Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#4001

David Gozal

#4002

Kirk Ludwig

#49653

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Kirk Alan Ludwig is an American philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Education and career Ludwig graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981 and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, where he worked with Donald Davidson. He joined the faculty at the University of Florida in 1990, where he taught until 2010 when he joined Indiana University Bloomington.

#4003

Robert Bonow

#48337

Overall Influence

Robert O. Bonow is an American cardiologist, currently the Max and Lilly Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and also Editor-in-Chief of JAMA's JAMA Cardiology. He received his MD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973.

#4004

H. A. Prichard

1871 - 1947 (76 years)

Harold Arthur Prichard was an English philosopher. He was born in London in 1871, the eldest child of Walter Stennett Prichard and his wife Lucy. Harold Prichard was a scholar of Clifton College from where he won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, to study mathematics. But after taking first-class honours in mathematical moderations in 1891, he studied Greats taking first-class honours in 1894. He also played tennis for Oxford against Cambridge. On leaving Oxford he spent a brief period working for a firm of solicitors in London, before returning to Oxford where he spent the rest of his life, first as Fellow of Hertford College and then of Trinity College .

#4005

Sean Dorrance Kelly

#38468

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sean Dorrance Kelly is an American philosopher, currently the Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Dean of Dunster House. He is an expert on phenomenology and philosophy of mind.

#4006

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

#70797

Overall Influence

#4007

Mitch Pacwa

#16126

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Mitchell Pacwa is an American Jesuit priest. He is president and founder of Ignatius Productions and is now the senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. Education Pacwa completed high school at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in 1967 with the intention of becoming a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago. He decided that he wanted to be a Jesuit in high school and was accepted after his freshman year at Loyola University Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and theology from University of Detroit Mercy and was ordained a priest of the Society of Jesus in 1976.

#4008

Robert Sokolowski

#37103

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Monsignor Robert Sokolowski is a philosopher and Roman Catholic priest who serves as the Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. Sokolowski's philosophical research is focused primarily on the discipline of phenomenology and interrelated sub-disciplines, though he has also written works from a theological perspective. He is known for his interpretation of Husserl, commonly known as "East-Coast Husserlianism" in academic circles. His Introduction to Phenomenology has been translated into seven other languages.

#4009

Richard Polt

#36578

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Richard F. H. Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has written about and translated works by Martin Heidegger. Polt is a typewriter enthusiast active on the Typosphere and a former editor of the quarterly ETCetera publication about manual typewriters. He is the author of three books, and he also contributed to the 2016 documentary California Typewriter that features Tom Hanks.

#4010

Jim A. Kuypers

#6240

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.

#4011

King K. Holmes

#70034

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

King Kennard Holmes is an American physician, microbiologist, epidemiologist, and medical school professor. He is an internationally recognized expert on sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

#4012

Igor Blauberg

1929 - 1990 (61 years)

Igor Viktorovich Blauberg was a Soviet philosopher and cyberneticist. Blauberg was Head of Systems Approach and Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory of the Research Institute for Systems Studies in Moscow. He is known for his pioneering work in the field of systems theory in Russia.

#4013

Bensalem Himmich

#28821

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Bensalem Himmich is a Moroccan novelist, poet and philosopher with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris, who teaches at the Mohammed V University, Rabat. He served as Minister of Culture from 29 July 2009 to 3 January 2012.

#4014

Zef Jubani

1818 - 1880 (62 years)

Zef Jubani or Giuseppe Jubany in Italian was an Albanian folklorist and activist of the Albanian National Awakening. He is known for the publication of a Collection of Albanian Folk Songs and Rhapsodies in the Gheg Albanian dialect. Jubani advocated the creation of a unique alphabet of the Albanian language. For his political activities, which often were anti-clericalist, Jubani was denounced to the Holy See by the Jesuit missionaries of Shkodër.

#4015

Eduardo Nicol

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Eduardo Nicol was a Mexican-Catalan philosopher. He arrived in Mexico in 1939, obtained his major in philosophy from National Autonomous University of Mexico , the biggest university in Mexico, where he taught from 1940. While at UNAM, he became the chairs of adolescent psychology and the history of psychology following .

#4016

William de Groat

#70912

Overall Influence

William de Groat is an American bioscientist, focusing in neuropharmacology and pharmacology of cell and nervous systems, currently Distinguished Professor at University of Pittsburgh.

#4017

Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link

Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link

1767 - 1851 (84 years)

Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link was a German naturalist and botanist. Biography Link was born at Hildesheim as a son of the minister August Heinrich Link , who taught him love of nature through collection of 'natural objects'. He studied medicine and natural sciences at the Hannoverschen Landesuniversität of Göttingen, and graduated as MD in 1789, promoting on his thesis "Flora der Felsgesteine rund um Göttingen" . One of his teachers was the famous natural scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach . He became a private tutor in Göttingen.

#4018

Richard von Schubert-Soldern

1852 - 1924 (72 years)

Richard Ritter von Schubert-Soldern was a philosopher in Austria-Hungary and later Austria. Schubert-Soldern earned a doctorate at the University of Prague in 1879 and habilitated at Leipzig University in 1882 with a thesis titled Ueber Trancendenz des Objects und Subjects .

#4019

Christian Krohg

Christian Krohg

1852 - 1925 (73 years)

Christian Krohg was a Norwegian naturalist painter, illustrator, author and journalist. Krohg was inspired by the realism art movement and often chose motifs from everyday life. He was the director and served as the first professor at the Norwegian Academy of Arts from 1909 to 1925.

#4020

Tang Chun-i

1909 - 1978 (69 years)

Tang Chun-I or Tang Junyi was a Chinese philosopher who was one of the leading exponents of New Confucianism. Born in Sichuan, he moved to Hong Kong in 1949 due to the establishment of the People's Republic of China and co-founded New Asia College with the dual objective of modernizing China while upholding its traditional values.

#4021

Etel Adnan

#8192

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

#4022

Aristobulus of Alexandria

200 BC - Present (2226 years)

Aristobulus of Alexandria also called Aristobulus the Peripatetic and once believed to be Aristobulus of Paneas, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the Peripatetic school, though he also used Platonic and Pythagorean concepts. Like his successor, Philo, he attempted to fuse ideas in the Hebrew Scriptures with those in Greek thought.

#4023

William H. Dietz

#4024

Aryeh Kosman

#53609

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Aryeh Kosman was a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy and a professor of philosophy at Haverford College. Kosman was born in 1935 in Oakland, California. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Harvard University. He came to Haverford as an assistant professor in 1962, was promoted to full professor in 1973, and was appointed John Whitehead Professor of Philosophy at Haverford in 1984. He retired in 2010.

#4025

Christoph Schrempf

Christoph Schrempf

1860 - 1944 (84 years)

Christoph Schrempf was a German evangelical theologian and philosopher. Life Christoph Schrempf was a pastor and writer from Besigheim, Germany. He had a difficult childhood due to his father's alcoholism. His mother suffered from the violence until she fled, taking the children. Perhaps this made the young Christoph Schrempf sensitive to all forms of violence, including hidden violence. In his youth, Schrempf was an avid Bible reader. He studied religion and was vicar and assistant teacher in Tübingen. The normal path of a Protestant Württemberg Pastor seemed predetermined. He read the Bible with a critical scientific eye and explored the historical background of biblical texts.

#4026

John Elof Boodin

1869 - 1950 (81 years)

John Elof Boodin was a Swedish-born American philosopher and educator. He was the author of numerous books proposing a systematic interpretation of nature. Boodin's work preserved the tradition of philosophical idealism within the framework of contemporary science. Boodin also focused on the social nature of human behavior believing an understanding required an appreciation of individual participation in social life and interpersonal relationship.

#4027

Joan Mitchell

#11553

Overall Influence

1925 - 1992 (67 years)

Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.

#4028

Angelika Krebs

#58997

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Angelika Krebs is a German philosopher. Education and career Angelika Krebs studied philosophy, German literature and musicology in Freiburg, Oxford, Konstanz and Berkeley. She did her PhD with Friedrich Kambartel, Bernard Williams and Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt in 1993. Her dissertation thesis on environmental ethics won the Wolfgang Stegmüller award of the German Society for Analytical Philosophy. From 1993 to 2001 she was an assistant professor in Frankfurt, writing her habilitation thesis on work, justice and love. In 2001, she was appointed to the chair for practical philosophy at the University of Basel.

#4029

Philipp Spitta

1841 - 1894 (53 years)

Julius August Philipp Spitta was a German music historian and musicologist best known for his 1873 biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. Life He was born in , near Hoya, and his father, also called Philipp Spitta, was a theologian and wrote the Protestant collection of hymns entitled Psalter und Harfe. As a child, the younger Spitta learnt the piano, pipe organ, and musical composition. He studied theology and classical philology at the University of Göttingen from 1860, graduating in 1864 with a Ph.D. for a dissertation on Tacitus . While at university, he composed, wrote a biography of Robert Schumann, and became friends with Johannes Brahms.

#4030

Anjan Chakravartty

#41065

Overall Influence

Anjan Chakravartty is an analytic philosopher and the Appignani Foundation Professor at the University of Miami. Previously, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Toronto. His work focuses on topics in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology.

#4031

Ludwig. Wittgenstein

#71187

Overall Influence

#4032

Anil Gupta

#46518

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Anil K. Gupta is an Indian-American philosopher who works primarily in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Gupta is the Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.

#4033

Thomas Willis

1621 - 1675 (54 years)

Thomas Willis FRS was an English physician who played an important part in the history of anatomy, neurology and psychiatry, and was a founding member of the Royal Society. Life Willis was born on his parents' farm in Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, where his father held the stewardship of the manor. He was a kinsman of the Willys baronets of Fen Ditton, Cambridgeshire. He graduated M.A. from Christ Church, Oxford in 1642. In the Civil War years he was a Royalist, dispossessed of the family farm at North Hinksey by Parliamentary forces. In the 1640s, Willis was one of the royal physicians to Charles I.

#4034

François Noudelmann

#29130

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

François Noudelmann is a contemporary French philosopher, university professor and radio producer. François Noudelmann is currently a professor at New York University, and regularly at the University of Paris VIII , and European Graduate School in Saas-Fee . He is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Between 2001 and 2004, he was the director of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Since 2019, he runs La Maison française at NYU.

#4035

Werner Beierwaltes

#44721

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Werner Beierwaltes was a German academic best known as a historian of philosophy. His most important areas of specialization were Neoplatonism and German Idealism. He was an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#4036

J. C. C. McKinsey

1908 - 1953 (45 years)

John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey , usually cited as J. C. C. McKinsey, was an American mathematician known for his work on game theory and mathematical logic, particularly, modal logic. Biography McKinsey received B.S. and M.S. degrees from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" th...

#4037

Alasdair Cochrane

Alasdair Cochrane

#41480

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation . His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals.

#4038

Norman Geschwind

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Norman Geschwind was a pioneering American behavioral neurologist, best known for his exploration of behavioral neurology through disconnection models based on lesion analysis. Early life Norman Geschwind was born on January 8, 1926, in New York City, New York to a Jewish family. He was a student at Boy's High School in Brooklyn, New York. He matriculated into Harvard University in 1942, initially planning to study mathematics. His education was interrupted when drafted into the Army in 1944. After serving for two years, he returned to Harvard University in 1946. Geschwind changed to the Depa...

#4039

György Bence

#40139

Overall Influence

1941 - 2006 (65 years)

György Bence was a university professor, philosopher, dissident and political consultant. In 1979 he was among the first Hungarians who criticized together with Andrei Sakharov and others the Soviet crackdown on the Czech Charter 77 signatories.

#4040

Sidney Charles Truelove

#71317

Overall Influence

#4041

Alexandru Dragomir

#41268

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Alexandru Dragomir was a Romanian philosopher. He made his doctoral studies under Martin Heidegger's direction, in 1940. Philosophy Dragomir refused to publish any of his writing. He always maintained that publishing was of no importance to him; instead, genuine understanding was all that mattered. Thus he never got involved with the public cultural milieu. Before his death, no one even knew whether he had actually written anything, or not.

#4042

Kanji Swami

1890 - 1980 (90 years)

Kanji Swami was a teacher of Jainism. He was deeply influenced by the Samayasāra of Kundakunda in 1932. He lectured on these teachings for 45 years to comprehensively elaborate on the philosophy described by Kundakunda and others. He was given the title of "Koh-i-Noor of Kathiawar" by the people who were influenced by his religious teachings and philosophy.

#4043

Władysław Mieczysław Kozłowski

Władysław Mieczysław Kozłowski

1858 - 1935 (77 years)

Władysław Mieczysław Kozłowski was a Polish philosopher. Life Kozłowski lectured at Brussels' Université Nouvelle and at Geneva University. In 1919–28 he was professor of the theory and methodology of science at Poznań University.

#4044

Len Doyal

#19138

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Len Doyal FRSA FRSocMed is emeritus professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary, University of London and a medical ethicist. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1944 and studied philosophy and sociology at Georgia State University, earning his undergraduate degree in 1966. That same year he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Karl Popper at the London School of Economics.

#4045

David Hollenbach

#23059

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Rev. David Hollenbach, S.J. is a Jesuit priest, professor, author, and moral theologian currently serving as the Pedro Arrupe Distinguished Research Professor of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is a consultant to the Jesuit Refugee Service and is the recipient of the John Courtney Murray Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1998.

#4046

S. N. Balagangadhara

#19981

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

S. N. Balagangadhara is a professor emeritus of the Ghent University in Belgium, and was director of the India Platform and the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cutuurwetenschap . Early life and education Balagangadhara was a student of National College, Bangalore and moved to Belgium in 1977 to study philosophy at Ghent University, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Etienne Vermeersch. His doctoral thesis was entitled Comparative Science of Cultures and the Universality of Religion: An Essay on Worlds without Views and Views without the World.

#4047

Samir Okasha

#34191

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Samir Okasha , is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at University of Bristol. He is a winner of Lakatos Award for his book Evolution and the Levels of Selection. He was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018.

#4048

Howard Selsam

1903 - 1970 (67 years)

Howard Selsam was an American Marxist philosopher. Background Howard Brillinger Selsam was born on 28 June 1903 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His parents were John T. Selsam, a grocer, and his mother was Flora Emig Selsam.

#4049

Eugeniu Sperantia

1888 - 1972 (84 years)

Eugeniu Sperantia was a Romanian poet, aesthetician, essayist, sociologist and philosopher. He was born in Bucharest to folklorist Theodor Speranția and his wife Elena , a relative of poet Mihail Cruceanu. He attended primary and high school in his native city, graduating in 1906. That year, he made his published debut, in Ovid Densusianu's Vieața Nouă. Prior to that, he had frequented Alexandru Macedonski's circle. In 1910, he graduated from the philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest. Two years later, he received a doctorate in literature and philosophy; his thesis dealt with pragmatic apriorism.

#4050

Jacqueline Lichtenstein

#50934

Overall Influence

1947 - 2019 (72 years)

Jacqueline Lichtenstein was a French philosopher, art historian, and professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of art at the University of Paris IV - Paris-Sorbonne. Her work focused on 17th century- and 18th-century art, and the ways in which people think, talk, and theorize about art. Another theme of her work was the shift, since the 17th century, in how people think about the amateur.

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