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,

#2901

Eli Y. Adashi

#33349

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Eli Y. Adashi is an American physician-scientist-executive who served as the Fifth Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences at Brown University. Adashi is presently a tenured Professor of Medical Science with the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Association of American Physicians . Adashi is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the Hastings Center Ethics Research Institute, and the Royal Society of Medicine.

#2902

Nomy Arpaly

#59652

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Nomy Arpaly is an American philosopher. Her main research interests include ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and free will. She is professor of philosophy at Brown University. Education and career Arpaly received a dual bachelor's from Tel Aviv University in 1992 in philosophy and linguistics, and a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University in 1998. She accepted a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for the 1998–9 term, before accepting an Assistant Professorship at Rice University where she stayed until 2003. In 2003, she accepte...

#2903

Mark Sacks

#71460

Overall Influence

1953 - 2008 (55 years)

Mark D. Sacks was a British philosopher best known for his work on Kant, Post-Kantian idealism, and the epistemological tradition in European Philosophy. He was one of the few philosophers in Britain who sought to integrate the Analytic philosophy tradition with Continental philosophy.

#2904

David Corfield

#26292

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

David Neil Corfield is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of psychology. He is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. Education Corfield studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and later earned his MSc and PhD in the philosophy of science and mathematics at King's College London. His doctoral advisor was Donald A. Gillies.

#2905

Adèle Mercier

#68985

Overall Influence

Adèle G. Mercier is a Canadian philosopher, currently employed at Queen's University, Kingston, and fellow of LOGOS- Language, Logic and Cognition at the University of Barcelona, Spain. She studied at the University of Ottawa and UCLA .

#2906

William J. Kraemer

#82788

Overall Influence

#2907

Alan Baker

#50681

Overall Influence

Alan R. Baker is a professor of philosophy in Swarthmore College , specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. He is also a former U.S. shogi champion. Academic career Baker did his undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy with first class honours in 1991. He then moved to the U.S. for graduate school, earning a master's degree in 1995 and a Ph.D. in 1999, both in philosophy from Princeton University. His doctoral supervisors were Paul Benacerraf and Gideon Rosen. After working as an assistant professor at ...

#2908

Nicholas C. Ling

#82834

Overall Influence

#2909

Totakacharya

#57948

Overall Influence

Totakacharya 8th century CEhead Meeting Ādi Śaṅkara The states that when Ādi Śaṅkara was at Śṛṅgeri, he met a boy named Giri. Ādi Śaṅkara accepted the boy as his disciple. Giri was a hard-working and loyal disciple of his Guru, Ādi Śaṅkara, though he did not appear bright to the other disciples. One day, Giri was busy plucking flowers for pooja, when Ādi Śaṅkara sat down to begin a lesson on Advaita Vedānta. He however did not start the lesson saying he was waiting for Giri to come back from his chores and singing lessons. At this, Padmapada pointed to a wall and said that it would be the same if Ādi Śaṅkara taught to this dumb object as he taught to Giri.

#2910

Richard P. Wenzel

#82852

Overall Influence

#2911

Martin Cline

#14782

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Martin J. Cline is an American geneticist who is the Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles . He did postdoctoral training in hematology-oncology at the University of Utah and was at the University of California, San Francisco before going to UCLA. His research has been in cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics.

#2912

José Gil

#42500

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

José Gil is a Portuguese philosopher. In his youth he lived in Lisbon, Portugal, but his experiences under António Salazar's 1933-1974 dictatorship, made him decide to study in a free country. He moved to Paris, France where in 1982 he got his PhD from the University of Paris where he researched on the body as a power field under the supervision of François Châtelet. There he attended Gilles Deleuze's classes whose influence on his thinking was decisive.

#2913

Donald Lowell Price

#82961

Overall Influence

#2914

Edgar Haber

#82974

Overall Influence

#2915

Demetrios P. Papahadjopoulos

#82977

Overall Influence

#2916

Robert M. Berne

#42718

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

Robert M. Berne was a heart specialist and a medical educator whose textbooks were used by generations of physicians Berne was recognized widely for his seminal research contributions on the role of adenosine in the blood flow to the heart. He served as the editor of the peer-reviewed journal the Annual Review of Physiology from 1983–1988.

#2917

Antti Revonsuo

#29712

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Antti Revonsuo is a Finnish cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher of mind. His work seeks to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon. He is one of a small number of philosophers running their own laboratories.

#2918

Margaret Atherton

#68882

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Margaret Atherton is an American philosopher and feminist historian who is currently a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy there before her retirement. Atherton's research has focused on philosophers of the early modern period, philosophy of psychology , and the work of women philosophers, as well as teaching the history of modern philosophy.

#2919

Brenda Almond

#61789

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Brenda Margaret Almond was a British philosopher, known for her work on philosophy of education and applied ethics. She was an elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Biography Almond co-founded the Society for Applied Philosophy in 1982 with her then colleague at Surrey University Anthony O'Hear and co-founded the International Journal of Applied Philosophy in 1983 part of a conscious strategy of moving philosophy away from abstract and abstruse debates towards issues that affect people in their everyday lives. Almond’s writing highlights issues like health and family and social relations.

#2920

Philip P. Wiener

#32039

Overall Influence

1905 - 1992 (87 years)

Philip P. Wiener was an American philosopher who was a specialist on Pragmatism, Charles S. Pierce, Leibnitz, the history and philosophy of science, and the history of ideas. He co-founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.

#2921

Thomas G. Pickering

#75147

Overall Influence

1940 - 2009 (69 years)

Thomas G. Pickering was a British physician and academic. He was a professor of medicine at College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He was an internationally renowned expert in clinical hypertension and a leader in the fields of hypertension and cardiovascular behavioral medicine. He coined the term "white-coat hypertension" to describe those whose blood pressure was elevated in the doctor's office, but normal in everyday life. He later published the first editorial describing "masked hypertension" . He also discovered and gave his name to the ...

#2922

Robert Misrahi

#42277

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Robert Misrahi was a French philosopher who specialised in the work of 17th Century Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza. Biography Born in Paris to Turkish-Jewish immigrants, Misrahi studied at the University of Paris , where he became a protege of Jean-Paul Sartre. He was the emeritus professor of ethical philosophy at the Université de Paris I , he has published a number of works on Spinoza and published the essentials of his work on the question of happiness. He has published a number of works in publications including Les Temps modernes, Encyclopædia Universalis, Le Dictionnaire des philosophies...

#2923

Michael Zammit

#70955

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Michael Zammit is a Maltese philosopher, specialised in Ancient and Eastern philosophy. Life Zammit was born at Valletta in 1954. He studied Philosophy at the University of Malta, acquiring a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1976, and a Master’s degree in 1993. After teaching at various academic centres in and around Malta, in 1983 he began teaching Philosophy at High School level. He joined the academic staff at the University of Malta in 1988 as part of a team preparing for the introduction of a general knowledge introductory course for High Schools called “Systems of Knowledge”, and also for the introduction of an advanced level matriculation exam in philosophy.

#2924

Harry Brighouse

Harry Brighouse

#46539

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Harry Brighouse is a British political philosopher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include the relationship between education and liberalism. His work on this topic has been widely cited by broadsheet newspapers, such as The Independent, and The Guardian.

#2925

Mieczysław Omyła

#70335

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Mieczysław Władysław Omyła is a Polish professor of humanities, logician, philosopher. He is a lecturer in logic and philosophy at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Education and career

#2926

Ángel Gabilondo

#9301

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ángel Gabilondo Pujol is a Spanish university professor, currently serving as the 6th Ombudsman of Spain. Between 2009 and 2011, he was Minister of Education in José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Cabinet.

#2927

Joseph Alpert

#61047

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Joseph Stephen Alpert is an American cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center. He is also the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Medicine. Education Alpert received his bachelor's degree from Yale University magna cum laude. He later received his medical doctorate from Harvard Medical School, cum laude.

#2928

Fergus Shanahan

#83166

Overall Influence

#2929

Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese

#12911

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Abraham Verghese is an American physician, author and Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School. He is the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015. He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the podcast Medscape Medicine and the Machine.

#2930

Samuel Todes

#44996

Overall Influence

1927 - 1994 (67 years)

Samuel Todes was an American philosopher who made notable contributions to existentialism, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. Biography Todes taught philosophy at MIT after graduation from Harvard, alongside Hubert Dreyfus. He taught courses on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes developed a philosophy of needs, based on his critique of Kant's schematism and Merleau-Ponty's critique of Heidegger. This contribution was never published, beyond its basis in his dissertation. Gerry Stahl and Ralph D. Sawyer attended his courses as undergraduates. When Todes and Dreyfus we...

#2931

Silvio Danese

#83205

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

#2932

W. Robert Godfrey

#15033

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

W. Robert Godfrey is a minister in the United Reformed Churches in North America and formerly served as the third president of Westminster Seminary California. As of 2017 he is president emeritus and professor emeritus of church history. He currently is chairman of Ligonier Ministries, located in Sanford, Florida, a position he took over from the late Dr. R. C. Sproul.

#2933

Evelyn Pluhar

#83176

Overall Influence

Evelyn B. Pluhar-Adams is an American philosopher specialising in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind, especially concerning the moral status of animals. Biography Evelyn Pluhar studied for a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of Denver before going on to read for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her doctoral thesis was entitled The Ontological Status of Colour. She has spent much of her career at Pennsylvania State University, Fayette Campus, where she was an assistant professor of philosophy from 1978 to 1984, an associate professor of philoso...

#2934

Ali Harb

#59313

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Ali Harb is a Lebanese writer, intellectual, and philosopher, he has many works and is known for his style of writings. He is influenced by Jacques Derrida, particularly with his theory of deconstruction. His book Critique of the Text is part of the curriculum in the University of Paris. He stands against elitism, intellectual fundamentalism, and formal logic which is based on holistic thinking not abstract intellectual tools and mechanisms for consideration and thought. As Harb follows Kant’s approach of critiquing the mind and its mechanics and intellectual structure.

#2935

Brian Copenhaver

#50262

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Brian P. Copenhaver is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at The University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches and writes about philosophy, religion and science in late medieval and early modern Europe.

#2936

Uta Francke

#62077

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Uta Francke is a German-American physician-geneticist known for her accomplishments in mapping genes to specific chromosome locations and discovering the genes and underlying mutations responsible for Prader-Willi and Rett syndromes. Her work on detailed mapping of human chromosome laid the foundation of the Human Genome Project and discovery of many other rare genetic disorders. She is currently a professor of Genetics and Pediatrics Emerita at Stanford University. She has also served as a consultant to 23andMe Inc since 2007, and as a part-time employee from 2010-2013.

#2937

Attilio Maseri

#51622

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Attilio Maseri OMRI KSG was an Italian academic and physician specialized in cardiology, considered a leading researcher in the field of ischemic heart disease. His patients included Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II.

#2938

Joe Nickell

#1252

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Joe Nickell is an American skeptic and investigator of the paranormal. Nickell is senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and writes regularly for their journal, Skeptical Inquirer. He is also an associate dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute. He is the author or editor of over 30 books.

#2939

William Nyhan

#10700

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

William Leo Nyhan is an American physician best known as the co-discoverer of Lesch–Nyhan syndrome. Nyhan currently serves as professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine in La Jolla, California. He has held positions at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine and has served on a number of advisory committees, pediatric advisory boards, and research foundation boards.

#2940

I. Glenn Cohen

#20812

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

I. Glenn Cohen is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also the director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. Cohen has written a number of articles, appearing in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine; JAMA; Cell; Nature; the Harvard, Stanford, Southern California, Minnesota, Iowa, and Hastings Law Reviews; the Harvard Journal of Law and Negotiation; the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology; the Food and Drug Law Journal; the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics; and the Hastings Center Reports. He has giv...

#2941

Gerald O'Collins

#12864

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Gerald Glynn O'Collins is an Australian Jesuit priest and academic. He was a research professor and writer-in-residence at the Jesuit Theological College in Parkville, Victoria, and a research professor in theology at St Mary's University College in Twickenham. For more than three decades, he was professor of systematic and fundamental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University .

#2942

Luca Incurvati

#65488

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Luca Incurvati is a logician and philosopher, currently an Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. Incurvati's research areas include set theory, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and metaethics. In set theory and philosophy of maths, Incurvati has argued for the iterative conception of sets, based on a methodology he terms inference to the best conception. Incurvati is currently the principal investigator in the Amsterdam-based project From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics, for which he was awarded a prestigious ERC grant of 1.5 million euros.

#2943

Klaus Döring

#55786

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Klaus Döring is a German classical philologist and philosophical historian. Life and work Döring studied Classical philology, philosophy and musicology at the Universities of Kiel, Würzburg, Hamburg and Freiburg from 1957 to 1964. In 1964 he took the first state examination in Greek and Latin. From 1966, he worked at the University of Freiburg, initially in an assistant position. After he received his doctorate in 1970, he became an Academic Assistant. In 1976 he achieved his habilitation in classical philology at Freiburg. From 1978 to 1980 he completed a clerkship at the South Baden higher education authority.

#2944

Arno Ros

#23977

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Arno Ros is a German philosopher and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in Magdeburg, Germany. Biography Studies and initial teaching positions Ros studied Ibero-Romance languages, sociology, literature and philosophy in Hamburg, Madrid and Coimbra . He received his doctorate in 1971 for the dissertation On the theory of literary narrative. He earned his habilitation in Saarbrücken as an assistant of Kuno Lorenz. The title of his habilitation thesis was Philosophy as a methodological critique of meaning. In subsequent years, Ros was a visiting...

#2945

Paul Whelton

#48966

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Paul Kieran Whelton is an Irish-born American physician and scientist who has contributed to the fields of hypertension and kidney disease epidemiology. He also mentored several public health leaders including the deans of the schools of public health at Johns Hopkins and Columbia . He currently serves as the Show Chwan Health Care System Endowed Chair in Global Public Health and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is the founding director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinica...

#2946

Gabriel M. Rebeiz

#83509

Overall Influence

#2947

Johannes Sløk

#27420

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

Johannes Sløk was a Danish philosopher, professor at the University of Aarhus and founder of "Idéhistorie" , an interdisciplinary discipline mainly about writings pertaining to the ideas of Western culture since Antiquity. The concept is now the "Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas" a department under the faculty of humanities of Aarhus University. During the student rising of 1968, Sløk was forced to leave his position as professor at Idéhistorie, and the institute became oriented around the Marxist theory. Sløk instead was granted a special position at the Department of Theology, as professor of analytic theology.

#2948

Stephen Park Turner

#35848

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stephen Park Turner is a researcher in social practice, social and political theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Florida, where he also holds the title Distinguished University Professor. He has held a NEH Fellowship, was Simon Honorary Professor at Manchester University and has twice been the Advanced Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies

#2949

Robert Weingard

#46206

Overall Influence

Robert Weingard was a philosopher of science and professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. Biography He became faculty member at Rutgers University and later joined the Department of Philosophy of Rutger University's School of Arts and Sciences in 1988. On 14 September 1996, Robert Weingard died of a heart attack; some of his articles were published posthumously.

#2950

William J. Catalona

#83542

Overall Influence

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