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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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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,

#2751

Walter B. Pitkin

1878 - 1953 (75 years)

Walter Boughton Pitkin was an American author and university professor. He taught at Columbia University for 38 years, and he authored more than 30 books, including the 1932 best-selling book, Life Begins at Forty.

#2752

Paul J. Griffiths

#20278

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Paul J. Griffiths is an English-born American theologian. He was the Warren Professor of Catholic Thought at Duke Divinity School. Life and career Griffiths was born in London, England, on 12 November 1955. Griffiths has held appointments at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago. A scholar of Augustine of Hippo, Griffiths' main interests and pursuits are philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion – particularly Christianity and Buddhism. He received a doctorate in Buddhist studies in 1983 from the University of Wisconsin–Madi...

#2753

Kirill Martynov

#15188

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Kirill Konstantinovich Martynov is a Russian journalist, political scientist, philosopher and writer. He is the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe and former associate professor at the Higher School of Economics .

#2754

Ronda Chervin

#30324

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Ronda Chervin is a Catholic author, international speaker and Professor of Philosophy. She is the author of over 80 books concerning the matters of Catholic thought, practice and spirituality, including Taming the Lion Within: 5 Steps From Anger to Peace, Last Call: Fourteen Men Who Dared Answer, and her autobiography, En Route to Eternity. A widow, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, she is originally from New York.

#2755

Thomas Nail

#32410

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Thomas Nail is a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Denver. Biography Nail received a B.A in philosophy from the University of North Texas, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. His dissertation was on the theme of political revolution in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. This research was the foundation of his first book, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo, published in 2012.

#2756

Richard Knisely Winkelmann

#48200

Overall Influence

#2757

Cleomenes the Cynic

300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)

Cleomenes was a Cynic philosopher. He was a pupil of Crates of Thebes, and is said to have taught Timarchus of Alexandria and Echecles of Ephesus, the latter of whom would go on to teach Menedemus. He wrote a work on Pedagogues from which Diogenes Laërtius has preserved an anecdote concerning Diogenes of Sinope: Cleomenes in his work on Pedagogues says that Diogenes' friends wanted to ransom him, for which he called them simpletons, for, he said, lions are not the slaves of those who feed them, but rather those who feed them are at the mercy of the lions, Fear, he added, is the mark of the slave, whereas wild beasts make human beings afraid of them.

#2758

Rudolf Allers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Rudolf Allers was an Austrian psychiatrist who was a member of the first group of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Life and career Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883. He was the son of a doctor, Mark Allers and Augusta Grailich . In 1908, he married Carola Meitner .

#2759

Wilfrid Desan

#24379

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Wilfrid Desan was a professor in philosophy best known for introducing French existentialism and especially the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre to the United States. He was a native of Belgium who emigrated to the United States in 1948, where he gained a doctorate from Harvard University in 1951 and met his wife Elisabeth. In 1952, he gained a lectureship at the philosophy department of Kenyon College. In 1957, he joined Georgetown University where he remained for the rest of his academic career and where he enjoyed a good reputation as teacher and a clear writer. He also had appointments as dist...

#2760

David Carrier

#31878

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

David Carrier is an American philosopher of art and cultural critic. Education Carrier received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, where he was a student of Arthur Danto, in 1972. He was a Getty Scholar , a Clark Fellow , a Senior Fellow, National Humanities Center, 2006–2007 and holder of the Fulbright-Luce Lectureship, Spring 2009.

#2761

Camil Petrescu

1894 - 1957 (63 years)

Camil Petrescu was a Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet. He marked the end of the traditional novel era and laid the foundation of the modern novel era in Romania. Life Petrescu was born in Bucharest in 1894. He lost both his parents early in life and was raised by a relative, or a nanny from the Moșilor suburb .

#2762

Tine Hribar

#18885

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Tine Hribar is a Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual, notable for his interpretations of Heidegger and his role in the democratization of Slovenia between 1988 and 1990, known as the Slovenian Spring. He is the husband of author, essayist and political commentator Spomenka Hribar.

#2763

Christiane Woopen

Christiane Woopen

#27051

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Christiane Woopen is a German medical ethicist. She was appointed Professor for Ethics and Theory of Medicine at the University of Cologne in 2009. There she is Executive Director of ceres , an interdepartmental institution created by the Rector and five of the six Faculties of Cologne University. Furthermore, she is Head of the Research Unit Ethics at the Faculty of Medicine and was from 2011 to 2019 Vice-Dean for Academic Development and Gender of that Faculty. From 2012 to 2016 she was Chair of the German Ethics Council and from 2014 to 2016 President of the Global Summit of National Ethics/Bioethics Committees.

#2764

Jean François de Saint-Lambert

Jean François de Saint-Lambert

1716 - 1803 (87 years)

Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet, philosopher and military officer. Biography Saint-Lambert was born at Nancy and raised on his parents' estate at Affracourt, a village in Lorraine near Haroué, a seat of the Beauvau family, with whom he had close ties. He studied at the university at Pont-à-Mousson, but then spent several years at home recovering from an unidentified illness. He often complained of poor health, but participated in military campaigns, led a strenuous social life, and lived to be 86 years old.

#2765

Severo Ochoa

#751

Overall Influence

1905 - 1993 (88 years)

Severo Ochoa de Albornoz was a Spanish physician and biochemist, and winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Arthur Kornberg for their discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid ".

#2766

François Ewald

#15235

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

François Ewald is a French philosopher. An assistant to Michel Foucault in the 1970s, he has overseen the publication of much of Foucault's literary estate. Ewald's own work has applied Foucault's notion of governmentality to a history of the welfare state.

#2767

Bengt Bertil Samuelsson

#48358

Overall Influence

#2768

Ingemar Hedenius

Ingemar Hedenius

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

Per Arvid Ingemar Hedenius was a Swedish philosopher. He was Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University . He was a famous opponent of organised Christianity. The Swedish Humanist Association, known in Sweden as "Humanisterna", offers the Ingemar Hedenius Award each year to support humanist ideas and critical thinking.

#2769

Jean-Pierre Dupuy

#26057

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a French engineer and philosopher. Biography Dupuy attended the Ecole polytechnique, where he graduated in 1965 and attended the Ecole des Mines. He was a professor of French and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information of Stanford University, California. He also taught social and political philosophy and the ethics of science and technology until 2006 at the École Polytechnique.

#2770

Johann Jakob Engel

Johann Jakob Engel

1741 - 1802 (61 years)

Johann Jakob Engel was a German author. Life Engel was born and died in Parchim, in the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He studied theology at Rostock and Bützow, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he took his doctors' degree. In 1776 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy and belles-lettres in the Joachimstal gymnasium at Berlin, and a few years later he became tutor to the crown prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William III.

#2771

Alejandro Rossi

#15756

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

Alejandro Rossi was born in Florence, Italy of Venezuelan mother and Italian father Alejandro Rossi wrote philosophical essays, short stories and the following books: Lenguaje y significado ; Manual del Distraído Manual of the Absent-minded ; Sueños de Occam ; La fábula de Las Regiones , Edén: Vida imaginada . Ortega y Gasset in collaboration ; he edited José Gaos' Anthology: Filosofía de la Filosofía . Rossi won the Premio Nacional de Lingüística y Literatura in 1999.

#2772

Anaxarchus

380 BC - 320 BC (60 years)

Anaxarchus was a Greek philosopher of the school of Democritus. Together with Pyrrho, he accompanied Alexander the Great into Asia. The reports of his philosophical views suggest that he was a forerunner of the Greek skeptics.

#2773

Margaret Somerville

#17221

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Margaret Anne Ganley Somerville is a Catholic philosopher and professor of bioethics at University of Notre Dame Australia. She was previously Samuel Gale Professor of Law at McGill University. Early life and career Somerville was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and educated at Mercedes College . She received a A.u.A. from the University of Adelaide in 1963, a Bachelor of Law degree and the University Medal from the University of Sydney in 1973, and a D.C.L. from McGill University in 1978.

#2774

Giuseppe Remuzzi

#48461

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

#2775

William Craig

#30019

Overall Influence

1918 - 2016 (98 years)

William Craig was an American academic and philosopher, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California. His research interests included mathematical logic, and the philosophy of science, and he is best known for the Craig interpolation theorem.

#2776

Robert Lanza

#10171

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Robert Lanza is an American medical doctor and scientist, currently Head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, and Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He is an Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

#2777

Thomas Uebel

#31477

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Thomas Ernst Uebel is a philosopher of science, and professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester. Uebel has held academic posts at Northwestern University, University of Pittsburgh, Technical University of Berlin, University of Vienna and London School of Economics.

#2778

Yahya ibn Adi

893 - 974 (81 years)

Abū Zakarīyā’ Yaḥyá ibn ʿAdī known as Yahya ibn Adi was a Syriac Jacobite Christian philosopher, theologian and translator working in Arabic. Biography Yahya ibn Adi was born in Tikrit to a family of Syriac Jacobite Christians in 893.

#2779

Lynne Rudder Baker

#28087

Overall Influence

1944 - 2017 (73 years)

Lynne Rudder Baker was an American philosopher and author. At the time of her death she was a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1944 to Virginia Bennett and James Rudder, she earned her Ph.D. in 1972 from Vanderbilt University after beginning her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1967. She was a fellow of the National Humanities Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars .

#2780

Aristocles of Messene

200 - Present (1824 years)

Aristocles of Messene , in Sicily, was a Peripatetic philosopher, who probably lived in the 1st century AD. Life Little is known about the life of Aristocles. He came from Messene in Sicily , not from the then far better known city of Messene in the Peloponnese. There are some indications that he stayed in Alexandria. In earlier research he was wrongly considered to be the teacher of the famous Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias. It was erroneously believed that the philosopher Aristotle of Mytilene whom Alexander mentions as his teacher was actually Aristocles and that the name "Aristotle" was a misspelling.

#2781

Alberto Buela

#37808

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Alberto Buela Lamas is an Argentine philosopher. Buela is professor at the National Technological University and the University of Barcelona and works as a researcher in the University of Barcelona. He is best known for his philosophical works on metapolitics, Aristotle and Peronism.

#2782

Johannes Althusius

Johannes Althusius

1557 - 1638 (81 years)

Johannes Althusius was a German-French jurist and Calvinist political philosopher. He is best known for his 1603 work, "Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata". revised editions were published in 1610 and 1614. The ideas expressed therein relate to the early development of federalism in the 16th and 17th centuries and the construction of subsidiarity.

#2783

Daniel O. Dahlstrom

#38589

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Daniel Oscar Dahlstrom is an American philosopher and John R. Silber Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. Books Identity, Authenticity, and Humility. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017.The Heidegger Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury Academics, 2013.Philosophical legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and their Contemporaries. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press CUA, 2008.Heidegger’s Concept of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Das logische Vorurteil: Untersuchungen zur Wahrheitstheorie des frühen Heidegger. Vienna: Passagen, 1994.

#2784

Gilles-Gaston Granger

Gilles-Gaston Granger

#14132

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Gilles-Gaston Granger was a French philosopher. Work His works discuss the philosophy of logic, mathematics, human and social sciences, Aristotle, Jean Cavaillès, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He produced the most authoritative French translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and published more than 150 scientific articles.

#2785

Georgius Agricola

Georgius Agricola

1494 - 1555 (61 years)

Georgius Agricola was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest in the mining and refining of metals. For his groundbreaking work De Natura Fossilium published in 1546, he is generally referred to as the Father of Mineralogy.

#2786

Jeffrey A. Barrett

#16696

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jeffrey A. Barrett is Chancellor's Professor in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he specializes in philosophy of physics. Education and career He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University.

#2787

Peter of Spain

1300 - 1300 (0 years)

Peter of Hispania was the author of the , later known as the , an important medieval university textbook on Aristotelian logic. As the Latin Hispania was considered to include the entire Iberian Peninsula, he is traditionally and usually identified with the medieval Portuguese scholar and ecclesiastic Peter Juliani, who was elected Pope John XXI in 1276. The identification is sometimes disputed, usually by Spanish authors, who claim the author of the was a Castilian Blackfriar. He is also sometimes identified as Petrus Ferrandi Hispanus .

#2788

Lambros Couloubaritsis

Lambros Couloubaritsis

#41114

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lambros Couloubaritsis is a Greek-born Belgian philosopher. Life Lambros Couloubaritsis received his PhD in philosophy from the Free University of Brussels after studying chemistry at the University of Liège. He teaches philosophy at the Free University of Brussels, where he is also the director of Ancient Philosophy Center. He is internationally recognized as a specialist of Aristotle. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oradea, Crete, Athens, Liège and Charles de Gaulle University – Lille III.

#2789

Hastings Rashdall

Hastings Rashdall

1858 - 1924 (66 years)

Hastings Rashdall was an English philosopher, theologian, historian, and Anglican priest. He expounded a theory known as ideal utilitarianism, and he was a major historian of the universities of the Middle Ages.

#2790

Joseph Heath

#11479

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Joseph Heath is a Canadian philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the Centre for Ethics. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. Heath's webpage at the University of Toronto declares his work "is all related, in one way or another, to critical social theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School." He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling The Rebel Sell. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice...

#2791

Robert Rynasiewicz

#28259

Overall Influence

Robert Rynasiewicz is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct professor in philosophy and the Committee on History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Maryland.

#2792

Anselm Jappe

#21574

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Anselm Jappe is a German professor of philosophy. Jappe currently resides in France. Jappe has authored several works in German, French, and Italian. Jappe has lectured at several institutions in within higher education.

#2793

John Cook Wilson

1849 - 1915 (66 years)

John Cook Wilson was an English philosopher, Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College. Early life and career John Cook Wilson was born in Nottingham, England, in 1849. He was the son of James Wilson, a Methodist minister. After studying at Derby Grammar School, 1862–67, Cook Wilson went up with a scholarship to Balliol College in 1868, where he read both Classics under H. W. Chandler and Mathematics under H. J. S. Smith. He graduated with a double 'double-first', gaining both firsts in Mathematical and Classical Moderations , and then firsts in Mathematics and Literae Humaniores or 'Greats' .

#2794

Annemarie Mol

#12127

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Annemarie Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher. She is the Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Winner of the Constantijn & Christiaan Huijgens Grant from the NWO in 1990 to study 'Differences in Medicine', she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2010 to study 'The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory'. She has helped to develop post-ANT/feminist understandings of science, technology and medicine. In her earlier work she explored the performativity of health care practices, argued that realities are generated within those practices, and noted that since practices differ, so too do realities.

#2795

Bryan W. Van Norden

#23060

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Bryan W. Van Norden is an American translator of Chinese philosophical texts and scholar of Chinese and comparative philosophy. He has taught for twenty five years at Vassar College, United States, where he is currently the James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy. From 2017 to 2020, he was the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

#2796

Akeel Bilgrami

#15121

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian philosopher. He has been in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University since 1985 after spending two years as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

#2797

Arthur Galston

#9704

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Arthur W. Galston was an American plant physiologist and bioethicist. As a plant biologist, Galston studied plant hormones and the effects of light on plant development, particularly phototropism. He identified riboflavin and other flavins as the photoreceptors for phototropism, the bending of plants toward light, challenging the prevailing view that carotenoids were responsible.

#2798

Joan Callahan

#33001

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Joan Callahan was a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, an institution where she taught for more than twenty years and served in a variety of roles, including as director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Callahan's research has focused on feminist theory, critical race theory, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and on the junctions of these topics.

#2799

Shabbir Akhtar

#17490

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Shabbir Akhtar was a British Muslim philosopher, poet, researcher, writer and multilingual scholar. He was on the Faculty of Theology and Religions at the University of Oxford. His interests included political Islam, Quranic exegesis, revival of philosophical discourse in Islam, Islamophobia, extremism, terrorism and Christian-Muslim relations as well as Islamic readings of the New Testament. Shabbir Akhtar was also a Søren Kierkegaard scholar. Akhtar's articles have appeared both in academic journals and in the UK press. Several of his books have been translated into the major Islamic langua...

#2800

Peter Koellner

#20271

Overall Influence

Peter Koellner is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D from MIT in 2003. His main areas of research are mathematical logic, specifically set theory, and philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, analytic philosophy, and philosophy of language.

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