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,

#3251

James Mark Baldwin

#3252

Dean Ornish

#5376

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dean Michael Ornish is an American physician and researcher. He is the president and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Eat More, Weigh Less and The Spectrum, he is an advocate for using diet and lifestyle changes to treat and prevent heart disease.

#3253

Alice Paul

1885 - 1977 (92 years)

Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.

#3254

Tullio Gregory

#52952

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Tullio Gregory was an Italian philosopher and historian of medieval and early modern philosophy. He was professor in La Sapienza, Rome, and collaborated with several institutions, either in Italy or abroad. His work and interpretations have shed new light on Medieval thought and on the connection to early modern philosophy .

#3255

John Grote

1813 - 1866 (53 years)

John Grote was an English moral philosopher and Anglican clergyman. Life and career The son of a banker, John Grote was younger brother to the historian, philosopher and reformer George Grote. He was educated at Beckenham School, Kent. He then went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1831, graduating with a first-class degree in the Classics Tripos in 1835, and became a fellow of Trinity in 1837. From 1847 until his death, he was vicar of Trumpington, where he was a neighbour of his close friend Robert Leslie Ellis, the paralysed mathematician and Bacon scholar. In 1855, Grote succeeded Will...

#3256

William Ritchie Sorley

1855 - 1935 (80 years)

William Ritchie Sorley, FBA , usually cited as W. R. Sorley, was a Scottish philosopher. A Gifford Lecturer, he was one of the British Idealist school of thinkers, with interests in ethics. He was opposed to women being admitted as students to the University of Cambridge.

#3257

Boris Hessen

1893 - 1936 (43 years)

Boris Mikhailovich Hessen , also Gessen , was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He is most famous for his paper on Newton's Principia which became foundational in historiography of science.

#3258

Herbert W. Franke

Herbert W. Franke

#3642

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Herbert W. Franke was an Austrian scientist and writer. Die Zeit calls him "the most prominent German writing Science Fiction author". He is also one of the important early computer artists , creating computer graphics and early digital art since the late 1950s. Franke was also active in the fields of future research as well as speleology. He used his pen name Sergius Both as this Avatar name in Active Worlds and Opensimulator grids. The Sergius Both Award is given for creative scripting in Immersionskunst by Stiftung Kunstinformatik, first time issued at Amerika Art 2022.

#3259

Hans Larsson

1862 - 1944 (82 years)

Hans Larsson was a Swedish Professor of Philosophy at Lund University, Sweden and a Member of the Swedish Academy , chair no. 15. He was known in Sweden as Kloke-Hans . Prof. Larsson was a humanist and an author. He was also a mentor for several Swedish authors and a prominent essayist.

#3260

Donald S. Fredrickson

#57787

Overall Influence

#3261

Jeffrey L. Saver

#57801

Overall Influence

#3262

Nalin de Silva

#15359

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Thakurartha Devadithya Guardiyawasam Lindamulage Nalin Kumara de Silva is a Sri Lankan philosopher and a political analyst. He is the former Sri Lankan ambassador in Myanmar. He was a professor in the department of mathematics, a member of University Grant Commission and the dean of the faculty of science at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.

#3263

Pierre Aubenque

#42787

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Pierre Aubenque was a French philosopher. He was strongly focused on Aristotle. Biography Aubenque was a student at the École normale supérieure in Paris and earned his Agrégation in philosophy in 1950. He became an assistant professor at the University of Montpellier, then a professor at the University of Franche-Comté and Aix-Marseille University. In 1969, he began teaching philosophy at Sorbonne University. He also wrote many works published by Éditions Beauchesne.

#3264

Ioane Petritsi

1050 - 1200 (150 years)

Ioane Petritsi also referred as John Petritsi was a Georgian Neoplatonist philosopher of the 11th-12th century, active in the Byzantine Empire and Kingdom of Georgia, best known for his translations of Proclus, along with an extensive commentary. In later sources, he is also referred to as Ioane Chimchimeli . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Petritsi as "the most significant Georgian medieval philosopher" and the "most widely read Georgian philosopher."

#3265

Thierry of Chartres

Thierry of Chartres

1100 - 1155 (55 years)

Thierry of Chartres or Theodoric the Breton was a twelfth-century philosopher working at Chartres and Paris, France. The cathedral school at Chartres promoted scholarship before the first university was founded in France. Thierry was a major figure in twelfth-century philosophy and learning, and, like many twelfth-century scholars, is notable for his embrace of Plato's Timaeus and his application of philosophy to theological issues. Some modern scholars believed Thierry to have been a brother of Bernard of Chartres who had founded the school of Chartres, but later research has shown that th...

#3266

Volker Halbach

#47818

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Volker Halbach is a German logician and philosopher. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and epistemology, with a focus on formal theories of truth. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, Tutorial Fellow of New College, Oxford.

#3267

Richard Gregg

1885 - 1974 (89 years)

Richard Bartlett Gregg was an American social philosopher said to be "the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance" based on the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and so influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., Aldous Huxley, civil-rights theorist Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and socialist reformer Jessie Wallace Hughan, and the Peace Pledge Union.

#3268

Ivo Urbančič

#30081

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Ivo Urbančič was a Slovenian philosopher. He is considered by many to be one of the fathers of the phenomenological school in Slovenia. Biography Born Ivan Urbančič in Robič near Kobarid, in what was then the Italian administrative region of Julian March to a peasant Slovene family, his family left the region when he was a child to escape Fascist persecution and moved to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

#3269

Ramchandra Gandhi

#33463

Overall Influence

1937 - 2007 (70 years)

Ramchandra Gandhi was an Indian philosopher. He was a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of Devdas Gandhi and Lakshmi and also brother of Rajmohan Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.

#3270

Roger Unger

#47151

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Roger H. Unger was an American physician known for his studies of the physiology of pancreatic islets. In particular the elucidation of the roles of insulin and glucagon in the regulation of normal blood glucose homeostasis and in the pathogenesis of diabetes, and the establishment of glucagon as a hormone. He was the Touchstone/West Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

#3271

Alison Stone

#45888

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Alison Stone is a British philosopher. She is a Professor of European Philosophy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. Career Stone has a D.Phil. from the University of Sussex on Hegel and feminist philosophy, and before joining Lancaster University in 2002 she held a temporary lectureship and a research fellowship at Cambridge University.

#3272

Johan Braeckman

Johan Braeckman

#25755

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Johan Braeckman is a Flemish philosopher. He is professor in philosophy at the University of Ghent and taught at various other institutions e.g. University of Amsterdam. He is editor of the skeptical organisation SKEPP's magazine Wonder en is gheen Wonder. His research, conducted along with a dozen doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, focuses on the philosophical problems associated with the life sciences, in particular the evolutionary theory and neuroscience.

#3273

Nick Trakakis

#34856

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Nick Trakakis is an Australian philosopher who is Assistant Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion of the Australian Catholic University. He has previously taught at Monash University and Deakin University, and during 2006–2007 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. He works mainly at the intersections of philosophy , religion, and theology.

#3274

Susan Hurley

#20173

Overall Influence

1954 - 2007 (53 years)

Susan Lynn Hurley was appointed professor in the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick in 1994, professor of philosophy at Bristol University from 2006 and the first woman fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She wrote on practical philosophy as well as on philosophy of mind, bringing these disciplines closer together. Her work draws on sources from the social sciences as well as the neurosciences, and can be broadly characterised as both naturalistic and interdisciplinary.

#3275

Johan Jakob Borelius

Johan Jakob Borelius

1823 - 1909 (86 years)

Johan Jakob Borelius was an influential professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Lund, Sweden from 1866 to 1898. He has been called "The Last Swedish Hegelian." Borelius was born in Skinnskatteberg. He obtained his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1848, afterward becoming a teacher in Kalmar, while he continued his studies under Christopher Jacob Boström. His overall philosophy is laid out in his work Metafysik , not published in full until after his death.

#3276

Arto Haapala

#51765

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Arto Haapala is a Finnish philosopher, aesthetician and Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies at Helsinki University, Finland. Haapala received his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 1985. He is also active in the work of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics and the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics in Lahti, Finland.

#3277

William Seager

#28487

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

William Edward Seager is a Canadian philosopher. Now retired, he spent his career as a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His academic specialties lie in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.

#3278

Rebecca Roache

#47294

Overall Influence

Rebecca Roache is a British philosopher and Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, known for her work on the philosophy of language, practical ethics and philosophy of mind. She is particularly noted for her work on swearing, which has featured in various media, such as the BBC.

#3279

Pakudha Kaccayana

#11460

Overall Influence

was an Indian teacher and philosopher who lived around the 6th century BCE, contemporaneous with Mahavira and the Buddha. He was an atomist who believed in atomism which believed that everything is made of seven eternal elements – earth, water, fire, air, happiness, pain and soul.

#3280

Aleksander Świętochowski

Aleksander Świętochowski

1849 - 1938 (89 years)

Aleksander Świętochowski was a Polish writer, educator, and philosopher of the Positivist period that followed the January 1863 Uprising. He was widely regarded as the prophet of Polish Positivism, spreading in the Warsaw press the gospel of scientific inquiry, education, economic development, and equality of rights for all, without regard to sex, class, ethnic origin or beliefs. His was a nuanced vision, however, that took account of the shortcomings of human nature; like H.G. Wells, he advocated that power in society be wielded by the most enlightened among its members.

#3281

Ruth Nanda Anshen

1900 - 2003 (103 years)

Ruth Nanda Anshen was an American philosopher, author and editor. She was the author of several books including The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of An Idea, Morals Equals Manners and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival.

#3282

Josep Trueta

1897 - 1977 (80 years)

Josep Trueta i Raspall was a Catalan surgeon and researcher from Spain. Biography As a Catalan nationalist, he fled into exile to England after the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been the chief of trauma services for the main hospital in Barcelona. In 1939 a booklet of his, first published in Catalan, was published in English as Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures, with special reference to the Closed Method as used in the war in Spain, in London. His work was noted and accepted by the British RAMC, thus influencing British Army medical practice. During World War II, he helped to organize medical emergency services.

#3283

Gerhard Dorn

1530 - 1584 (54 years)

Gerhard Dorn was a Belgian philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile. Biography The details of Gerhard Dorn's early life, along with those of many other 16th century personalities, are lost to history. It is known that he was born about 1530 in Mechelen, which is part of modern-day Belgium's Antwerp Province. He studied with Adam von Bodenstein, to whom his first book is dedicated and began publishing books from around 1565. He used John Dee's personal glyph from his 1564 book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, on the title page of his Chymisticum artificium.

#3284

Joseph Koterski

#39490

Overall Influence

1953 - 2021 (68 years)

Joseph Koterski, S.J. was an American Jesuit priest, philosopher, author, and professor at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. Biography In 1976, Koterski graduated with a H.A.B. degree in Classics from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1980, he earned a M.A. from Saint Louis University with a thesis titled Aristotle's Ethics and Reflective Equilibrium, and then two years later a Ph.D. from the same school, while there on a Danforth Fellowship. His dissertation, mentored by James Collins, was titled Truth and Freedom in Karl Jasper’s Philosophy of Science.

#3285

Raziel Abelson

#42920

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Raziel Abelson was an American academic. He served as Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at New York University and was a proponent of the Ordinary Language School of Philosophy. Biography He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Rabbi Alter Abelson and Anna Goldina Schwartz. His brother was the playwright Lionel Abel .

#3286

Vicente Ferreira da Silva

Vicente Ferreira da Silva

1916 - 1963 (47 years)

Vicente Ferreira da Silva was a Brazilian logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He was one of first men in Brazil history to write and have published an academic book in logic and Phenomenology.

#3287

Brion Gysin

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin ...

#3288

Marc de Vries

#26156

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

M.J. de Vries , is professor of Reformational Philosophy at the Delft University of Technology. Biography Marc de Vries studied physics at the Free University of Amsterdam and graduated in 1982 on the subject: dissolving problems in physical education. In 1988 he got his promotion at the Eindhoven University of Technology on the subject: technology in physical education.

#3289

Karel Reisz

#4203

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker and film critic, one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in British cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the best-known films he directed are Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , a classic of kitchen sink realism, and the romantic period drama The French Lieutenant's Woman .

#3290

Alexander Bird

#31223

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Alexander James Bird is a British philosopher and Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Career In 2020, Bird was elected to the Bertrand Russell Professorship of Philosophy, succeeding Huw Price. Previously he was Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at King's College London and the professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol . Bird was lecturer then reader and head of department at the University of Edinburgh . Bird has also taught at Dartmouth College and at Saint Louis University and was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

#3291

Günther Jakobs

#7954

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Günther Jakobs , is a German jurist, specializing in criminal law, criminal procedural law and philosophy of law. Jakobs studied legal sciences in Cologne, Kiel and Bonn, and in 1967 he graduated from the University of Bonn with a thesis on criminal law and competition doctrine.

#3292

Allen Forte

#4773

Overall Influence

1926 - 2014 (88 years)

Allen Forte was an American music theorist and musicologist. He was Battell Professor Emeritus of the Theory of Music at Yale University and specialized in 20th-century atonal music and music analysis.

#3293

Richard Blyton Devereux

#58480

Overall Influence

#3294

Marilyn Friedman

#39279

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Marilyn Ann Friedman is an American philosopher. She holds the W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Education In 1967, she received an A.B. in political science from Washington University in St. Louis. In 1968, she moved to Canada for political reasons and resided there for a decade. By 1974 she received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. In 1964, while Friedman was taking a year off from college, she was persuaded by what she refers to as "a kind of political ignorance and apathy" by political chaos.

#3295

Julius Moravcsik

#39230

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Julius Matthew Emil Moravcsik was a Hungarian-American philosopher who specialized in ancient Greek philosophy. His main professional interests were in Greek philosophy – especially Plato, Aristotle, and the pre-Socratic philosophers. He also made important contributions to the philosophy of language, aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics. In particular, he was engaged by the notion of friendship.

#3296

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

#16306

Overall Influence

1913 - 1994 (81 years)

Nicolás Gómez Dávila was a Colombian conservative philosopher and aphorist. Gómez Dávila's fame began to spread only in the last few years before his death, particularly by way of German translations of his works. He was one of the most radical critics of modernity whose work consists almost entirely of aphorisms which he called "escolios" .

#3297

Louise Michel

1830 - 1905 (75 years)

Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.

#3298

Dan Flavin

#7378

Overall Influence

1933 - 1996 (63 years)

Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Early life and career Daniel Nicholas Flavin Jr. was born in Jamaica, New York, of Irish Catholic descent, and was sent to Catholic schools. He studied for the priesthood at the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn between 1947 and 1952 before leaving to join his twin brother, David John Flavin, and enlist in the United States Air Force.

#3299

Howard Thurman

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

Howard Washington Thurman was an American author, philosopher, theologian, mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.

#3300

Jules de Gaultier

1858 - 1942 (84 years)

Jules de Gaultier , born Jules Achille de Gaultier de Laguionie, was a French philosopher and essayist. He was a contributor to Mercure de France and one of the chief advocates of "nietzscheism" in vogue in the literary circles of the day. He was known especially for his theory of "bovarysme" , by which he meant the continual need of humans to invent themselves, to lie to themselves. His books include De Kant à Nietzsche and Le Bovarysme, essai sur le pouvoir d'imaginer .

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