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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#3151

Raymond of Sabunde

1385 - 1436 (51 years)

Raymond of Sabunde was a Catalan scholar, teacher of medicine and philosophy and finally regius professor of theology at Toulouse. He was born in Barcelona , and died in Toulouse. His Theologia Naturalis sive Liber naturae creaturarum, etc., written 1434–1436 but published in 1484, marks an important stage in the history of natural theology. It was first written in Latin . His followers composed a more classical Latin version of the work. It was translated into French by Michel de Montaigne and edited in Latin at various times .

#3152

Jonathan Rée

#37399

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jonathan Rée is a British freelance historian and philosopher from Bradford. Educated at Sussex University and then at Oxford, Rée was previously a professor of philosophy at Middlesex University, but gave up a teaching career in order to "have more time to think".

#3153

Aulus Cornelius Celsus

Aulus Cornelius Celsus

25 BC - 50 (75 years)

Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a Roman encyclopaedist, known for his extant medical work, De Medicina, which is believed to be the only surviving section of a much larger encyclopedia. The De Medicina is a primary source on diet, pharmacy, surgery and related fields, and it is one of the best sources concerning medical knowledge in the Roman world. The lost portions of his encyclopedia likely included volumes on agriculture, law, rhetoric, and military arts. He made contributions to the classification of human skin disorders in dermatology, such as myrmecia, and his name is often found in medical terminology regarding the skin, e.g., kerion celsi and area celsi.

#3154

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

1772 - 1844 (72 years)

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific views had a transcendental flavor and were similar to those of German morphologists like Lorenz Oken. He believed in the underlying unity of organismal design, and the possibility of the transmutation of species in time, amassing evidence for his claims through research in comparative anatomy, paleontology, and embryology. He is considered as a predecessor ...

#3155

Norman Swartz

#30735

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Norman Swartz is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy, Simon Fraser University. He is the author or co-author of multiple books and multiple articles on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He earned a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1961, an M.A. in history and philosophy of science from Indiana University in 1965 and a Ph.D. in history of philosophy of science in 1971 also from Indiana University. He uses the term physical law to mean the laws of nature as they truly are and not as they are inferred and described in the practice of science.

#3156

George Caffentzis

#29468

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

George Caffentzis is an American political philosopher and an autonomist Marxist. He founded the Midnight Notes Collective, is a founder member of the co-ordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. His partner is Silvia Federici.

#3157

Emil Fackenheim

#18613

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

Emil Ludwig Fackenheim was a Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi. Born in Halle, Germany, he was arrested by Nazis on the night of 9 November 1938, known as . Briefly interned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , he escaped with his younger brother Wolfgang to Great Britain, where his parents later joined him. Emil's older brother Ernst-Alexander, who refused to leave Germany, was killed in the Holocaust.

#3158

Arvid Carlsson

#55692

Overall Influence

#3159

Han Yu

768 - 824 (56 years)

Han Yu , courtesy name Tuizhi , and commonly known by his posthumous name Han Wengong , was an essayist, Confucian scholar, poet, and government official during the Tang dynasty who significantly influenced the development of Neo-Confucianism. Described as "comparable in stature to Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe" for his influence on the Chinese literary tradition, Han Yu stood for strong central authority in politics and orthodoxy in cultural matters.

#3160

Kumazawa Banzan

Kumazawa Banzan

1619 - 1691 (72 years)

Kumazawa Banzan was a Japanese Confucian. He learned Yangmingism from Nakae Tōju and served Ikeda Mitsumasa, the lord of Bizen Province. In his later years, he was imprisoned for writing Daigaku Wakumon, which contained criticism of Tokugawa shogunate politics.

#3161

Jesse Shera

1903 - 1982 (79 years)

Jesse Hauk Shera was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

#3162

Reinhard Brandt

#46801

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Reinhard Brandt is a German philosopher. Brandt studied Greek, Latin and philosophy in Marburg, Munich and Paris. In 1965 he completed his doctorate on the Aristotelian theory of judgement. His habilitation was on an unpublished work of David Hume's theoretical philosophy.

#3163

Ursula Coope

#37906

Overall Influence

Ursula Charlotte Macgillivray Coope FBA is a British classical scholar, who is an expert in the study of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's physics, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as on Neoplatonism. She is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

#3164

David George Ritchie

1853 - 1903 (50 years)

David George Ritchie was a Scottish philosopher who had a distinguished university career at Edinburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford, and after being fellow of Jesus College and a tutor at Balliol College was elected professor of logic and metaphysics at St Andrews. He was also the third president of the Aristotelian Society in 1898.

#3165

Daniel Berlyne

1924 - 1976 (52 years)

Daniel Ellis Berlyne was a British and Canadian psychologist. Berlyne worked at several universities both in Canada and the United States. His work was in the field of experimental and exploratory psychology. Specifically, his research focused on how objects and experiences are influenced by and have an influence on curiosity and arousal.

#3166

Jean Jolivet

#42249

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Jean Jolivet was a French philosopher and medievalist. He was an authority on Medieval philosophy and honorary director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He was co-director of the publication series "Études de philosophie médiévale" for the Vrin Library of philosophy. Jolivet has been an influential mentor for, and collaborator with, Constant Mews, particularly in relation to Peter Abelard.

#3167

Antonio Millán-Puelles

#37255

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Antonio Millán-Puelles was a Spanish philosopher interested in phenomenology and metaphysics, who published many books and articles. He discovered his vocation to philosophy when he read Husserl’s Logical Investigations and abandoned the medical studies he had just begun.

#3168

Edward C. Holmes

Edward C. Holmes

#31233

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Edward Charles Holmes is a British evolutionary biologist and virologist. Since 2012, he has been a fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia and professor at the University of Sydney. He was an honorary visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, from 2019-2021.

#3169

Gerrit Mannoury

Gerrit Mannoury

1867 - 1956 (89 years)

Gerrit Mannoury was a Dutch philosopher and mathematician, professor at the University of Amsterdam and communist, known as the central figure in the signific circle, a Dutch counterpart of the Vienna circle.

#3170

Augusto Vera

1813 - 1885 (72 years)

Augusto Vera was an Italian philosopher who followed Hegel's theories and translated many of his works. Life Vera was born in Amelia in the province of Terni. He was educated in Rome and Paris, and, after teaching classics for some years in Geneva, held chairs of philosophy in various colleges in France. He was a philosophy teacher at the Lycée Victor-Duruy and subsequently was professor in Strasbourg and in Paris. He left Paris after the coup d'etat of 1851 and spent nine years in England. Attaching himself with enthusiasm to Hegel's system, Vera became widely influential in spreading a kn...

#3171

Hugo Kükelhaus

1900 - 1984 (84 years)

Hugo Kükelhaus was a German carpenter, writer, pedagogue, philosopher and artist. Kükelhaus is best known for his infant toys "allbedeut" and the "Erfahrungsfeld zur Entfaltung der Sinne." Throughout his life, he presented his views for a human-scaled living environment in talks and publications. He is also regarded as a harbinger for infant toy designs that fulfil the requirements of pedagogy and developmental psychology. He gained international recognition for his design of 30 "Experience stations" at the German Pavilion of the Expo 1967 in Montreal. His ideas are relevant for contemporary ...

#3172

Peter Szendy

#21045

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Peter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist. He is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles is a critique of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening. Paying close attention to arrangements as "signed listenings" and to the juridical history of the listener, Szendy suggests an alternative model based on deconstruction: listening, he argues , is a "tolerated theft", and our ears are always already haunted by the ear of the other.

#3173

David Seyfort Ruegg

#20107

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

David Seyfort Ruegg was an eminent American-British Buddhologist with a long career, extending from the 1950s to the present. His specialty was Madhyamaka philosophy, a core doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism.

#3174

Anthony Atala

#4732

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Anthony Atala is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He is the W.H. Boyce professor of urology, the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. His work focuses on the science of regenerative medicine: "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells".

#3175

Gregory Loewen

#33780

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Gregory Victor Loewen is a Canadian social philosopher in the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. The author of over thirty scholarly non-fiction books as well as over twenty works of fiction, he is age-relative one of a number of modern period academic writers to have produced a significant body of work early in their careers, along with Herder, de Bono, Spir, Joad, Aguilera, and Schelling.

#3176

Konstantin Leontiev

Konstantin Leontiev

1831 - 1891 (60 years)

Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev, monastic name: Clement was a conservative tsarist and imperial monarchist Russian philosopher who advocated closer cultural ties between Russia and the East against what he believed to be the West's catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian and revolutionary influences. He also advocated Russia's cultural and territorial expansion eastward to India, Tibet and China.

#3177

Patrick Gardiner

#36901

Overall Influence

1922 - 1997 (75 years)

Patrick Lancaster Gardiner, FBA was a British academic philosopher and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Biography Gardiner was born in Chelsea, London, on 17 March 1922. His father was Clive Gardiner, a landscape artist and principal of Goldsmiths College; his mother was Lilian Lancaster, an artist and a pupil of Walter Sickert. His paternal grandfather was Alfred George Gardiner, editor of The Daily News. His younger brother was the architect Stephen Gardiner. He was educated at Westminster School, and then received a First in history from Christ Church, Oxford. After Army service in It...

#3178

Elisabeth Schellekens

#50890

Overall Influence

Elisabeth Schellekens is a Swedish philosopher and Chair Professor of Aesthetics at Uppsala University . Previously, she was Senior Lecturer at Durham University . Schellekens is known for her works in aesthetics. Her research interests include aesthetic cognitivism and objectivism, aesthetic normativity, Hume, Kant, aesthetic and moral properties, conceptual art, non-perceptual or intelligible aesthetic value, the relations between perception and knowledge, the aesthetics and ethics of cultural heritage , and the interaction between aesthetic, moral, cognitive and historical value in art.

#3179

Arturo Ardao

#14500

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Arturo Ardao was a Uruguayan philosopher and historian of ideas. From 1968 to 1972 he was dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Before the Military Coup in 1973, he was forced into exile in Venezuela, where he continued his academic activity as professor at the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas . In addition, he participates as researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies Rómulo Gallegos.

#3180

Ishaq ibn Hunayn

830 - 910 (80 years)

Abū Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn was an influential Arab physician and translator, known for writing the first biography of physicians in the Arabic language. He is also known for his translations of Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest. He is the son of the famous translator Hunayn Ibn Ishaq.

#3181

Marcello Malpighi

Marcello Malpighi

1628 - 1694 (66 years)

Marcello Malpighi was an Italian biologist and physician, who is referred to as the "Founder of microscopical anatomy, histology & Father of physiology and embryology". Malpighi's name is borne by several physiological features related to the biological excretory system, such as the Malpighian corpuscles and Malpighian pyramids of the kidneys and the Malpighian tubule system of insects. The splenic lymphoid nodules are often called the "Malpighian bodies of the spleen" or Malpighian corpuscles. The botanical family Malpighiaceae is also named after him. He was the first person to see capillar...

#3182

Émile Chartier

1868 - 1951 (83 years)

Émile-Auguste Chartier , commonly known as Alain , was a French philosopher, journalist, and pacifist. He adopted his pseudonym as an allusion to the 15th-century Norman poet Alain Chartier. Early life Alain was born in 1868 in Mortagne-au-Perche . He entered Lycée d'Alençon in 1881 and studied there for five years. On 13 June 1956, the lycée was renamed Lycée Alain, after its most famous student.

#3183

S. R. Ranganathan

S. R. Ranganathan

1892 - 1972 (80 years)

Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Librarian Day in India.

#3184

Anton Günther

1783 - 1863 (80 years)

Anton Günther was an Austrian Roman Catholic philosopher whose work was condemned by the church as heretical tritheism. His work has been described as Liberal Catholicism and Vienna's first Catholic political movement. His writings made him a leader among the generation of German Catholic theologians who emerged from the Romantic movement.

#3185

Maxwell Wintrobe

1901 - 1986 (85 years)

Maxwell Myer Wintrobe was an Austrian-born American physician who was a 20th-century authority in the medical field of hematology. His 1942 textbook on hematology, Clinical Hematology, was the first dedicated work in the field and he contributed to the diagnostic approach of anemia and copper metabolism, amongst many other achievements.

#3186

James Black Baillie

1872 - 1940 (68 years)

Sir James Black Baillie, was a British moral philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. He wrote the first significant translation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Mind." He is said to be the model for the character Sir John Evans in the novel The Weight of the Evidence by Michael Innes.

#3187

Joe Orton

1933 - 1967 (34 years)

John Kingsley Orton , known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.

#3188

Brian Herbert

#5309

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Brian Patrick Herbert is an American author who lives in Washington state. He is the elder son of science fiction author Frank Herbert . Brian Herbert's novels include Sidney's Comet, Prisoners of Arionn, Man of Two Worlds , and Sudanna Sudanna. In 2003, Herbert wrote a biography of his father titled Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. The younger Herbert has edited the Songs of Muad'dib and the Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune. Herbert has also created a concordance for the Dune universe based on his father's notes, though, according to the younger Herbert, there are no immedia...

#3189

Jack Hirsh

#36482

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jack Hirsh is a Canadian clinician and scientist specializing in anticoagulant therapy and thrombosis. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Hirsh is a graduate of the University of Melbourne Medical School. He studied hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, the London Postgraduate Medical School and the University of Toronto. In 1973 he joined the Faculty of Medicine of McMaster University. He is also the Director of the Hamilton Civic Hospital Research Centre.

#3190

George F. McLean

#32582

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

George Francis McLean was a Professor Emeritus at the School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America , Washington, D.C., and Director of its Centre for the Study of Culture and Values . He lectured internationally, promoting global philosophical dialogue and cooperation. Likewise, he invited scholars from many countries to participate in seminars in Washington, D.C.

#3191

Ibn Zuhr

1091 - 1162 (71 years)

Abū Marwān ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Zuhr , traditionally known by his Latinized name Avenzoar , was an Arab physician, surgeon, and poet. He was born at Seville in medieval Andalusia , was a contemporary of Averroes and Ibn Tufail, and was the most well-regarded physician of his era. He was particularly known for his emphasis on a more rational, empiric basis of medicine. His major work, Al-Taysīr fil-Mudāwāt wal-Tadbīr , was translated into Latin and Hebrew and was influential to the progress of surgery. He also improved surgical and medical knowledge by keying out several diseases and their treatme...

#3192

Edward Gorey

#4830

Overall Influence

1925 - 2000 (75 years)

Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer, Tony Award-winning costume designer, and artist, noted for his own illustrated books as well as cover art and illustration for books by other writers. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.

#3193

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

1901 - 1966 (65 years)

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art.

#3194

Liu Xiaofeng

#15269

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Liu Xiaofeng is a contemporary Chinese scholar and a professor at Renmin University of China. He has been considered the prototypical example of what is called a cultural Christian , meaning a believer who may lack a specific church identification or affiliation, and was, along with He Guanghu, one of the main forerunners of the academic field of Sino-Christian Theology . However, in recent years, his interest has shifted from studies in Christian theology to the political theories of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt.

#3195

Michèle Le Dœuff

#46611

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Michèle Le Dœuff is a French philosopher with a scholarly interest in the philosophy of Francis Bacon, and Sir Thomas More's utopianism. She questions the boundaries of philosophy, while insisting upon philosophy's importance . She is critical of professional philosophers' neglectful attitude to science, and argues that disputes within sciences are often epistemological . In Hipparchia's Choice she questions philosophy's pretensions to being a unique practice which achieves a pure clarity: philosophy is inevitably shaped by language, metaphor, and power relations. According to Le Dœuff feminists make a special contribution.

#3196

Otto Pöggeler

#41325

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Otto Pöggeler was a German philosopher. He specialized in phenomenology and commenting on Heidegger. In 1963 he authored the acclaimed Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, one of the first rigorous attempts at tracing the development of Heidegger's thought. He also published a study of poetry of Paul Celan, and was director of the Hegel-Archiv at the Ruhr University in Bochum.

#3197

Padmapadacharya

#37304

Overall Influence

Padmapadacharya was an Indian philosopher, a follower of Adi Shankara. Padmapāda's dates are unknown, but some modern scholarship places his life around the middle of the 8th century; similarly information about him comes mainly from hagiographies. What is known for certain is that he was a direct disciple of Shankara, of whom he was a younger contemporary. Padmapada was the first head of Puri Govardhana matha. He is believed to have founded a math by name Thekke Matham in Thrissur, Kerala. Keralites believe that he was a Nambuthiri belonging to Vemannillom, though according to textual source...

#3198

William C. Dowling

#18594

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

William Courtney Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.

#3199

Cemal Yıldırım

#41953

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Cemal Yıldırım was a Turkish philosopher, author, educator, and researcher. He wrote 15 books and numerous academic papers. He wrote extensively on the philosophy of science and the history of science. His popular books Bilimin Öncüleri and Evrim Kuramı ve Bagnazlık were widely read and discussed in Turkey. His book Matematiksel Düşünme was also very influential.

#3200

Fouad Zakariyya

#43348

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Fouad Zakariyya was an Egyptian philosopher, and critic of Islamist thought who is known as “the father of Arab existentialism.” Biography Zakariyya was born in 1927. He studied at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1956. Zakariyya was the head of the philosophy department at Kuwait University from 1974 to 1991.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions