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,
#3551
Brihaspati
#1934
Overall Influence
Brihaspati , also known as Guru, is a Hindu deity. In the ancient Vedic scriptures of Hinduism, Brihaspati is a deity associated with fire, and the word also refers to a rishi who counsels the devas . In some later texts, the word refers to the largest planet of the solar system, Jupiter, and the deity is associated with the planet as a Navagraha.
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Theodor Mundt
1808 - 1861 (53 years)
Theodor Mundt was a German critic and novelist. He was a member of the Young Germany group of German writers. Biography Born at Potsdam, Mundt studied philology and philosophy at Berlin. In 1832 he settled at Leipzig as a journalist, where he co-edited Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung, and where he was subjected to a rigorous police supervision. In 1839 he married Klara Müller , who under the name of Luise Mühlbach became a popular novelist, and he moved in the same year to Berlin. Here his intention of entering upon an academical career was for a time thwarted by his collision with the Prussian press laws.
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Eero Tarasti
#14600
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Eero Aarne Pekka Tarasti , is a Finnish musicologist and semiologist, currently serving as Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. He received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Helsinki in 1978, writing his dissertation Myth and Music on Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius, and Igor Stravinsky. Then, Tarasti served at the University of Jyväskylä between 1979–1984, where he was appointed Professor of Arts Education in 1979 and Professor of Musicology in 1983. In 1984 he took the position of Professor of Musicology in Helsinki, succeeding Erik Tawaststjerna. Tarasti has hel...
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John Michell
1724 - 1793 (69 years)
John Michell was an English natural philosopher and clergyman who provided pioneering insights into a wide range of scientific fields including astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation. Considered "one of the greatest unsung scientists of all time", he is the first person known to have proposed the existence of black holes, and the first to have suggested that earthquakes travelled in wavess. Recognizing that double stars were a product of mutual gravitation, he was the first to apply statistics to the study of the cosmos. He invented an apparatus to measure the mass of the Earth, and explained how to manufacture an artificial magnet.
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Julian Young
#47773
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Julian Padraic Young is an American philosopher and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is known for his expertise on post-Kantian philosophy. Career He specializes in Continental philosophy, philosophy of art, environmental philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Prior to moving to the United States, Professor Young taught at all levels at the universities of Auckland, Pittsburgh, Calgary and Tasmania, the following: Introduction to Ethics, Introduction to Metaphysics and Theory of Knowledge, Introduction to Theories of Human Nature, British Empiricis...
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Leslie John Witts
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Leslie John Witts was a British physician and pioneering haematologist. Biography L. J. Witts received secondary education at Boteler Grammar School, where he won in 1916 a scholarship to the University of Manchester. During WWI when he reached the age of 18 he joined the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps and then the Royal Field Artillery. Serving on the western front, he suffered a leg wound and was invalided back to civilian life. From 1919 to 1923 he studied at the University of Manchester, graduating there MB ChB in 1923. After house appointments, he became Dickinson travelling scho...
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Julius Tomin
#32174
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Julius Tomin is a Czech philosopher. He became known in the 1970s and 1980s for his involvement with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which ran an underground education network in the former Czechoslovakia, offering seminars in philosophy in people's homes.
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Margaret MacDonald
1907 - 1956 (49 years)
Margaret MacDonald was a British analytic philosopher. She worked in the areas of philosophy of language, political philosophy and aesthetics. Life and education Margaret MacDonald was born in London and abandoned as a child.
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P. C. Chang
1892 - 1957 (65 years)
Peng Chun Chang, commonly known as P. C. Chang , was a Chinese academic, philosopher, playwright, human rights activist, and diplomat. He was born in Tianjin, China, and died at his home in Nutley, New Jersey.
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Dimitris Dimitrakos
#45176
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Dimitris Dimitrakos is a Greek philosopher, currently Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy in the Philosophy of Science Department of the University of Athens. Biography Dimitrakos originally studied economics at the London School of Economics
Go to Profile#3561
Henry Longueville Mansel
1820 - 1871 (51 years)
Henry Longueville Mansel was an English philosopher and ecclesiastic. Life He was born at Cosgrove, Northamptonshire . He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London and St John's College, Oxford. He took a double first in 1843, and became tutor of his college. He was appointed reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855, and Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1859. He was a great opponent of university reform and of the Hegelianism which was then beginning to take root in Oxford. In 1867 he succeeded Arthur Penrhyn Stanley as regius professor of ecclesiastical history, and in 1868 he was appointed dean of St Paul's.
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Karl Ameriks
#51758
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Karl P. Ameriks is an American philosopher. He is the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Education and career Ameriks studied at Yale University, A.B., summa cum laude , Ph.D. , where he wrote his thesis under the direction of Karsten Harries. He joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 1973, and taught there for more than forty years.
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Polemarchus
500 BC - 403 BC (97 years)
Polemarchus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from Piraeus. Life The son of Cephalus of Syracuse, Polemarchus had two brothers, the famous orator Lysias and Euthydemus, and a sister who married Brachyllus. Polemarchus and Lysias traveled to Thurii when the latter was 15 years old.
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Raymond Plant, Baron Plant of Highfield
#14833
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Raymond Plant, Baron Plant of Highfield FKC is a British Labour peer and academic. Lord Plant was educated at Havelock School in Grimsby, King's College London , and the University of Hull . He is currently Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Philosophy at King's College London and was previously Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, having previously served as Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2000. He is an Honorary Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Before moving to Oxford he was Professor of European Political Thought at the University of Southampto...
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Melvin Rader
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Melvin Miller Rader was an American academic and civil rights advocate. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, teaching ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. In the late 1940s, he was accused of being a Communist by the Canwell Committee, although he was later exonerated.
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Itzhak Brook
#63229
Overall Influence
#3567
Antonio Cua
#45102
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Antonio S. Cua was an eminent scholar in Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy who was professor emeritus of philosophy at The Catholic University of America. Cua was primarily interested in Western moral philosophy, moral psychology and Chinese ethics, in particular Confucian ethics. He was the author of many important scholarly works, and the chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, the first English-language encyclopedia on 'Chinese philosophy'.
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Edmund Husserl
#3569
Marcus George Singer
#41547
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Marcus George Singer was an American philosopher. His works include Generalization in Ethics – An Essay in the Logic of Ethics, with the Rudiments of a System of Moral Philosophy . Personal life Marcus George Singer was born in 1926 in New York City. His father, David Singer, a lawyer, died when MGS was 9 years old from a rare autoimmune disease. His mother, Esther Kobre Singer, was a concert level pianist and received awards from the City of New York for her service typing books in braille. Her father and uncle, through their small bank, provided loans to many Jews to pay passage to the USA .
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Françoise Dastur
#54187
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Françoise Dastur is a French philosopher. She is Professor Emeritus at University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. She is a specialist of the works of Martin Heidegger. Bibliography Heidegger and the Question of Time , translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Humanity Books, 1998Death: An Essay on Finitude, translated by John Llewelyn, Continuum, 2002Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chronology , translated by Edward Bullard, The Athlone Press, 2000How Are We to Confront Death?: An Introduction to Philosophy , Robert Vallier , David Farrell Krell , Fordham University Press, 2012Q...
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Richard Middleton
#9571
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Richard Middleton FBA is Emeritus Professor of Music at Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is also the founder and co-ordinating editor of the journal Popular Music. Education Middleton studied at Clare College, Cambridge and at the University of York, where his PhD was supervised by Wilfrid Mellers.
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Mario Aurelio Poli
#22314
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mario Aurelio Poli is an Argentine prelate of the Catholic Church who was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires from 2013 to 2023. He was the Bishop of Santa Rosa from 2008 to 2013 and before that an auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires from 2002 to 2008. Pope Francis, his predecessor in Buenos Aires, made him a cardinal in 2014.
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Ben Goldacre
#1564
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials to require open science practices in clinical trials.
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Blay Whitby
#17062
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dr Blay Whitby is a philosopher and technology ethicist, specialising in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics. He is based at the University of Sussex, England. Blay Whitby graduated with first class honours from New College, Oxford University in 1974 and completed his PhD on "The Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence" at Middlesex University in 2003. His publications are predominantly in the area of the philosophy and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. His views place particular stress on the moral responsibilities of scientific and technical professionals, having some features in common with techno-progressivism.
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Belu Zilber
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Belu Zilber was a Romanian communist activist. Born into a Jewish family in Târgu Frumos, Iași County, he adhered to the Bolshevik movement while still an adolescent. Because he participated in the typographers' demonstration of December 13, 1918, he was expelled from every educational institution in his native country by the authorities of the Kingdom of Romania. He continued his high school education in Paris and began but did not complete studies at the polytechnic division of the University of Grenoble. He returned to Romania in 1922 and was hired as an expert at the War Ministry. He was ...
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Xenophilus
400 BC - Present (2424 years)
Xenophilus , of Chalcidice, was a Pythagorean philosopher and musician who lived in the first half of the 4th century BC. Aulus Gellius relates that Xenophilus was the intimate friend and teacher of Aristoxenus and implies that Xenophilus taught him Pythagorean doctrine. He was said to have belonged to the last generation of Pythagoreans, and he is the only Pythagorean known to have lived in Athens in the 4th century BC.
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Ole Martin Moen
#37253
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Ole Martin Moen is a Norwegian philosopher who works primarily with applied ethics and value theory. He is Professor of Ethics at Oslo Metropolitan University and Researcher in Philosophy and Principal Investigator for the 5-year research project "What should not be bought and sold?" at the University of Oslo, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
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François Dosse
#15610
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
François Dosse is a French historian and philosopher who specializes in intellectual history. Biography After devoting his doctoral thesis to the Annales School, Dosse turned his research interests to structuralism, the philosopher Paul Ricœur and the historian Michel de Certeau. François Dosse is one of the founders of the journal EspacesTemps. In 2007, he published Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, biographie croisée , where he advocated the rehabilitation of Guattari in an intellectual history that had made place only for Deleuze. In 2011 he published a biography on the French historian...
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Pedro Zulen
1889 - 1925 (36 years)
Pedro Salvino Zulen Aymar was a Peruvian philosopher and librarian of Chinese descent, who dedicated the most part of his short life to the fight for decentralised politics and the defense of indigenous rights.
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Isaac Malitz
#36420
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Isaac Richard Jay Malitz is a logician who introduced the subject of positive set theory in his 1976 Ph.D. Thesis at UCLA.
Go to Profile#3581
David L. Paulsen
#37124
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Lamont Paulsen was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Brigham Young University . From 1994 to 1998 he held the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding at BYU. He was an active faculty member at BYU from 1972–2011.
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David Lyons
#34543
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David Lyons is an American moral, political and legal philosopher who is emeritus professor of philosophy and of law at Boston University. Education and career Lyons earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University where he studied under John Rawls. He taught at Cornell University from 1964 until 1995, when he joined the BU faculty. His former students include David O. Brink.
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Jacinto Convit
#7624
Overall Influence
1913 - 2014 (101 years)
Jacinto Convit García was a Venezuelan physician and scientist, known for developing a vaccine to prevent leprosy and his studies to treat cancer. He played a role in founding Venezuela's National Institute of Biomedicine and held many leprosy-related positions. Among Convit's many honors for his work on leprosy and tropical diseases was Spain's Prince of Asturias Award in the Scientific and Technical Research category and France's Legion of Honor. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his experimental anti-leprosy vaccine.
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Susanna Siegel
#49450
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Susanna Siegel is an American philosopher. She is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and well known for her work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, especially on perception.
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Władysław Ślewiński
1856 - 1918 (62 years)
Władysław Ślewiński was a Polish painter. He was one of Gauguin's students and a leading artist of the Young Poland movement. Biography He was born to a landowning family and his mother died in childbirth. His cousin, the painter Józef Chełmoński, noticed his artistic talent and advised his father to enroll him at the drawing school operated by Wojciech Gerson. His father resisted at first, but finally agreed.
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Dale Jacquette
#50609
Overall Influence
1953 - 2016 (63 years)
Dale Jacquette was an American analytic philosopher. At the time of his death, he was Professor Ordinarius of Philosophy at the University of Bern. Jacquette had previously served on the faculty of Penn State University. He received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in 1975, and his PhD in the same subject from Brown University in 1983, writing a dissertation on the logic of intention supervised by Roderick Chisholm. Jacquette had broad research interests in the philosophy of intentionality, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy.
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Yuk Hui
#28735
Overall Influence
Yuk Hui is a Hong Kong philosopher and professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is known for his writings on philosophy and technology. Hui has been described as one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers of technology.
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Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński
1776 - 1853 (77 years)
Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński was a Polish messianist philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, lawyer, occultist and economist. He was born as Hoëné to a municipal architect in 1776 but changed his name in 1815 to Józef Wroński. Later in life he changed his name to Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński, without using his family's original French spelling Hoëné. At no point in his life, neither in Polish or French, was he known as Hoëné-Wroński; nor was the common French transliteration, Josef Hoëné-Wronski, ever his official name in his native Poland .
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Scott L. Friedman
#32584
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Scott L. Friedman is an American scientist, professor and physician who works in the field of hepatology. Friedman has conducted pioneering research into the underlying causes of scarring, or fibrosis, associated with chronic liver disease, by characterizing the key fibrogenic cell type, the hepatic stellate cell His laboratory has also discovered a novel tumor suppressor gene, KLF6 that is inactivated in a number of human cancers including primary liver cancer. Friedman is the Fishberg Professor of Medicine, and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
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Tomáš Masaryk
1850 - 1937 (87 years)
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czechoslovak statesman, political activist and philosopher who served as the first president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. He is regarded as the founding father of Czechoslovakia.
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Paul Werbos
#2176
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul John Werbos is an American social scientist and machine learning pioneer. He is best known for his 1974 dissertation, which first described the process of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. He also was a pioneer of recurrent neural networks.
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Shlomit C. Schuster
#28098
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Shlomit C. Schuster was an Israeli Philosophical Counselor, and considered a pioneer in the Philosophical counseling field. Her first book is considered a source of learning and teaching Philosophical counseling .
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Bente Klarlund Pedersen
#63728
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#3594
Yves Agid
#22141
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Yves Agid is a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, cell biologist, neurochemist, academician, university professor, hospital doctor, researcher in biology and scientist specializing in neurosciences. Early life and education Yves Agid is the son of university professor Rene Agid and Swedish artist painter Sylvia Stave. Rene Agid was a close friend of Romain Gary. The latter dedicated his novel The Promise at Dawn to Rene and Sylvia Agid.
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Julio Cabrera
#52244
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Julio Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brazil. He is a retired professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brasília and former head of the department. Previously he taught in Argentina, at the National University of Córdoba, the University of Belgrano and then in Brazil at the Federal University of Santa Maria. He is best known for his works on "negative ethics" and cinema and philosophy. Other areas of philosophy that he deals with are philosophy of language, logic and Latin American philosophy.
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Peter Wust
1884 - 1940 (56 years)
Peter Wust was a German existentialist philosopher who is unknown in the English realm, for his works has never been translated into English to this day. Biography Wust was born the oldest of eleven children in Rissenthal in Saarland. He attended the local public school, then the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, in Trier. Though his parents had hoped he would become a Catholic priest, he decided on studying Geisteswissenschaft. After 1907, Wust pursued German studies, English studies, and philosophy in Berlin and Strasbourg. He taught in Berlin, Neuss, Trier, and Cologne, and earned his doctorate...
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Egon Diczfalusy
#63852
Overall Influence
#3598
Fred Poché
#40083
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Fred Poché is a French philosopher. Bachelor of philosophy , higher degree in language sciences from the University of Paris III : Sorbonne nouvelle, PhD in philosophy , and accreditation awarded by the University of Strasbourg as supervisor of doctoral students. He is professor of contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of the West in Angers. His research concerns social philosophy and covers the following fields: recognition, dignity, vulnerability, memories, wounds, racism, contextuality and politics .
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Stanley Plotkin
#14793
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Stanley Alan Plotkin is an American physician who works as a consultant to vaccine manufacturers, such as Sanofi Pasteur, as well as biotechnology firms, non-profits and governments. In the 1960s, he played a pivotal role in discovery of a vaccine against rubella virus while working at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Plotkin was a member of Wistar’s active research faculty from 1960 to 1991. Today, in addition to his emeritus appointment at Wistar, he is emeritus professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, Vaccines, is the standard reference on the subject. He is a...
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Addison Webster Moore
1866 - 1930 (64 years)
Addison Webster Moore was a U.S. pragmatist philosopher. He was president of the Western Philosophical Association in 1911 and president of the American Philosophical Association in 1917. He was born in Plainfield, Indiana, United States. He studied at DePauw University, earning an A.B. in 1890 and an A.M. in 1893. He then studied at Cornell and took his Ph.D. in 1898 at the University of Chicago, attracted by John Dewey's arrival there. When Dewey went to Columbia University in 1904, Moore took over the Metaphysics and Logic courses at Chicago, and became professor of philosophy in 1909.
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