The Most Influential People Across History
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,
#351
Jonathan Barnes
#2243
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan Barnes, FBA is an English scholar of Aristotelian and ancient philosophy. Education and career He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford University. He taught for 25 years at Oxford University before moving to the University of Geneva. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, 1968–78; a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, 1978–94, and has been Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College since 1994.
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Julius Evola
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola was an Italian far-right philosopher. Evola regarded his values as aristocratic, monarchist, masculine, traditionalist, heroic, and defiantly reactionary. An eccentric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany; in the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant Right.
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Hermann Lotze
1817 - 1881 (64 years)
Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and logician. He also had a medical degree and was well versed in biology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws and relations, then developments in the universe could be explained as the functioning of a world mind. His medical studies were pioneering works in scientific psychology.
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Numenius of Apamea
200 - 200 (0 years)
Numenius of Apamea was a Greek philosopher, who lived in Rome, and flourished during the latter half of the 2nd century AD. He was a Neopythagorean and forerunner of the Neoplatonists. Philosophy Statements and fragments of his apparently very numerous works have been preserved by Origen, Theodoret, and especially by Eusebius, and from them we may learn the nature of his Platonist-Pythagorean philosophy, and its approximation to the doctrines of Plato.
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John Henry Newman
1801 - 1890 (89 years)
John Henry Newman was an English theologian, academic, intellectual, philosopher, polymath, historian, writer, scholar and poet, first as an Anglican priest and later as a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s, and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.
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Philolaus
470 BC - 390 BC (80 years)
Philolaus was a Greek Pythagorean and pre-Socratic philosopher. He was born in a Greek colony in Italy and migrated to Greece. Philolaus has been called one of three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition and the most outstanding figure in the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras developed a school of philosophy that was dominated by both mathematics and mysticism. Most of what is known today about the Pythagorean astronomical system is derived from Philolaus's views. He may have been the first to write about Pythagorean doctrine. According to August Böckh , who cites Nicomachus, Philo...
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Peter Vallentyne
#3214
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Vallentyne is Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. Biography Vallentyne received his B.A. from McGill University in 1978 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, under the direction of David Gauthier and with significant help from Shelly Kagan. He formerly taught at the University of Western Ontario and Virginia Commonwealth University .
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Dignāga
480 - 540 (60 years)
Dignāga was an Indian Buddhist scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic . Dignāga's work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology .
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Simplicius of Cilicia
490 - 560 (70 years)
Simplicius of Cilicia was a disciple of Ammonius Hermiae and Damascius, and was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He was among the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being allowed back into the empire. He wrote extensively on the works of Aristotle. Although his writings are all commentaries on Aristotle and other authors, rather than original compositions, his intelligent and prodigious learning makes him the last great philosopher of pagan antiquity. His works have preserved much info...
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Ruth Barcan Marcus
#2104
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Ruth Barcan Marcus was an American academic philosopher and logician best known for her work in modal and philosophical logic. She developed the first formal systems of quantified modal logic and in so doing introduced the schema or principle known as the Barcan formula. Marcus, who originally published as Ruth C. Barcan, was, as Don Garrett notes "one of the twentieth century's most important and influential philosopher-logicians". Timothy Williamson, in a 2008 celebration of Marcus' long career, states that many of her "main ideas are not just original, and clever, and beautiful, and fasci...
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Axel Honneth
#1337
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.
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Rush Rhees
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Rush Rhees was an American philosopher. He is principally known as a student, friend, and literary executor of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. With G. E. M. Anscombe he was co-editor of Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations , and, with Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, he co-edited Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics . He was solely responsible for the editing of Philosophical Grammar and Philosophical Remarks . Rhees taught philosophy at Swansea University from 1940 until 1966, when he took early retirement to devote more time to editing Wittgenstei...
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Jean-Luc Marion
#1345
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Roman Catholic theologian. Marion is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. Much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, but also religion. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida.
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L. E. J. Brouwer
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer , usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. Regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he is known as the founder of modern topology, particularly for establishing his fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.
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Jason Josephson Storm
#742
Overall Influence
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American academic, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is currently Professor and chair in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. He also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Storm's research focuses on Japanese religions, European intellectual history from 1600 to the present, and theory in religious studies. His more recent work has discussed disenchantment and philosophy of social science.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#819
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar. He is University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in Iran and the United States, earning a bachelor's degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's in geology and geophysics, and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University. He returned to his homeland in 1958, turning down teaching positions at MIT and Harvard, and was appointed a professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University. H...
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Paul Grice
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Herbert Paul Grice , usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle , which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
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Haskell Curry
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Haskell Brooks Curry was an American mathematician and logician. Curry is best known for his work in combinatory logic, which initial concept is based on a paper by Moses Schönfinkel, for which Curry did much of the development. Curry is also known for Curry's paradox and the Curry–Howard correspondence. Named for him are three programming languages: Haskell, Brook, and Curry, and the concept of currying, a method to transform functions, used in mathematics and computer science.
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Frantz Fanon
1925 - 1961 (36 years)
Frantz Omar Fanon was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique . His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
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Moses Mendelssohn
1729 - 1786 (57 years)
Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau, Principality of Anhalt, and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature. Through his writings on philosophy and religion he came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Christian and Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe and beyond.
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John Searle
#1167
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.
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Cratylus
500 BC - Present (2524 years)
Cratylus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from the mid-late 5th century BC, known mostly through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue Cratylus. He was a radical proponent of Heraclitean philosophy and influenced the young Plato.
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Kuno Fischer
1824 - 1907 (83 years)
Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic. Biography After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle, became a privatdocent at Heidelberg in 1850. The Baden government in 1853 laid an embargo on his teaching owing to his liberal ideas, but the effect of this was to rouse considerable sympathy for his views, and in 1856 he obtained a professorship at Jena, where he soon acquired great influence by the dignity of his personal character. In 1872, on Eduard Zeller's move to Berlin, Fischer succeeded him as professor of philosophy and the history ...
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Michael Huemer
#2679
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has defended ethical intuitionism, direct realism, libertarianism, veganism, the repugnant conclusion, and philosophical anarchism.
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Hans Selye
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist who conducted important scientific work on the hypothetical non-specific response of an organism to stressors. Although he did not recognize all of the many aspects of glucocorticoids, Selye was aware of their role in the stress response. Charlotte Gerson considers him the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress.
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Eugen Dühring
1833 - 1921 (88 years)
Eugen Karl Dühring was a German philosopher, positivist, antisemite, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism. Life and works Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised at Berlin as a lawyer until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, occasioned his taking up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.
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Harald Høffding
1843 - 1931 (88 years)
Harald Høffding was a Danish philosopher and theologian. Life Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen. He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school. The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding. The philosopher and author Ágúst H. Bjarnason was a student of Høffding.
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C. D. Broad
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Charlie Dunbar Broad , usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English epistemologist, historian of philosophy, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, and writer on the philosophical aspects of psychical research. He was known for his thorough and dispassionate examinations of arguments in such works as Scientific Thought , The Mind and Its Place in Nature , and Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy .
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David Gauthier
#2661
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
David Gauthier was a Canadian philosopher best known for his neo-Hobbesian social contract theory of morality, as developed in his 1986 book Morals by Agreement. Life and career David Gauthier was born in Toronto on 10 September 1932. He was educated at the University of Toronto , Harvard University , and the University of Oxford .
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Helga Kuhse
#2726
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist. Kuhse was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to Australia in 1962. From the 1970s, she was one of the first philosophers to address the ethical implications of the developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. With Peter Singer, she founded the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in 1980, one of the first research centres in the world devoted entirely to bioethics. She served as Director of the Centre until June 1999. Her ideas on the end of life, the right to die, and assisted death, have prompted controv...
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Guru Nanak
1469 - 1539 (70 years)
Gurū Nānak , also referred to as , was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. His birth is celebrated as Guru Nanak Gurpurab on Katak Pooranmashi , i.e. October–November.
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Colin Murray Turbayne
#2400
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Colin Murray Turbayne was an Australian philosopher and an internationally recognized authority on the writings of George Berkeley. He spent most of his thirty five year academic career at the University of Rochester and was noted as the author of the book The Myth of Metaphor.
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Gorgias
483 BC - 375 BC (108 years)
Gorgias was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays wa...
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Peter Winch
#3547
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Peter Guy Winch was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of social science, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Winch is perhaps most famous for his early book, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy , an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
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Robert Anton Wilson
#239
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
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Bernard Rollin
#2839
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Bernard Elliot Rollin was an American philosopher, who was emeritus professor of philosophy, animal sciences, and biomedical sciences at Colorado State University. He was considered to be the "father of veterinary medical ethics".
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James Mark Baldwin
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
James Mark Baldwin was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Princeton and the University of Toronto. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.
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Ted Honderich
#2558
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ted Honderich is a Canadian-born British professor of philosophy, who was Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London. Biography Honderich was born Edgar Dawn Ross Honderich on 30 January 1933 in Baden, Ontario, Canada, the younger brother of Beland Honderich, who became publisher of the Toronto Star. An undergraduate at the University of Toronto, qualifying as B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature, he came to University College London to study under the logical positivist and Grote Professor A. J. Ayer, graduating with a PhD in 1968. He has since lived in England and become a British citizen.
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Patrick Suppes
#1404
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Patrick Colonel Suppes was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.
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Robert Grosseteste
1175 - 1253 (78 years)
Robert Grosseteste , also known as Robert Greathead or Robert of Lincoln, was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, scientist and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents in Suffolk , but the associations with the village of Stradbroke is a post-medieval tradition. Upon his death, he was revered as a saint in England, but attempts to procure a formal canonisation failed. A. C. Crombie called him "the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford, and in some ways, of the modern English intellectual tradition".
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Cornelius Castoriadis
#805
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activist circles.
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Henri Lefebvre
#627
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectical materialism, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Espaces et Socié...
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Angela Davis
#123
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American revolutionary Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
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Simon Blackburn
#2554
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Simon Walter Blackburn is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy. He has appeared in multiple episodes of the documentary series Closer to Truth. During his long career, he has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Bas van Fraassen
#2954
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
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Simone de Beauvoir
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
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Nikolas Kompridis
#2058
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Nikolas Kompridis is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist. His major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic dimension of politics. His writing touches on a variety of issues in social and political thought, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture, often in terms of re-worked concepts of receptivity and world disclosure—a paradigm he calls "reflective disclosure".
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Alan Watts
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
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Stanisław Leśniewski
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Stanisław Leśniewski was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician. Life He was born on 28 March 1886 at Serpukhov, near Moscow, to father Izydor, an engineer working on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and mother Helena . Leśniewski went to a high school in Irkutsk. Later he attended lectures by Hans Cornelius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and lectures by Wacław Sierpiński at Lviv University.
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Patricia Churchland
#1479
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
