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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,

#3401

Robert FitzRoy

1805 - 1865 (60 years)

Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, FitzRoy's second expedition to Tierra del Fuego and the Southern Cone.

#3402

Cezary Wodziński

#48875

Overall Influence

1959 - 2016 (57 years)

Cezary Wodziński was a Polish philosopher, historian of philosophy, essayist, translator, and writer. He was a lecturer at Jagiellonian University in Cracow and at the University of Warsaw . Biography

#3403

Margaret Masterman

1910 - 1986 (76 years)

Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.

#3404

Andy Blunden

#42768

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Andy Blunden is an Australian historian, writer, and Marxist philosopher based in Melbourne. Biography Blunden is a member and secretary of the Marxists Internet Archive Collective , a website which contains many Marxist and Marxist related text on history, philosophy and politics along with many other topics.

#3405

Ramón Xirau

#17658

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Ramón Xirau Subías was a Spanish-born Mexican poet, philosopher and literary critic. In 1939, as the Spanish civil war was coming to an end, Xirau emigrated to Mexico where he obtained Mexican citizenship in 1955. He obtained a Master's Degree in philosophy at the UNAM and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de las Américas. He was a research faculty member of the UNAM y and the National System of Researchers. At the UNAM he taught at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and did research at the Institute of Philosophy Research. He was a member of the Colegio Nacional since 1973.

#3406

Francis Daniels Moore

#15074

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Francis Daniels Moore was an American surgeon who was a pioneer in numerous experimental surgical treatments. Among his many achievements, he refined burn-treatment techniques, helped perform the world's first successful organ transplant , and accurately determined the volume of water and other nutrients in the human body using radioactive isotopes of those substances.

#3407

David Kyle Johnson

#20938

Overall Influence

David Kyle Johnson is a Professor of Philosophy at King's College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He specializes in logic, metaphysics, free will, and philosophy of religion. Early life Johnson was born in Guymon, Oklahoma in 1977.

#3408

Peter Lamarque

#48163

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Peter Vaudreuil Lamarque is a British aesthethician and philosopher of art, working in the analytic tradition. Since 2000, he has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York. He is known primarily for his work in philosophy of literature and on the role of emotions in fiction.

#3409

Naveed Sattar

#51412

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Naveed Amjid Sattar is a Scottish medical researcher and Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the Institute of Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow, as well as an Honorary Consultant in Metabolic Medicine at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He was described by the BBC as "a leading expert in diabetes and cardio-vascular disease research". He has been an ISI Highly Cited Researcher since 2014. In 2016, he was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow,...

#3410

Ladislav Hejdánek

Ladislav Hejdánek

#20067

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Ladislav Hejdánek was a Czech philosopher and a proponent of Charter 77. He was born in Prague and graduated from the Charles University in Prague. In 1952 he attained a degree in philosophy with his dissertation "Truth and its ontological premises". From 1956 to 1968 he worked at the Prague Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. Then he took a position at the Institute for Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, but was expelled in 1971.

#3411

Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire

Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire

1805 - 1895 (90 years)

Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire was a French philosopher, journalist, statesman, and possible illegitimate son of Napoleon I of France. Biography Jules was born in Paris. Marie Belloc Lowndes, in the second volume of her autobiography Where Love and Friendship Dwelt , made claims regarding his paternity. He was reportedly ashamed of and did not talk about it. Lowndes did not say who his mother was.

#3412

Gáspár Miklós Tamás

#36664

Overall Influence

1948 - 2023 (75 years)

Gáspár Miklós Tamás , often referred to as TGM, was a Romanian-born Hungarian political philosopher and public intellectual, influenced by Marxism and libertarian socialism. He was a contributor to online newspaper Mérce and to OpenDemocracy, where he wrote primarily about political and aesthetic questions. He was the father of British poet and writer Rebecca Tamás.

#3413

Arash Abizadeh

#28262

Overall Influence

Arash Abizadeh is an Iranian-Canadian philosopher and Professor at the Department of Political Science and Associate Member of the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. He is known for his expertise on democratic theory and Thomas Hobbes. He is a recipient of Rhodes Scholarship .

#3414

Heiner Bielefeldt

Heiner Bielefeldt

#12524

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Heiner Bielefeldt is a German philosopher, historian and Catholic theologian. He is Professor of Human Rights and Human Rights Policy at the University of Erlangen. From 2010 to 2016, he served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief.

#3415

Ian Mitroff

#12387

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Ian Irving Mitroff is an American organizational theorist, consultant and professor emeritus at the USC Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California He is noted for a wide range of contributions in the field of organizational theory from contributions on strategic planning assumptions and management information systems, to the subjective side of the workplace and spirituality, religion, and values.

#3416

Yoram Hazony

#10915

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Yoram Reuben Hazony is an Israeli-American philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He has argued for national conservatism in his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism and 2020's Conservatism: A Rediscovery.

#3417

Penelope Deutscher

#42208

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Penelope Deutscher is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University whose work focuses on French philosophy from the 20th and 21st centuries and gender theory. She has written four books dealing with subjects ranging from gender and feminism to the works of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Simone de Beauvoir. In 2002–2003, Deutscher also served as the Lane Professor for the Humanities at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University.

#3418

Thomas Wharton Jones

Thomas Wharton Jones

1808 - 1891 (83 years)

Thomas Wharton Jones was an eminent ophthalmologist and physiologist of the 19th century. Biography Jones's father was Richard Jones, a native of London. Richard Jones had moved north to St. Andrews and was working with Her Majesty's Customs for Scotland when Thomas Wharton Jones was born in January 1808. Jones grew up in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. From 1827 to 1829, he was an assistant to Robert Knox, a lecturer on anatomy at Edinburgh. Around Christmas of 1827, while working for Knox, he purchased a body from William Hare on Knox's behalf, paying £7 10s to Hare.

#3419

Arthur Earl Walker

#13003

Overall Influence

1907 - 1995 (88 years)

Arthur Earl Walker was a Canadian-born American neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and epileptologist remembered for the eponymous syndromes Dandy–Walker syndrome, Dandy–Walker-like syndrome and Walker–Warburg syndrome. During his career he published over 400 research articles and 8 books.

#3420

Marian Massonius

1862 - 1945 (83 years)

Piotr Marian Massonius was a Polish philosopher and teacher who was born into in the Russian Empire. Life Massonius studied law at the Warsaw University and then abroad, where he took up philosophical and pedagogical studies at various German universities, mainly in Leipzig. He became one of the representatives of the Warsaw school of Positivism who formed a common front against Messianism together with the Polish Neo-Kantians.

#3421

Milton Packer

#60680

Overall Influence

#3422

Louis Arnaud Reid

1895 - 1986 (91 years)

Louis Arnaud Reid was a British philosopher who held the foundation chair in Philosophy of Education at the London University Institute of Education. He was a founding contributor to the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is best known for his writings on epistemology and aesthetics. He influenced figures as diverse as Susanne Langer, Lionel Trilling and Harold Osborne. Jacques Barzun said that Reid's book A Study in Aesthetics was "the best discussion of art yet produced in our century."

#3423

Bronisław Baczko

Bronisław Baczko

#43097

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Bronisław Baczko was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. Together with Leszek Kołakowski, he was a leading figure in the Warsaw School of the history of ideas in the late 1950s and 1960s.

#3424

Arthur David Ritchie

1891 - 1967 (76 years)

Arthur David Ritchie FRSE was a British chemical physiologist and philosopher. Life He was born Oxford on 22 June 1891 the son of Prof David George Ritchie. The family moved to St Andrews in 1894 when his father was given a new professorship there.

#3425

Nicholas Griffin

#37696

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Nicholas John Griffin is a retired Canadian-based philosopher. He was Director of the Bertrand Russell Centre at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy.

#3426

Thomas Abbt

1738 - 1766 (28 years)

Thomas Abbt was a German mathematician and writer. Biography Born in Ulm as the son of a wig-maker, Abbt visited a secondary school in Ulm, then moved in 1756 to study theology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Halle, receiving a Magister degree in 1758. In 1760 he was appointed as an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt , where he wrote his most well-known work Vom Tode für's Vaterland .

#3427

Radomir Konstantinović

Radomir Konstantinović

#36699

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Radomir Konstantinović was Serbian writer and philosopher. His most famous work is a philosophical treatise "Filosofija palanke" . He won the prestigious literary NIN Award in 1960 for the novel "Izlazak" .

#3428

Oskar Kraus

1872 - 1942 (70 years)

Oskar Kraus was a Czech philosopher and jurist. Life Oskar Kraus, who converted from the Jewish to the Protestant faith, was born in Prague, the son of Hermann Kraus and Clara Reitler-Eidlitz. In 1899 he married Bertha Chitz.

#3429

Aaron L. Mackler

#32307

Overall Influence

Aaron L. Mackler is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and an ordained Conservative Rabbi. He is an author in the fields of bioethics and Jewish law. He was editor of Life and Death Responsibilities in Jewish Biomedical Ethics and authored Introduction to Jewish and Catholic Bioethics, part of the Georgetown Press Moral Traditions series.

#3430

Sam Gillespie

#39883

Overall Influence

1970 - 2003 (33 years)

Sam Gillespie was a philosopher with a particular interest in the work of Alain Badiou, a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure who wrote about being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Gillespie was described by Joan Copjec as "one of the most gifted and promising philosophers of his generation". He was a co-founder of the academic journal Umbr. Gillespie's book The Mathematics of Novelty was published posthumously in 2008. Peter Hallward wrote that "This tremendously valuable...

#3431

František Listopad

#34775

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

František Listopad was a Czech poet, prose writer, essayist, theatre and television director, promoter of Czech literature and culture abroad, regarded as an expert on Central European thought and cultural output.

#3432

Zhang Shenfu

1893 - 1986 (93 years)

Zhang Shenfu , born Zhang Songnian , courtesy name Shenfu , was a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, a philosopher, and a political activist. Zhang was born on June 15, 1893, in Xiaoduo village, Zhili . His father, Zhang Liangong, was a senior official. In 1912, Zhang enrolled at Middle School Affiliated to Senior Normal School in Beiping . He later enrolled at Peking University to study philosophy and math in 1914. After graduating, Zhang started to lecture at Peking University, as well as assisting the work of university librarian Li Dazhao. When the Chinese Communist Party was founded...

#3433

Louis Mink

1921 - 1983 (62 years)

Louis O. Mink Jr. was a philosopher of history whose works challenged early philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood and were part of a postmodern dialogue on history and historical narrative with other philosophers of history, like Hayden White and Georg Lukács. Mink and White were responsible for what would later be called the "linguistic turn" in philosophy of history.

#3434

Richard Schickel

Richard Schickel

#2658

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Richard Warren Schickel was an American film historian, journalist, author, documentarian, and film and literary critic. He was a film critic for Time magazine from 1965–2010, and also wrote for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His last writings about film were for Truthdig.

#3435

Henri Grenier

1899 - 1980 (81 years)

Henri Grenier was a French Canadian priest, theologian, and philosopher. He was the author of a manual of Thomistic philosophy, once widely used in Roman Catholic seminaries. Life Grenier was born in Gaspé, Quebec, and ordained for the diocese of Gaspé in 1924. He studied philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome , and at the major seminary in Gaspé . From 1927-1930 he studied theology at the Angelicum and Canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University. He held doctorates in philosophy, theology, and canon law. From 1930 to 1947 he was professor of theology at the seminary of Québec. In 1938 he was incardinated in the diocese of Québec.

#3436

Sabina Leonelli

#34424

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sabina Leonelli is a philosopher of science and professor at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She is well known for her work on scientific practices, data-centric science, and open science policies. She was awarded the 2018 Lakatos award for her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study .

#3437

Gillian Rose

#25662

Overall Influence

1947 - 1995 (48 years)

Gillian Rosemary Rose was a British philosopher and writer. Rose held the chair of social and political thought at the University of Warwick until 1995. Rose began her teaching career at the University of Sussex. She worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Her writings include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso, amongst others.

#3438

Nemesius

350 - 420 (70 years)

Nemesius of Emesa was a Christian philosopher, and the author of a treatise Περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου or De natura hominis . According to the title of his book, he was the Bishop of Emesa . His book is an attempt to compile a system of anthropology from the standpoint of Christian philosophy; it was very influential in later Greek, Arabic and Christian thought.

#3439

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

#6612

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen is a professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the author of many works on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and hypnosis. Born to Danish parents, he began his studies in France and emigrated to the United States in 1986. His constructivist analysis of the co-production of psychical "facts" emphasises the accuracy of historical accounts of mental disorders.

#3440

José María Mainetti

#22313

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

José María Mainetti was an Argentine physician, surgeon and oncologist. Mainetti was born in Hinojo, Buenos Aires. He spent most of his childhood and youth in La Plata, were his family moved in 1911. He finished his medicine studies in 1932. Since 1940 he started working also as a professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata.

#3441

Michael Bordt

#47814

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Michael Bordt SJ is a German philosopher and academic. He is a professor at the Munich School of Philosophy and specialized in the area of ancient philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. Since 2011 he has been the chair of the Institute of Philosophy and Leadership at Munich.

#3442

Bence Nanay

#32845

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Bence Nanay is Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp and has worked as a film critic. He is co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

#3443

Quintus Sextius

50 BC - 100 BC (-50 years)

Quintus Sextius the Elder was a Roman philosopher, whose philosophy combined Pythagoreanism with Stoicism. Seneca frequently praised him. Life Sextius was born no later than 70 BC. He founded a school of philosophy combining some features of the Pythagoreans with others of the Stoics; and which was consequently classed sometimes with one, and sometimes with the other of those sects. Seneca describes Sextius as a Stoic but mentions that Sextius himself denied it. From the Epistles of Seneca we learn that Sextius, though born of an illustrious family, had declined the office of Senator when offered him by Julius Caesar.

#3444

Benedikt Löwe

#41445

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Benedikt Löwe is a German mathematician and logician working at the universities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Cambridge. He is known for his work on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics, as well as for initiating the interdisciplinary conference series Foundations of the Formal Sciences and Computability in Europe .

#3445

Nestor Makhno

1888 - 1934 (46 years)

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno , also known as Bat'ko Makhno , was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian Civil War. He established the Makhnovshchina , a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown, Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine.

#3446

Erich Neumann

1905 - 1960 (55 years)

Erich Neumann was a German psychologist, philosopher, writer, and student of Carl Jung. Life and career Neumann was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1927 and then continued to study medicine at the University of Berlin, where he acquired his first degree in medicine in 1933. In 1934 Neumann and his wife Julie, who had been Zionists since they were teenagers, spurred on by fear of persecution of Jews by the Nazi government, moved to Tel Aviv. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C.

#3447

Victor Babeș

1854 - 1926 (72 years)

Victor Babeș was a Romanian physician, bacteriologist, academician and professor. One of the founders of modern microbiology, Victor Babeș is author of one of the first treatises of bacteriology in the world – Bacteria and their role in pathological anatomy and histology of infectious diseases, written in collaboration with French scientist Victor André Cornil in 1885. In 1888, Babeș underlies the principle of passive immunity, and a few years later enunciates the principle of antibiosis. He made early and significant contributions to the study of rabies, leprosy, diphtheria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

#3448

Antoine Louis

1723 - 1792 (69 years)

Antoine Louis was an 18th-century French surgeon and physiologist. He was originally trained in medicine by his father, a sergeant major at a local military hospital. As a young man he moved to Paris, where he served as gagnant-maîtrise at the Salpêtrière. In 1750 he was appointed professor of physiology, a position he held for 40 years. In 1764 he was appointed lifetime secretary to the Académie Royale de Chirurgie.

#3449

Robert S. Hartman

1910 - 1973 (63 years)

Robert Schirokauer Hartman was a German-American logician and philosopher. His primary field of study was scientific axiology and he is known as its original theorist. His axiology is the basis of the Hartman Value Inventory

#3450

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

#10669

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Philippe-Joseph Salazar , a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on 10 February 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco. Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. In 2015 he received a presti...

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