terence Irwin and David Lyons. He taught for two years at Case Western Reserve University, and then from 1987 to 1994 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at UCSD.

#2603

Graham R. .v. Hughes

#76652

Overall Influence

#2604

Kathleen Dean Moore

#35355

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Kathleen Dean Moore is a philosopher, writer, and environmental activist from Oregon State University. Her early creative nonfiction writing focused on the cultural and spiritual values of the natural world, especially shorelines and islands. Her more recent work is about the moral issues of climate change.

#2605

Jean-Louis Chrétien

Jean-Louis Chrétien

#40008

Overall Influence

1952 - 2019 (67 years)

Jean-Louis Chrétien was a French philosopher in the tradition of phenomenology as well as a poet and religious thinker. Author of over thirty books, he was the 2012 winner of the Cardinal Lustiger Prize for his life’s work in philosophy. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at the Sorbonne at the end of his career. The study of Chrétien increased widely after his death, a posthumous recognition that contrasts with his modest and solitary attitude.

#2606

Verna Wright

#23083

Overall Influence

1928 - 1998 (70 years)

Verna Wright, MD, FRCP, was a British evangelist, physician, professor of rheumatology at the University of Leeds and co-founder of United Beach Missions. Biography Wright was educated at Bedford School and studied medicine at the University of Liverpool, then spent two years at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. As an actively practising evangelical Christian, Wright helped to found United Beach Missions, an organization whose goal was to preach the Christian gospel message to holidaymakers in Llandudno. The organization, under his leadership, grew to over 3000 people, ministering on the beaches of Britain, France and Belgium.

#2607

Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman

#5231

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.

#2608

Dudley Knowles

#53587

Overall Influence

1947 - 2014 (67 years)

Dudley Knowles was a British political philosopher and professor at Glasgow University. He was widely known for his influential book Political Philosophy . Publications Books2001 Political Philosophy 2002 Hegel and the Philosophy of Right 2009 Political Obligation: A Critical Introduction Books edited1990 Explanation and its Limits 1993 , Virtue and Taste 2009 G.W.F. Hegel

#2609

Edward D. Freis

#59866

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Edward D. Freis was an American physician and researcher, who received the Albert Lasker Award for his studies of the treatment of hypertension. Early life Edward David Freis was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 3, 1912 to Lithuanian immigrants Roy and Rose Freis. He had his eyes set on becoming an actor, but after a few shows, he realized that acting was not for him, and he decided to become a doctor.

#2610

Thomas Donaldson

#30801

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Thomas Donaldson is The Mark O. Winkelman Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert in the areas of business ethics, corporate compliance, corporate governance, and leadership. He is Associate Editor for the Business Ethics Quarterly

#2611

Gunnar Skirbekk

Gunnar Skirbekk

#35227

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Gunnar Skirbekk is a Norwegian philosopher. He is professor emeritus at the Department of Philosophy and the Center for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

#2612

Paul W. Franks

#51630

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Paul Walter Franks is the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at Yale University. He graduated with his PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Franks' dissertation, entitled "Kant and Hegel on the Esotericism of Philosophy", was supervised by Stanley Cavell and won the Emily and Charles Carrier Prize for a Dissertation in Moral Philosophy at Harvard University. He completed his B.A and M.A, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to this, Franks received his general education at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and stud...

#2613

Seyyed Hassan Eslami Ardakani

#26015

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Seyyed Hassan Eslami Ardakani is an Iranian philosopher and professor of ethics at the University of Religions and Denominations. He is known for his expertise on virtue ethics, environmental ethics and research ethics. Eslami is a winner of Farabi International Award for his book Human Cloning in Catholic and Islamic Perspectives.

#2614

Jean–fréderic Colombel‡‡

#76999

Overall Influence

#2615

Rachel Yehuda

#24852

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, the vice chair for veterans affairs in the psychiatry department, and the director of the traumatic stress studies division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She also leads the PTSD clinical research program at the neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology laboratory at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center. In 2020 she became director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at Mount Sinai.

#2616

Simo Elaković

#51059

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Simo Elaković was a Serbian philosopher and Professor at University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. Biography After earning his degree in philosophy from the University of Belgrade, he has continued further specialization in Germany. He has worked as professor at a gymnasium in Dubrovnik and in Sremski Karlovci. He has been elected as assistant at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Economics. He worked as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy, then he moved to Belgrade, where he reaches a Professor of Philosophy title.

#2617

Jouko Väänänen

#48886

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jouko Antero Väänänen is a Finnish mathematical logician known for his contributions to set theory, model theory, logic and foundations of mathematics. He served as the vice-rector at the University of Helsinki, and a professor of mathematics at the University of Helsinki, as well as a professor of mathematical logic and foundations of mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Peter Aczel in 1977 with the PhD thesis entitled "Applications of set theory to generalized quantifiers". He was elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 2002.

#2618

Garret A. FitzGerald

#37796

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Garret Adare FitzGerald is an Irish physician. He is professor of in translational medicine and Therapeutics and chair of the department of pharmacology at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He researches aspects of cardiology, pharmacology, translational medicine, and chronobiology.

#2619

Esther Meek

#52582

Overall Influence

Esther Lightcap Meek is an American philosopher and a Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Geneva Collegein Western Pennsylvania. She is a Fellow Scholar of the Fujimura Institute with artist Makoto Fujimura, an Associate Fellow with the Kirby Laing Center for Public Theology, and a member of the Polanyi Society.

#2620

Vaclav Smil

#11230

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Vaclav Smil is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies. He has also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.

#2621

Aleksander Bobko

Aleksander Bobko

#18438

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Aleksander Bobko is the Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of Poland. He was previously the rector of Rzeszów University. Biography Bobko graduated in informatics from the AGH University of Science and Technology. He also earned advanced degrees in philosophy, including a doctorate and a habilitation, at the Pontifical University of John Paul II and at the Jagiellonian University. In the years 1998–2002, Bobko was a member of the city council of Rzeszów.

#2622

Cheshire Calhoun

#56589

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Cheshire Calhoun is a professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University and research professor at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. She is best known for her work in feminist philosophy as well as writing on gay and lesbian philosophy and the morality of same-sex marriage.

#2623

Ioan Petru Culianu

Ioan Petru Culianu

#19536

Overall Influence

1950 - 1991 (41 years)

Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. He served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago from 1988 to his death, and had previously taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.

#2624

David Forman

#77277

Overall Influence

#2625

Mary T. Clark

#40648

Overall Influence

1913 - 2014 (101 years)

Mary Twibill Clark was an American Roman Catholic nun, academic, and civil rights advocate. She was best known as a scholar of the history of philosophy, and was associated especially with Saint Augustine.

#2626

Kevin Hart

#44740

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kevin John Hart is an Anglo-Australian theologian, philosopher and poet. He is currently Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of Virginia. As a theologian and philosopher, Hart's work epitomizes the "theological turn" in phenomenology, with a focus on figures like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida. He has received multiple awards for his poetry, including the Christopher Brennan Award and the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry twice.

#2627

Joanna Wardlaw

#60428

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Joanna Marguerite Wardlaw is a Scottish physician, radiologist, and academic specialising in neuroradiology and pathophysiology. Wardlaw worked as a junior doctor before specialising as a radiologist. She continues to practice medicine as an Honorary Consultant Neuroradiologist with NHS Lothian. She has spent her entire academic career at the University of Edinburgh.

#2628

Ronald M Krauss

#77376

Overall Influence

#2629

John Tienson

#34328

Overall Influence

1940 - 2018 (78 years)

John L. Tienson was an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Memphis. He served as Co-Editor of the Southern Journal of Philosophy.

#2630

Barbara Creed

#28476

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Barbara Creed is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.

#2631

Bruce Avolio

#42439

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Bruce J. Avolio is an American academic in the field of leadership studies. He is the Professor of Management, Mark Pigott Chair in Business Strategic Leadership, and executive director of the Center for Leadership & Strategic Thinking in the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the Gerontological Society of America.

#2632

Jean Daujat

#21346

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Jean Daujat was a French philosopher of neo-Thomism, a disciple of Jacques Maritain, and the founder of the Centre d'études religieuses, the Center for Religious Studies, specializing in teaching Christian doctrine.

#2633

Alimuddin Zumla

Alimuddin Zumla

#20381

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Sir Alimuddin Zumla, , FRCP, FRCPath, FRSB is a British-Zambian professor of infectious diseases and international health at University College London Medical School. He specialises in infectious and tropical diseases, clinical immunology, and internal medicine, with a special interest in HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections , and diseases of poverty. He is known for his leadership of infectious/tropical diseases research and capacity development activities. He was awarded a Knighthood in the 2017 Queens Birthday Honours list for services to public health and protection from infectious disease. I...

#2634

Françoise Meltzer

#46120

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Françoise Meltzer is a professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Work Meltzer's scholarship includes work on contemporary critical theory and nineteenth-century French literature. She marshals postmodern critical theories in order to explore literary representations of the subject.

#2635

Marcus Steinweg

#73806

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Marcus Steinweg is a German philosopher based in Berlin. His speciality is working between the fields of art and philosophy. He is an editor of the journal Inaesthetics. Biography Steinweg has worked on collaborations with artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Rosemarie Trockel. In 2011 he curated the exhibition “Kunst und Philosophie” at the Neue Berliner Kunstverein. He has given numerous talks, published many texts and participated in art exhibitions.

#2636

Susan James

#46338

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Susan James is a British professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She has previously taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Cambridge. She is well known for her work on the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy.

#2637

Leopold Flam

#28609

Overall Influence

1912 - 1995 (83 years)

Leopold Flam was a Belgian philosopher. Together with Alphonse De Waelhens, Chaïm Perelman and Rudolf Boehm, he was one of leading philosophers of Belgium from the 1960s until the 1980s. Born in Antwerp, Flam studied social sciences, political history, philosophy at the University of Ghent and obtained a PhD in history. During World War II he was imprisoned in the Dossin Barracks at Mechelen and in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war he became a professor at the Free University of Brussels.

#2638

Ross Upshur

#50556

Overall Influence

Ross Upshur is a Canadian physician and researcher. He is a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, and heads its public health division.

#2639

Andreas-michael Zeiher

#77553

Overall Influence

#2640

Frank Sibley

#74395

Overall Influence

1923 - 1996 (73 years)

Frank Noel Sibley was a British philosopher who worked mainly in the field of aesthetics. He held the first Chair of Philosophy at Lancaster University. Sibley is best known for his 1959 paper "Aesthetic Concepts" , and for "Seeking, Scrutinizing and Seeing" . Both papers have been anthologized, "Aesthetic Concepts" multiple times.

#2641

Antoni Ribas

#74887

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Antoni Ribas is a Spanish-American physician–scientist. He is a Professor of Medicine, Surgery, and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Ribas served as president of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2021–2022.

#2642

John Foster

#59502

Overall Influence

1941 - 2009 (68 years)

John Andrew Foster , known as John Foster, was a British philosopher and tutorial Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, from 1966 to 2005 . He authored several books, including The Case for Idealism and A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenalistic Idealism . His A. J. Ayer was described by Anthony Quinton as "the only serious monograph" about Ayer's philosophy".

#2643

Judith Goslin Hall

#33830

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Judith Goslin Hall is a pediatrician, clinical geneticist and dysmorphologist who is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Early life and education The daughter of a minister, Judith Goslin Hall was born on July 3, 1939, in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Garfield High School in Seattle and then attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. from which she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961.

#2644

Marin H. Kollef

#77651

Overall Influence

#2645

Renato Janine Ribeiro

Renato Janine Ribeiro

#54181

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Renato Janine Ribeiro is a Brazilian full professor of ethics and political philosophy at the University of São Paulo. As of April 6, 2015, he was named Minister of Education of Brazil in the cabinet of Dilma Rousseff.

#2646

Randall Auxier

#39888

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Randall E. Auxier is a professor of philosophy and communication studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, a musician, environmental activist, union advocate, and candidate for the United States House of Representatives, nominated by the Green Party in the 12th Congressional District of Illinois. He is a radio host for WDBX Carbondale since 2001, a widely read author of popular philosophy, and also a co-founder and co-director of the AIPCT .

#2647

Eric Weisbard

#44779

Overall Influence

Eric Weisbard is an American music critic known for founding the Pop Conference, which is hosted annually by the Museum of Pop Culture . He also organized the conference for many years. Career Weisbard serves as professor of American studies at the University of Alabama. He is also the author of both a 33⅓ book entry about Use Your Illusion and the 2014 book Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music, and a former editor for Spin. With Craig Marks, he was also the co-editor of the Spin Alternative Record Guide, and has also written for the Village Voice. For Top 40 Democracy, he...

#2648

Hilary Robinson

#31086

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Hilary Robinson is a British academic and art theorist. She is Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory at Loughborough University's School of Social Sciences and Humanities. She was Dean of the School of Art and Design and a professor at Middlesex University, and previously served as Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on the history, theory, and practice of feminist art.

#2649

Salvatore DiMauro

#64645

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Salvatore DiMauro, M.D., was born in Verona, Italy, November 14, 1939, graduated in medicine from the University of Padua in 1963 and completed his residency in neurology in 1966. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on genetic errors of energy metabolism and he defines disease entities using both biochemical and molecular approaches. As an "enzyme defect hunter", DiMauro has documented the molecular basis of many enzyme deficiencies, including carnitine palmitoyltransferase deficiency, the first error of fatty acid oxidation to be recognized in humans.

#2650

Costantino Iadecola

#77695

Overall Influence

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