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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,

#3101

Donald C. Hodges

#12866

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Donald Clark Hodges was a philosophy professor at Florida State University, who wrote about revolutions and revolutionaries . Growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Hodges returned to the USA in 1941. He was a student of James Burnham, the author of "The Managerial Revolution," which argued that both in the Communist and the capitalist world the managers "rule the world." Hodges was a devoted Marxist and an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man.

#3102

Immanuel Kant

#3103

James Doull

#31701

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

James Alexander Doull was a Canadian philosopher and academic who was born and lived most of his life in Nova Scotia. His father was the politician, jurist, and historian John Doull. Biography From the late 1940s until the mid-1980s, he taught in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He was himself educated at Dalhousie as well as at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

#3104

William M Pardridge

#54584

Overall Influence

#3105

Echecrates of Phlius

500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)

Echecrates was a Pythagorean philosopher from the ancient Greek town of Phlius. He appears in Plato's Phaedo dialogue as an aid to the plot. He meets Phaedo, the dialogue's namesake, some time after the execution of Socrates, and asks Phaedo to tell him the story of the famed philosopher's last hours. Phaedo's presentation of the story comprises most of the dialogue's remainder, though Echecrates interrupts at times to ask questions relevant to the retold discussion.

#3106

Vernon Bourke

#47105

Overall Influence

1907 - 1998 (91 years)

Vernon Joseph Bourke was a Canadian-born American Thomist philosopher and professor at Saint Louis University. His area of expertise was ethics, and especially the moral philosophy of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.

#3107

Benny Lévy

#15019

Overall Influence

1945 - 2003 (58 years)

Benny Lévy was a philosopher, political activist and author. A political figure of May 1968 in France, he was the disciple and last personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980. Along with him, he helped founding the French newspaper Libération in 1972.

#3108

Peter Kenneth Dews

#18663

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Peter Kenneth Dews is a British philosopher, in the fields of critical theory and continental philosophy. He made his name with the Logics of Disintegration, on the limitations of post-structuralism. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.

#3109

Jaap Kruithof

#26582

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

Jaap Kruithof was a Belgian philosopher and writer. His parents were Dutch Protestants. He took degrees in history, law and philosophy in Ghent, and in Paris. Then he earned a Ph.D. on Hegel's ontology, with honours. Since the 1960s he was, along with Etienne Vermeersch and Leo Apostel, one of the icons of the Ghent University and the Flemish intelligentsia in general. He was also a musician and taught the sociology of music at the Royal Music Conservatory in Antwerp.

#3110

Dionysius Lardner

Dionysius Lardner

1793 - 1859 (66 years)

Dionysius Lardner FRS FRSE was an Irish scientific writer who popularised science and technology, and edited the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopædia. Early life in Dublin He was born in Dublin on 3 April 1793 the son of William Lardner and his wife; his father was a solicitor in Dublin, who wished his son to follow the same calling. After some years of uncongenial desk work, Lardner entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1812. He obtained a B.A. in 1817 and an M.A. in 1819, winning many prizes.

#3111

Bernardus Silvestris

1085 - 1160 (75 years)

Bernardus Silvestris, also known as Bernard Silvestris and Bernard Silvester, was a medieval Platonist philosopher and poet of the 12th century. Biography Little is known about Bernardus's life. In the nineteenth century, it was assumed that Bernardus was the same person as Bernard of Chartres, but the scholarly consensus is now that the two were different people. There is little evidence connecting Bernardus to Chartres, yet his work is consistent with the scholarship associated with Chartres in the twelfth century and is in that sense "Chartrian". Bernardus dedicated his Cosmographia to Thi...

#3112

Jeroen van den Hoven

#30518

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jeroen van den Hoven is a Dutch ethicist and a philosophy professor at Delft University of Technology. He specializes in ethics of information technology. Work Van den Hoven has written and worked with a range of scholars including Seumas Miller, Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum and John Weckert.

#3113

Jayatirtha

1345 - 1388 (43 years)

Sri Jayatirtha , also known as Teekacharya , was a Hindu philosopher, dialectician, polemicist and the sixth pontiff of Madhvacharya Peetha from . He is considered to be one of the most important seers in the history of Dvaita school of thought on account of his sound elucidations of the works of Madhvacharya. He is credited with structuring the philosophical aspects of Dvaita and through his polemical works, elevating it to an equal footing with the contemporary schools of thought. Along with Madhva and Vyasatirtha, he is venerated as one of the three great spiritual sages, or munitraya of Dvaita.

#3114

Thomas Mormann

#41708

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Thomas Mormann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain. He obtained his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Dortmund . He obtained his Habilitation from the University of Munich. He works in the philosophy of science, formal ontology, structuralism, Carnap studies, and neo-Kantianism.

#3115

Crantor

344 BC - 275 BC (69 years)

Crantor of Soli was an Ancient Greek philosopher and member of the Old Academy who was the first philosopher to write commentaries on the works of Plato. Life Crantor probably born around the middle of the 4th century BC, at Soli in Cilicia . He moved from Cilicia to Athens in order to study philosophy, where he became a pupil of Xenocrates and a friend of Polemon, and one of the most distinguished supporters of the philosophy of the older Academy. As Xenocrates died 314/3 BC, Crantor must have come to Athens prior to that year, although the date of his birth is not known. He died before both Polemon and Crates, who succeeded Polemon as scholarch.

#3116

Theodor Gomperz

Theodor Gomperz

1832 - 1912 (80 years)

Theodor Gomperz , Austrian philosopher and classical scholar, was born at Brno . Biography Gomperz studied at Brno and at Vienna under Hermann Bonitz. Graduating at the University of Vienna in 1867 he became privatdozent, and subsequently a professor of classical philology . In 1882 he was elected a full member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa from the University of Königsberg, and Doctor of Literature from the universities of Dublin and Cambridge, and became correspondent for several learned societies.

#3117

W. H. William H. Harris

#54896

Overall Influence

#3118

Marcel Conche

#33175

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Marcel Conche was a French philosopher and emeritus professor at the Sorbonne University . Biography Marcel Conche was born in Altillac, France. "Philosophizing ad infinitum" has been published by SUNY Press, June 2014. It is the translation of one of his major works: "Philosopher à l'infini", published by PUF, Presses Universitaires de France, in 2005.

#3119

Thomas Noguchi

#3527

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Thomas Tsunetomi Noguchi is the former Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner for the County of Los Angeles. Popularly known as the "coroner to the stars", Noguchi determined the cause of death in many high-profile cases in Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s. He performed autopsies on Marilyn Monroe, Albert Dekker, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Inger Stevens, Janis Joplin, Gia Scala, David Janssen, Divine, William Holden, and John Belushi.

#3120

Sosipatra

400 - 400 (0 years)

Sosipatra was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic who lived in Ephesus and Pergamon in the first half of the 4th century CE. The story of her life is told in Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists. Biography

#3121

Jeff Sebo

#44540

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Jeffrey Raymond Sebo is an American philosopher. He is clinical associate professor of environmental studies, director of the animal studies MA program, and affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy at New York University. In 2022, he published his first sole-authored book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves.

#3122

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda

1490 - 1573 (83 years)

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was a Spanish humanist, philosopher, and theologian of the Spanish Renaissance. He is mainly known for his participation in a famous debate with Bartolomé de las Casas in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–1551. The debate centered on the legitimacy of the conquest and colonization of America by the Spanish Empire and on the treatment of the Native Americans. The main philosophical referents of Ginés de Sepúlveda were Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roman law and Christian theology. These influences allowed him to argue for the cultural superiority and domination of the Spani...

#3123

Victor Alekseyevich Vaziulin

Victor Alekseyevich Vaziulin

#42704

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Victor Alekseyevich Vaziulin was a Soviet and Russian philosopher. He became famous for his deep knowledge of Karl Marx's work as well as for further developing Marxism through the dialectical sublation of its acquis.

#3124

Manel Esteller

#19386

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Manel Esteller graduated in medicine from the University of Barcelona in 1992, where he also obtained his doctorate, specializing in the molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma, in 1996. He was an invited researcher at the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, during which time his research interests focused on the molecular genetics of inherited breast cancer.

#3125

Susan Brownmiller

#1881

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.

#3126

Sally Scholz

#46940

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Sally J. Scholz is an American Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and former editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Her research focuses on social philosophy, political philosophy, and feminist theory. Her early work involves issues of violence against women, oppression and peacemaking, and then progresses to ethics of advocacy and violence against women in conflict settings, including war rape and just war theory. Her recent research involves these issues in addition to solidarity. She has published four single-author books and edited three academic journals, among...

#3127

Juozas Girnius

#41004

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Juozas Girnius was a Lithuanian existentialist philosopher. His philosophy combined existentialism, Catholicism, and Lithuanian nationalism. Together with Antanas Maceina and Stasys Šalkauskis, Girnius became a cornerstone of modern Lithuanian philosophy. In 1994, he was awarded the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas.

#3128

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly

#3001

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.

#3129

William Barton Rogers

William Barton Rogers

1804 - 1882 (78 years)

William Barton Rogers was an American geologist, physicist, and educator at the College of William & Mary from 1828 to 1835 and at the University of Virginia from 1835 to 1853. In 1861, Rogers founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university opened in 1865 after the American Civil War. Because of his affiliation with Virginia, Mount Rogers, the highest peak in the state, is named after him.

#3130

John Daniel Wild

1902 - 1972 (70 years)

John Daniel Wild was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Wild began his philosophical career as an empiricist and realist but became an important proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in the United States.

#3131

Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza

1578 - 1651 (73 years)

Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza , also called Puente Hurtado de Mendoza, was a Basque scholastic philosopher and theologian. Philosophical work He was a teacher of theology and philosophy in Valladolid and he occupied a chair at the University of Salamanca.

#3132

Božidar Debenjak

Božidar Debenjak

#19793

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Božidar Debenjak is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, social theorist and translator. Biography He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1961, he became professor at the University of Ljubljana. For more than thirty years, he taught Marxist theory and history of philosophy at the Ljubljana University; many renowned Slovenian philosophers and sociologists were among his pupils, including Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Rastko Močnik, Renata Salecl and Tonči Kuzmanić. He was one of the first scholars to introduce the thought of the Frankfurt school in the curric...

#3133

Seymour Chatman

#13104

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Seymour Chatman was an American film and literary critic and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the most significant figures of American narratology , regarded as a prominent representative of its Structuralist or "classic" branch.

#3134

Alexander Dobrokhotov

#22437

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Alexander Lvovich Dobrokhotov is a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of culture, and university professor. He specialises in the history of Russian culture, history of philosophy, metaphysics, Russian philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy, Kant and German Idealism, and philosophy of culture.

#3135

Methodios Anthrakites

Methodios Anthrakites

1660 - 1736 (76 years)

Methodios Anthrakites was a Greek Orthodox cleric, author, educator, mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher. He directed the Gioumeios and Epiphaneios Schools in Ioannina. He also supported the use of the people's language in education instead of archaic forms of Greek. He was involved in a controversy regarding Korydalism. He is known for being persecuted for introducing modern philosophical thought to Greek education, the incident is widely known as the Methodios Affair. He made a significant contribution to the growth of the Modern Greek Enlightenment during the Ottoman ...

#3136

John Worrall

#27601

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Worrall is a professor of philosophy of science at the London School of Economics. He is also associated with the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the same institution. Education Worrall attended Leigh Grammar School in Leigh, Lancashire and originally planned to join the school's Scholarship Stream in order to then apply for university admission to Oxbridge. He later described his change of mind, saying: "Think The History Boys – it then meant an additional year in the Sixth Form, and so another year in Leigh and I just couldn't face that!" After receiving a singl...

#3137

C. Michael Hall

#55235

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#3138

Yuri Samarin

1819 - 1876 (57 years)

Yuri Fyodorovich Samarin was a leading Russian Slavophile thinker and one of the architects of the Emancipation reform of 1861. He came from a noble family and befriended Konstantin Aksakov from an early age. An ardent admirer of Hegel and Khomyakov, Samarin attended the Moscow University, where his teachers included Mikhail Pogodin. He came to believe that "Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy alone, is a religion which philosophy can recognize" and that "the Orthodox church cannot exist apart from Hegel's philosophy". Samarin's dissertation was a study of Feofan Prokopovich's influence on the Russian O...

#3139

Peter Aczel

#18278

Overall Influence

1941 - 2023 (82 years)

Peter Henry George Aczel was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures.

#3140

Wilhelm Busch

1832 - 1908 (76 years)

Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day. Busch drew on the tropes of folk humour as well as a profound knowledge of German literature and art to satirize contemporary life, any kind of piety, Catholicism, Philistinism, religious morality, bigotry, and moral uplift.

#3141

Clémence Royer

1830 - 1902 (72 years)

Clémence Royer was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

#3142

J. H. Muirhead

1855 - 1940 (85 years)

John Henry Muirhead was a British philosopher best known for having initiated the Muirhead Library of Philosophy in 1890. He became the first person named to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in 1900.

#3143

Jacob Freudenthal

1839 - 1907 (68 years)

Jacob Freudenthal was a German philosopher. He was born at Bodenfelde, Hanover and died at Schreiberhau. Life Freudenthal was educated at the universities of Breslau and Göttingen, and at the rabbinical seminary of Breslau. After graduating from the University of Göttingen in 1863, he became a teacher of the in Wolfenbüttel . He then moved to Breslau to teach in the rabbinical seminary there, a position which he resigned in 1888.

#3144

Inoue Tetsujirō

Inoue Tetsujirō

1856 - 1944 (88 years)

Inoue Tetsujirō was a Japanese philosopher, poet and educator. He is known for introducing Western philosophy in Japan and for being a pioneer in Eastern philosophy. He became the first Japanese professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, and also served as the 2nd President of Daito Bunka Academy.

#3145

John Tasioulas

#16344

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

John Tasioulas is a Greek-Australian moral and legal philosopher. He is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI , and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.

#3146

Frédéric Lordon

Frédéric Lordon

#7424

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Frédéric Lordon is a French economist and philosopher, CNRS Director of Research at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris. He is an influential figure in France's Nuit debout movement and has regularly contributed to French broadcast and print media on French and European politics, and also writes a regular opinion column for Le Monde diplomatique. He has argued in favour of Communism as an alternative to Capitalism in books, articles and media appearances, and has been engaged in a project of re-grounding the social sciences in a Spinoza-inspired materialism. He ...

#3147

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

#8185

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiologist or semiotician and professor of musicology at the Université de Montréal. He studied semiology with Georges Mounin and Jean Molino and music semiology with Nicolas Ruwet.

#3148

David Lane

#19892

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Sir David Philip Lane is a British immunologist, molecular biologist and cancer researcher. He is currently working in the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology at the Karolinska Institute and is Chairman of Chugai Pharmabody. He is best known for the discovery of p53, one of the most important tumour suppressor genes.

#3149

Wallace O. Fenn

1893 - 1971 (78 years)

Wallace Osgood Fenn was a physiologist, chairman of the department of physiology at the University of Rochester from 1925 to 1959. He also headed the University's Space and Science center from 1964 to 1966. He was also the president of the American Physiological Society, the president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the president of the International Union of Physiological Science. His work on heat generated by muscles, oxygen use by the nervous system, and potassium equilibrium in muscle, as well as pressure breathing and nitrogen narcosis, was recognized internationally.

#3150

Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis

#5390

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.

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