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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#351

Peter Marshall

#4736

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter Hugh Marshall is an English author of over a dozen works of philosophy, history, biography, travel writing, and poetry. He is best known for his 1991 history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, and his 1984 biography of William Godwin.

#352

Pamela Sue Anderson

#8144

Overall Influence

1955 - 2017 (62 years)

Pamela Sue Anderson was an American philosopher who specialized in philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy and continental philosophy. In 2007 she was an Official Fellow, Tutor in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Dean, and Women's Advisor of Regent's Park College in the University of Oxford. Her former students include feminist philosopher Hanneke Canters.

#353

Frans H. van Eemeren

#4256

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Frans Hendrik van Eemeren is a Dutch scholar, professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. He is noted for his Pragma-dialectics theory, an argumentation theory which he developed with Rob Grootendorst from the early 1980s onwards. He has published numerous books and papers, including Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse.

#354

Michael Ruse

#2018

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. Ruse currently teaches at Florida State University.

#355

Mark Poster

#3496

Overall Influence

1941 - 2012 (71 years)

Mark Poster was Professor Emeritus of History and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he also taught in the Critical Theory Emphasis. He was pivotal to "bringing French critical theory to the U.S., and went on to analyse contemporary media."

#356

Dallas Willard

#3946

Overall Influence

1935 - 2013 (78 years)

Dallas Albert Willard was an American philosopher also known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. Much of his work in philosophy was related to phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, many of whose writings he translated into English for the first time.

#357

Jesse Prinz

#1842

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jesse J. Prinz is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and Director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

#358

Keith Yandell

#8167

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Keith Edward Yandell was a philosopher of religion who became notable by his teaching and his writings. Teaching Yandell began teaching in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1966. He had become the Julius R. Weinberg Professor of Philosophy when he retired in 2011.

#359

A.C. Grayling

#3953

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

#360

John Lachs

#7727

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

John Lachs was a Hungarian-born American philosopher. He was Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, where he began teaching in 1967. Lachs received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1961. His primary focus was on American philosophy and German Idealism.

#361

Mary Anne Warren

#9110

Overall Influence

1946 - 2010 (64 years)

Mary Anne Warren was an American writer and philosophy professor, noted for her writings on the issue of abortion and animal rights. Biography Warren was a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University for many years. Her essays have sometimes been required readings in academic courses dealing with the abortion debate and they are frequently cited in major publications like Peter Singer's The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature and Bernard Gert's Bioethics: A Systematic Approach. She was sometimes described as a feminist, largely due to her pro-choice writings.

#362

Julia Annas

#9265

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Julia Elizabeth Annas is a British philosopher who has taught in the United States for the last quarter-century. She is Regents Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Arizona. Education and career Annas graduated from Oxford University in 1968 with a B.A. and from Harvard University with an A.M. and a Ph.D. . She was a Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh's College, Oxford for fifteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1986, where she taught until her retirement, apart for one year as a professor at Columbia University.

#363

Eugenio Garin

#5091

Overall Influence

1909 - 2004 (95 years)

Eugenio Garin was an Italian philosopher and Renaissance historian. He was recognised as an authority on the cultural history of the Renaissance. Born at Rieti, Garin studied philosophy at the University of Florence, graduating in 1929, and after a period as professor of philosophy at the liceo scientifico Stanislao Cannizzaro in Palermo and the University of Cagliari, Garin began teaching at his alma mater in 1949 until 1974, then moving to the Scuola Normale di Pisa until his retirement in 1984. The Graduate School of Historical Studies at San Marino was inaugurated with a public lecture by Eugenio Garin on 30 September 1989.

#364

Richard Sylvan

#9893

Overall Influence

1935 - 1996 (61 years)

Richard Sylvan was a New Zealand–born philosopher, logician, and environmentalist. Biography Sylvan was born Francis Richard Routley in Levin, New Zealand, and his early work is cited with this surname. He studied at Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand , and then Princeton University, before taking positions successively at several Australian institutions, including the University of Sydney. From 1971 until his death in Bali, Indonesia, he was a fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra.

#365

Stanley Rosen

#6014

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Stanley Rosen was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.

#366

David Abram

#2635

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World , for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics ; his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as the online magazine Emergence, Or...

#367

John M. Dillon

#5548

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Myles Dillon is an Irish classicist and philosopher who was Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin between 1980 and 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens on 15 June 2010. Dillon's area of research lies in the history of Platonism from the Old Academy to the Renaissance, and also Early Christianity.

#368

Michael Tye

#9389

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Michael Tye is a British philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind. Education and career Tye completed his undergraduate education at Oxford University in England, studying first physics and then physics and philosophy. He went on to complete a PhD in philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Before moving to Texas, Tye taught at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia and Temple University in Philadelphia proper. He was also a visiting professor at King's Co...

#369

Francisco J. Ayala

Francisco J. Ayala

#2009

Overall Influence

1934 - 2023 (89 years)

Francisco José Ayala Pereda was a Spanish-American evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and Catholic priest who was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, Davis.

#370

Keith Donnellan

#8415

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Keith Sedgwick Donnellan was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Donnellan contributed to the philosophy of language, notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions. He criticized Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions for overlooking the distinction between referential and attributive use of definite descriptions.

#371

Julian Baggini

#4553

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Julian Baggini is a philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine and has written for numerous international newspapers and magazines. In addition to writing on the subject of philosophy he has also written books on atheism, secularism and the nature of national identity. He is a patron of Humanists UK.

#372

Nigel Warburton

#3586

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Nigel Warburton is a British philosopher. He is best known as a populariser of philosophy, having written a number of books in the genre, but he has also written academic works in aesthetics and applied ethics.

#373

Owen Flanagan

#3320

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus at Duke University. Flanagan has done work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, ethics, contemporary ethical theory, moral psychology, as well as on cross-cultural philosophy.

#374

Catherine Malabou

#3218

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.

#375

John Etchemendy

John Etchemendy

#3794

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

John W. Etchemendy is an American logician and philosopher who served as Stanford University's twelfth Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000 and stepped down on January 31, 2017.

#376

Damien Keown

#1993

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Damien Keown is a British academic, bioethicist, and authority on Buddhist bioethics. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Keown earned a B.A. in religious studies from the University of Lancaster in 1977 and a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 1986.

#377

Alice Crary

#7595

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K. .

#378

Eugene Braunwald

Eugene Braunwald

#5403

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Eugene Braunwald is an Austrian-born American cardiologist. Early life Braunwald was born to Jewish parents Wilhelm Braunwald and Clara Wallach in Vienna. He obtained his A.B. and M.D. at New York University, then completed his residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

#379

Milan Kangrga

#7869

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Milan Kangrga was a Croatian and Yugoslav philosopher who was one of the leading thinkers in the Praxis School of thought which originated in the 1960s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

#380

Brian Leftow

#8118

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Brian Leftow is an American philosopher specializing in philosophy of religion, medieval philosophy, and metaphysics. He is the William P. Alston Professor for the Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University. Previously, he held the Nolloth Chair of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oriel College, Oxford, succeeding Richard Swinburne.

#381

Colin McGinn

#4019

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami. McGinn is best known for his work in philosophy of mind, and in particular for what is known as new mysterianism, the idea that the human mind is not equipped to solve the problem of consciousness. He has written over 20 books on this and other areas of philosophy, including The Character of Mind , The Problem of Consciousness , Consciousness and Its Objects , and The Meaning of Disgust .

#382

Robert Todd Carroll

Robert Todd Carroll

#721

Overall Influence

1945 - 2016 (71 years)

Robert Todd Carroll was an American author, philosopher and academic, best known for The Skeptic's Dictionary. He described himself as a naturalist, an atheist, a materialist, a metaphysical libertarian, and a positivist. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He was a professor of philosophy at Sacramento City College from 1977 until his retirement in 2007.

#383

Thomas Pogge

#2101

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. In addition to his Yale appointment, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire's Centre for Professional Ethics. Pogge is also an editor for social and politic...

#384

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

#3530

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator. Lacoue-Labarthe published several influential works with his friend Jean-Luc Nancy. Lacoue-Labarthe was influenced by and wrote extensively on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, German Romanticism, Paul Celan, and Gérard Granel. He also translated works by Heidegger, Celan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Walter Benjamin into French.

#385

Frederick C. Beiser

#6991

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Frederick Charles Beiser is an American philosopher who is professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is one of the leading English-language scholars of German idealism. In addition to his writings on German idealism, Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research in 1994, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.

#386

Robert Kane

#6474

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Robert Hilary Kane is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently on phased retirement. He is the author of Free Will and Values , Through the Moral Maze , and The Significance of Free Will . He also edited the Oxford Handbook of Free Will and has published many articles in the philosophy of mind and action, ethics, the theory of values and philosophy of religion.

#387

Claude Lefort

#2397

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Claude Lefort was a French philosopher and activist. He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty . By 1943 he was organising a faction of the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris.

#388

Jonathan Bennett

#7722

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Jonathan Francis Bennett is a philosopher of language and metaphysics, specialist of Kant's philosophy and a historian of early modern philosophy. He has New Zealand citizenship by birth and has since acquired UK and Canadian citizenship.

#389

Oliver Feltham

#4285

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Oliver Feltham is an Australian philosopher and translator working in Paris, France. He is known primarily for his English translations of Alain Badiou, most notably Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event . Feltham's own writings are drawn from many of his research interests including Marxism, critical theory, and the history of metaphysics. His recent work has also focused on psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan.

#390

Arthur Caplan

#2641

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Arthur L. Caplan is an American ethicist and professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. He is known for his contributions to the U.S. public policy, including: helping to found the National Marrow Donor Program; creating the policy of required request in cadaver organ donation adopted throughout the United States; helping to create the system for distributing organs in the U.S.; and advising on the content of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, rules governing living organ donation, and legislation and regulation in many other areas of health care includ...

#391

Nancy Cartwright

Nancy Cartwright

#4152

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire, is an American philosopher of science. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. Currently, she is the President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

#392

Richard Jeffrey

#6779

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Richard Carl Jeffrey was an American philosopher, logician, and probability theorist. He is best known for developing and championing the philosophy of radical probabilism and the associated heuristic of probability kinematics, also known as Jeffrey conditioning.

#393

John Lucas

#2725

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

John Randolph Lucas was a British philosopher. Biography Lucas was educated at Winchester College and then, as a pupil of R.M. Hare, among others, at Balliol College, Oxford. He studied first mathematics, then Greats , obtaining first class honours in both. He sat for Finals in 1951, and took his MA in 1954. He spent the 1957–58 academic year at Princeton University, studying mathematics and logic. For 36 years, until his 1996 retirement, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford, and he remained an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy. He was a Fellow of the Bri...

#394

Peter Railton

#9827

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Albert Railton is an American philosopher who is Gregory S. Kavka Distinguished University Professor and John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he has taught since 1979.

#395

Ludovico Geymonat

#7922

Overall Influence

1908 - 1991 (83 years)

Ludovico Geymonat was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and historian of science. As a philosopher, he mainly dealt with philosophy of science, epistemology and Marxist philosophy, in which he gave an original turn to dialectical materialism.

#396

Manfred Frank

#6355

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Manfred Frank is a German philosopher, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. His work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His 950-page study of German romanticism, Unendliche Annäherung, has been described as "the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing study of early German romanticism" and "surely one of the most important books from the post-War period on the history of German philosophy." He has also written at length on analytic philosophy and recent French philosophy.

#397

Stephen Stich

#5241

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Stephen P. Stich is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology. His 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in later years, as indicated in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind.

#398

Hao Wang

#4870

Overall Influence

1921 - 1995 (74 years)

Hao Wang was a Chinese-American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and commentator on Kurt Gödel. Biography Born in Jinan, Shandong, in the Republic of China , Wang received his early education in China. He obtained a BSc degree in mathematics from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1943 and an M.A. in Philosophy from Tsinghua University in 1945, where his teachers included Feng Youlan and Jin Yuelin, after which he moved to the United States for further graduate studies. He studied logic under W.V. Quine at Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. He was appoint...

#399

Charles H. Kahn

#5468

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Charles H. Kahn was a classicist and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focused on early Greek philosophy, up to the times of Plato. His 1960 monograph on Anaximander was still as of 2020 the most important reference work on the subject, and his 1979 edition of the Heraclitus fragments likewise remained the most widely cited English translation of Heraclitus, more or less representing the 'standard interpretation' for non-expert scholars.

#400

John Corcoran

#6689

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

John Corcoran was an American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and historian of logic. He is best known for his philosophical work on concepts such as the nature of inference, relations between conditions, argument-deduction-proof distinctions, the relationship between logic and epistemology, and the place of proof theory and model theory in logic. Nine of Corcoran's papers have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and Arabic; his 1989 "signature" essay was translated into three languages. Fourteen of his papers have been reprinted; one was reprinted twice.

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