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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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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#3201

Yujin Nagasawa

#43885

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Yujin Nagasawa is a Japanese-born British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Nagasawa is H.G. Wood Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham. He is also former president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and co-director of the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion. He is best known for his work on the nature and existence of God and the problem of consciousness.

#3202

Thomas Talbott

#14700

Overall Influence

Thomas Talbott is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He is best known for his advocacy of trinitarian universalism. The 2003 book Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate presents Talbott's defense of Trinitarian universalism together with responses from various fields theologians, philosophers, church historians and other religious scholars supporting or opposing Talbott's universalism.

#3203

S. Albert Kivinen

#49143

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Seppo Albert Kivinen was a Finnish author and doctor of philosophy and docent emeritus of University of Helsinki, known for his occult interests and study of monsters. He is a onetime winner of the Atorox Award for best Finnish short story, for his Lovecraftian pastiche Keskiyön Mato Ikaalisissa. Kivinen is a well known fixture in Finnish academia and a proponent of the study of the history of the occult with a sceptical bent.

#3204

Mark Sainsbury

#44139

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Richard Mark Sainsbury is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. He is known for his work in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and on the philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.

#3205

Jesse Glenn Gray

1913 - 1977 (64 years)

Jesse Glenn Gray was an American philosopher, writer, and professor of philosophy at Colorado College. Gray published numerous books and essays. His first major publication, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, is a philosophical memoir of his years as a counter-intelligence officer near the battle lines in Italy during World War II inspired by Gray’s opposition to war. Its reprint in 1967 and subsequent editions included an introduction by Hannah Arendt.

#3206

Hilary Greaves

#38424

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Hilary Greaves is a British philosopher, currently serving as professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. From 2017 to 2022, she was the founding director of the Global Priorities Institute, a research centre for effective altruism at the university supported by the Open Philanthropy Project.

#3207

Steven Crowell

#52768

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Steven Crowell is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at Rice University, where he taught from 1983 to 2022. Crowell earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1981. His work has largely focused on twentieth-century European philosophy, including phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism.

#3208

Hermotimus of Clazomenae

#22785

Overall Influence

Hermotimus of Clazomenae , was a possibly historic or legendary Presocratic philosopher about whom many legendary feats were ascribed in antiquity, including the ability for his soul to leave his body and travel around. Some ancient sources also considered him a previous reincarnation of Pythagoras. Aristotle also credited him with some of the metaphysical doctrines on Nous that were more commonly attributed to Anaxagoras.

#3209

Lisa H. Schwartzman

#52847

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Lisa H. Schwartzman is a philosophy professor and well known feminist and social/political philosopher currently teaching at Michigan State University. Schwartzman earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000 before going on to teach courses on feminist theory, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and ethics at Michigan State.

#3210

Thomas LaMarre

#17654

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Thomas Mark Lamarre is an American-Canadian academic, author, Japanologist and professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Education LaMarre was awarded a bachelor's degree in Biology in 1981 at Georgetown University. He continued his studies in science and the Université de la Méditerranée Aix-Marseille II in France, earning a Master's equivalent degree in Oceanology in 1982, and a doctorate equivalent in Oceanology in 1985.

#3211

František Palacký

František Palacký

1798 - 1876 (78 years)

František Palacký was a Czech historian and politician, the most influential person of the Czech National Revival, called "Father of the Nation". Life František Palacký was born on 14 June 1798, at Hodslavice house 108, a northeastern Moravian village now part of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. His ancestors had been members of the community of the Bohemian Brethren, and had clandestinely maintained their Protestant belief throughout the period of religious persecution, eventually giving their adherence to the Augsburg confession as approximate to their original faith. Palacký's father was a schoolmaster and a man of some learning.

#3212

Franz Samuel Karpe

Franz Samuel Karpe

1747 - 1806 (59 years)

Franz Samuel Karpe, , was a Slovenian philosopher and rector of University of Olomouc. Biography Karpe was born in Kranj, Carniola , to a townsman's family. His parents died soon and subsequently Count Lichteberg's family assumed responsibility for his upbringing and education. Karpe entered a Jesuit college in Ljubljana, which he finished in 1768.

#3213

Ara Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham

#11143

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ara Warkes Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham, is an Armenian-British surgeon, academic, and politician. Lord Darzi is an academic surgeon and holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London, specialising in the field of minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery, having pioneered many new techniques and technologies. He is co-director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and the NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at Imperial College London. He has become strongly identified with trying to change the National Health Service in England and is re...

#3214

Melvin Fitting

#25166

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Melvin Fitting is a logician with special interests in philosophical logic and tableau proof systems. He was a professor at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. from 1968 to 2013. At the Graduate Center he was in the departments of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics, and at Lehman College he was in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He is now Professor emeritus.

#3215

James M. Edie

#44121

Overall Influence

1927 - 1998 (71 years)

James M. Edie was an American philosopher. Life and career Edie was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He studied at Saint John’s University in Minnesota and at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm in Rome before obtaining his doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

#3216

Lucius Annaeus Cornutus

10 - 80 (70 years)

Lucius Annaeus Cornutus , a Stoic philosopher, flourished in the reign of Nero , when his house in Rome was a school of philosophy. Life Cornutus was a native of Leptis Magna in Libya, but resided for the most part in Rome. He is best known as the teacher and friend of Persius, whose fifth satire is addressed to him, as well as other distinguished students, such as Claudius Agathemerus. "Through Cornutus Persius was introduced to Annaeus, as well as to Lucan, who was of his own age, and also a disciple of Cornutus". At Persius's death, Cornutus returned to Persius' sisters a bequest made to him, but accepted Persius' library of some 700 scrolls.

#3217

Robin Le Poidevin

#42474

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Robin Le Poidevin is Emeritus Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds, whose special interests include agnosticism, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of space and time.

#3218

Mohsen Kadivar

#4097

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Mohsen Kadivar is a mujtahid, Islamic theologian, philosopher, writer, leading intellectual reformist, and research professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. A political Iranian dissident, Kadivar has been a vocal critic of the doctrine of clerical rule, also known as Velayat-e Faqih , and a strong advocate of democratic and liberal reforms in Iran as well as constructional reform in understanding of shari'a and Shi'a theology. Kadivar has served time in prison in Iran for his political activism and beliefs.

#3219

Brian Treanor

#52592

Overall Influence

Brian Treanor is the current Casassa Chair in Social Values, Professor of Philosophy in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and the academic director of the Academy of Catholic Thought & Imagination at Loyola Marymount University. He received his Ph.D. from Boston College where he studied with Richard Kearney & Jacques Taminiaux.

#3220

Mary Louise Gill

#50430

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mary Louise Gill is the David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Brown University. Her work primarily focuses on Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers. Education and career Gill received a bachelor's in religion in 1972 from Barnard College and a master's in religion from Columbia University in 1974. She received a second bachelor's from Cambridge University in classics and ancient philosophy in 1976, and a master's and doctorate in classics and ancient philosophy from Cambridge, both in 1981.

#3221

Virgil Aldrich

#51239

Overall Influence

1903 - 1998 (95 years)

Virgil Charles Aldrich , was an American philosopher of art, language, and religion. Early life and education The son of Floyd Clement Aldrich and his wife Ann Hanley, Virgil Aldrich earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1925. He studied at Oxford University in 1927 and then went on to earn a Diplôme d'Études Supérieures de Philosophie at the Sorbonne in 1928 before completing his Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley in 1931. He married Louise Hafliger on 3 September 1927 and they had one son, David Virgil Aldrich.

#3222

Georges Rey

#26212

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Georges Leon Rey is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland. Biography Rey received a doctoral degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1978. His thesis was titled The possibility of psychology: some preliminary issues, and was completed under Hilary Putnam.

#3223

Nicholas St. John Green

1830 - 1876 (46 years)

Nicholas St. John Green was an American philosopher and lawyer, one of the members of The Metaphysical Club. Green is known for his contributions in the field of law as well as his involvement in the formation of pragmatism. He has been named as the “grandfather of pragmatism” by Charles Peirce.

#3224

Herman De Dijn

#57096

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Herman De Dijn is a Belgian academic philosopher and historian of philosophy with a particular interest in the ethics of Spinoza, known as a public intellectual in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Life De Dijn was born in Galmaarden in 1943 and was educated at the Sint-Catharinacollege, Geraardsbergen. He studied at the KU Leuven, graduating Doctor of Philosophy in 1971. After postdoctoral study at the University of Cambridge he was appointed to the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, where he was a full professor from 1979 until 2008, when he became professor emeritus. From 1995 to 2000 he ...

#3225

Krzysztof Michalski

#36357

Overall Influence

1948 - 2013 (65 years)

Krzysztof Michalski was a Polish philosopher and the rector of Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen founded by him in Vienna in 1982. Life Krzysztof Michalski was born in Warsaw. He studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, where he received his Ph.D. in 1974 with a thesis on Heidegger and Contemporary Philosophy. In 1977, he spent one year in Germany as a Humboldt Fellow, from 1978 onwards he taught philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1981/82 he was a Thyssen Fellow at the Heidelberg University and in 1982/1983 a Fellow Commoner of Churchill College at Cambridge. In 1986, he was habilitated for Philosophy at the University of Warsaw with the study Logic and Time.

#3226

Jeanne Hersch

#14179

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Jeanne Hersch was a Swiss philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin, whose works dealt with the concept of freedom. She was the daughter of Liebman Hersch. Education and career Hersch was born in 1910 in Geneva, Switzerland. She later studied under the existentialist Karl Jaspers in Germany in the early 1930s. She taught French, Latin and Philosophy in the International School of Geneva, the world's first international school, for 33 years .

#3227

Janet Murray

#5864

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Janet Horowitz Murray is an American professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, she was a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT, where she taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects since 1971. She is well known as an early developer of humanities computing applications, a seminal theorist of digital media, and an advocate of new educational programs in digital media.

#3228

Denise Riley

#22126

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Denise Riley is an English poet and philosopher. Life Riley lives in London. She was educated for a year at Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated from New Hall, Cambridge. She was, until recently, Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A. D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University.

#3229

Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi

#21833

Overall Influence

1922 - 1993 (71 years)

Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi was a Moroccan philosopher, novelist and poet writing in Arabic and French. Career Some of his books were translated into more than 30 languages. Lahbabi studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received a doctorate of philosophy. He was professor of philosophy and dean of the faculty of letters at the Mohammed V University in Rabat. Characteristic of his philosophical writings is the union of Arab-Islamic and Western-humanistic ideas. He also wrote poetry, fiction, and non-fiction books on economics, politics, and literature. Lahbabi was one of the founders of the Union of Arab Writers of the Maghreb and the review Afaq .

#3230

Geydar Dzhemal

#22780

Overall Influence

1947 - 2016 (69 years)

Geydar Dzhahidovich Dzhemal was a Russian Islamic public figure, activist, philosopher, poet, political and social activist. He was the founder and chairman of the Islamic Committee of Russia He was also the Co-chairman and member of the Presidium of the Russian Social Movement "Russian Islamic Heritage", permanent member of the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress, one of the founders and a member of the Coordinating Council of the Left Front, member of The Other Russia. He took part in the Dissenters' March.

#3231

Birger Hjørland

#16213

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Birger Hjørland is a professor of knowledge organization at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen. His main areas of study pertain to theory of library and information science and of knowledge organization. Hjørland has contributed important developments to domain analysis and concept theory. He has been cited as an anchor of North American knowledge organization studies, as well as an information science pioneer.

#3232

Henryk Hiż

#37798

Overall Influence

1917 - 2006 (89 years)

Henryk Hiż was a Polish analytical philosopher specializing in linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and ethics, active for most of his life in the United States, one of the youngest representatives of the Lwów–Warsaw school.

#3233

Andrzej Wierciński

Andrzej Wierciński

#31436

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Andrzej Wiercinski is a Hermeneutician, Philosopher, and Theologian. As the transdisciplinary thinker, he is Professor of Liberal Arts, Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw, President-Founder of the International Institute for Hermeneutics , and President of Agora Hermeneutica .

#3234

Mohammed Abed al-Jabri

#31503

Overall Influence

1935 - 2010 (75 years)

Mohammed Abed Al Jabri was one of the most known Moroccan and Arab philosophers; he taught philosophy, Arab philosophy, and Islamic thought in Mohammed V University in Rabat from the late 1960s until his retirement. He is considered one of the major philosophers and intellectual figures in the modern and contemporary Arab world. He is known for his academic project "Critique of Arab Reason", published in four volumes between the 1980s and 2000s. He published several influential books on the Arab philosophical tradition.

#3235

Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey

1837 - 1902 (65 years)

Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey was an American professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont. Torrey was a great-grandson of Manasseh Cutler who had been a member of the United States Congress. His father, Augustus Torrey, was a medical doctor. Torrey was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. He moved to the household of his uncle Joseph Torrey to go to Burlington High School. He then studied at the University of Vermont, completing his bachelor's degree in 1858. After teaching school for a time in Beverly, Massachusetts, he went to the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York from which he graduated in 1864.

#3236

Lawrence Joseph Henderson

1878 - 1942 (64 years)

Lawrence Joseph Henderson was an American physiologist, chemist, biologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He became one of the leading biochemists of the early 20th century. His work contributed to the Henderson–Hasselbalch equation, used to calculate pH as a measure of acidity.

#3237

Kenneth Allen Taylor

Kenneth Allen Taylor

#33050

Overall Influence

1954 - 2019 (65 years)

Kenneth Allen Taylor was an American philosopher and co-host of the radio program Philosophy Talk. Education and career Taylor received his A.B. from the University of Notre Dame in 1977. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Chicago, where he completed his dissertation under the supervision of Leonard Linsky. Before coming to Stanford, Taylor taught in the philosophy departments at Rutgers University, University of Maryland at College Park, Wesleyan University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Middlebury College.

#3238

Mabogo P. More

#44775

Overall Influence

Mabogo P. More is a South African philosopher working in the area of Black existentialism, including philosophical analysis of the life and work of Steve Biko. Awards In 2015, More was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

#3239

Titus Brandsma

1881 - 1942 (61 years)

Titus Brandsma, OCarm was a Dutch Carmelite friar, Catholic priest and professor of philosophy. Brandsma was vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology and spoke out against it many times before the Second World War. He was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in November 1985 as a martyr of the faith and canonized as a saint on 15 May 2022 by Pope Francis.

#3240

Hilary Bok

#39629

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Hilary Bok is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Bioethics and Moral & Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University. Bok received a B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1981 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991.

#3241

Hans Lipps

1889 - 1941 (52 years)

Hans Lipps was a German phenomenological and existentialist philosopher. Biographical sketch Following his highschool graduation in Dresden in 1909, Lipps began studying art history, architecture, aesthetics and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1910–1911 while doing his military service in Dresden he continued his philosophical studies at Dresden's University of Technology. In the spring of 1911 he moved to Göttingen to study with Edmund Husserl. Together with Theodor Conrad and his wife, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, as well as Roman Ingarden and Fritz Kaufmann, Lipps be...

#3242

Harold C. Neu

#57533

Overall Influence

#3243

Eliseo Vivas

#33069

Overall Influence

1901 - 1993 (92 years)

Eliseo Vivas was a 20th-century philosopher and literary theorist. As a child, his family fled Colombia in response to the presidency of Cipriano Castro. They went to Curacao, then Paris, then, in 1915, to New York City. Vivas served as the Venezuelan consul in Philadelphia, then turned to academia studying or teaching at, among other schools, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, Rockford College, and the University of Iowa.

#3244

Gordon Parker

#15506

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gordon Barraclough Parker AO is an Australian psychiatrist who is scientia professor of psychiatry at the University of New South Wales . Parker’s particular focus is on the phenomenology and epidemiology of mood disorders, social psychiatry, and the treatment and management of mood disorders. His research has assisted in modelling psychiatric conditions – depression, bipolar and personality disorders – and examining causes, mechanisms and treatments for mood disorders, together with innovative clinical work. Parker is a critic of the current unitary classification of major depressive disorder , and has proposed the revival of the diagnosis of melancholia.

#3245

Andrew Bowie

#45710

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Andrew S. Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London and Founding Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre . He has worked to promote a better understanding of German philosophy in the Anglophone analytical tradition - including the works of Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Novalis , Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno, ...

#3246

George Paxton Young

1819 - 1889 (70 years)

George Paxton Young was a Canadian philosopher and professor of logic, metaphysics and ethics at the University of Toronto. He studied the quintic polynomial equation and in 1888 described how to solve a solvable quintic equation, without providing an explicit formula.

#3247

Ángel Cappelletti

Ángel Cappelletti

#54226

Overall Influence

1927 - 1995 (68 years)

Ángel Cappelletti was a philosopher and university professor. He was born in Rosario. He studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires where he also received his PhD in 1954. He moved to Venezuela in 1968 and began teaching at the Simon Bolivar University until his retirement in 1994, when he returned to Rosario. During his career he translated works from Greek and Latin and composed numerous works on ancient philosophy as well as on the subjects as positivism and anarchism in Latin America.

#3248

Robert Vischer

1847 - 1933 (86 years)

Robert Vischer was a German philosopher who invented the term Einfühlung , which was to be promoted by Theodor Lipps, Freud's admired philosopher. Vischer’s use of Einfühlung Vischer postulated the as yet undescribed distinction between verstehen and Einfühlung in his 1873 doctoral thesis On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics. It was the first mention of the word Einfühlung in this form in print. His more-famous father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, had used the term Einfühlen in explorations of Idealism relative to architectural form, and related concepts were certainly already in the air.

#3249

Tomonaga Sanjūrō

1871 - 1951 (80 years)

was a Japanese academic and esteemed professor emeritus of medieval, renaissance, early modern, and Kantian philosophy at the University of Kyoto during the early 20th century. He was one of the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School.

#3250

K. Danner Clouser

#54779

Overall Influence

1930 - 2000 (70 years)

K. Danner Clouser was an American bioethicist. He gained his bachelor's degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in 1955, then completed a PhD at Harvard University in 1961. After having taught at Dartmouth College and Carleton College, he moved to the Pennsylvania State University, where he pursued his career and became University Professor of Humanities . In 1968, he established one of the first humanities courses at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. At Dartmouth College, he met several moral philosophers with whom he continued to collaborate: Bernard Gert, Charles M.

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