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,

#4051

Steven M. Haffner

#71448

Overall Influence

#4052

Austin Farrer

1904 - 1968 (64 years)

Austin Marsden Farrer was an English Anglican philosopher, theologian, and biblical scholar. His activity in philosophy, theology, and spirituality led many to consider him one of the greatest figures of 20th-century Anglicanism. He served as Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1960 to 1968.

#4053

C. T. K. Chari

#27880

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

C. T. K. Chari was Head of the Department of Philosophy at Madras Christian College from 1958 to 1969 and the most prominent among contemporary Indian philosophers who paid close attention to psi phenomena. Chari published extensively on extremely diverse topics, such as logic, linguistics, information theory, mathematics, quantum physics, philosophy of mind, and, of course, psi research.

#4054

Fortunatus Victor Costa

#52512

Overall Influence

Fortunatus Victor Costa was a minor Maltese philosopher who specialised in metaphysics. Life Almost nothing is known as yet about the personal life of Costa, only that he hailed from Senglea, Malta, and that in 1806 he was a religious cleric. He might have been studying for the priesthood or else embraced the clerical state on a lifelong basis.

#4055

Harold Saxton Burr

Harold Saxton Burr

1889 - 1973 (84 years)

Harold Saxton Burr was E. K. Hunt Professor of Anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine and researcher into bio-electrics. Early life He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1889, to parents Hanford Burr and Clara Saxton. He studied in public schools and at the Technical High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1908 he was admitted to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and received his Ph.B. in 1911. On December 27 of that year, in Chicago, he married Jean Chandler, with whom he had a son, Peter. In 1914 he was appointed Instructor in Anatomy at Yale. He studied for his Ph.D. under Ross Granville Harrison, which he received in 1915.

#4056

Daniel Catovsky

#71544

Overall Influence

#4057

Robert Joseph Huebner

#71557

Overall Influence

#4058

Sanjiv Sam Gambhir

Sanjiv Sam Gambhir

#57619

Overall Influence

1961 - 2020 (59 years)

Sanjiv Sam Gambhir was an American physician–scientist. He was the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Cancer Research, Chairman of the Department of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a professor by courtesy in the departments of Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Additionally, he served as the Director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford , Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection and the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center . He authored 680 publications and had over 40 patents pending or granted.

#4059

Jerry Avorn

#29832

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jerry Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief Emeritus of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He founded one of the largest programs using health care utilization data to track medication use and outcomes, and invented the practice of "academic detailing" in which pharmacists, nurses, and physicians educate doctors about cost-effective prescribing practices using the same tactics that drug companies employ to market their products. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1969 and M.D. from Harvard Med...

#4060

Christoph Gottfried Bardili

1761 - 1808 (47 years)

Christoph Gottfried Bardili was a German philosopher and cousin of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. He was critical of Kantian idealism and proposed his own system of philosophy known as rational realism, a view based purely upon "thinking as thinking".

#4061

Simon Foucher

1644 - 1696 (52 years)

Simon Foucher was a French polemic philosopher. His philosophical standpoint was one of Academic skepticism: he did not agree with dogmatism, but didn't resort to Pyrrhonism, either. Life He was born in Dijon, the son of a merchant, and appears to have taken holy orders at a very early age. For some years he held the position of honorary canon at Dijon, but he resigned in order to take up his residence in Paris. He graduated at the Sorbonne, having studied theology, and spent the remainder of his life in literary work in Paris, where he died.

#4062

Milton Weinstein

#61562

Overall Influence

Milton C. Weinstein is an American health decision scientist and the Henry J. Kaiser Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Publishing over 300 papers in major journals in multiple fields, he is recognized for his current work around affordable healthcare and its improvements. He received four degrees from Harvard University, an AB and MA , MPP 1972Public Policy 1973

#4063

George Catlin

1896 - 1979 (83 years)

Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-American co-operation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural science model for political science. McMaster University Libraries holds his correspondence archive and the body of some of his works. He had two children, one of whom was the politician and academic Shirley Williams.

#4064

Joshua Parens

#41250

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Joshua S. Parens is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. He is the dean of Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts. Parens is known for his expertise on Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy.

#4065

Johann Wilhelm Ritter

Johann Wilhelm Ritter

1776 - 1810 (34 years)

Johann Wilhelm Ritter was a German chemist, physicist and philosopher. He was born in Samitz near Haynau in Silesia , and died in Munich. Life and work Johann Wilhelm Ritter's first involvement with science began when he was 14 years old. He became an apprentice to an apothecary in Liegnitz , and acquired a deep interest in chemistry. He began medicine studies at the University of Jena in 1796. A self-taught scientist, he made many experimental researches on chemistry, electricity and other fields.

#4066

Calvin Seerveld

#21184

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Calvin George Seerveld received a BA from Calvin College in 1952 and an MA in English literature and classics from the University of Michigan in 1953. He then went on to study under D. H. Th. Vollenhoven at the Free University in Amsterdam, where his doctoral dissertation dealt with Croce's aesthetics. It was supervised by Vollenhoven and Carlo Antoni. He then taught philosophy and German at Trinity Christian College and went on to teach philosophical aesthetics at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.

#4067

Ruwen Ogien

#46871

Overall Influence

Ruwen Ogien was a contemporary French philosopher. He was a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He focused on moral philosophy and the philosophy of social science. He was the brother of Albert Ogien a sociologist.

#4068

Manon Garcia

#58952

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Manon Garcia is a French philosopher, specializing in feminist philosophy. Her book We Are Not Born Submissive has been translated besides to English into several other languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German and Spanish.

#4069

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski

#11042

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Christian Liberté Boltanski was a French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French conceptual style. Early life Boltanski was born in Paris on 6 September 1944. His father, Étienne Alexandre Boltanski, a physician, was Jewish and had come to France from Russia, while Marie-Elise Ilari-Guérin, his Roman Catholic mother originated from Corsica, descended from Ukrainian Jews. His Jewish heritage was a large influence in Boltanski's household. During World War II, while living in Paris, his father escaped deportation by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for a year and a half.

#4070

Paul Piccone

#35913

Overall Influence

1940 - 2004 (64 years)

Paul Piccone was an Italian-American philosopher, critical theorist, intellectual historian, and most notably the founder and long-time editor of the journal Telos. He was born in L'Aquila in Italy to a family that emigrated to Rochester, New York in the mid-1950s. In 1968, he and others started the journal Telos, which he edited until his death in 2004.

#4071

Demetrius of Phalerum

Demetrius of Phalerum

350 BC - 283 BC (67 years)

Demetrius of Phalerum was an Athenian orator originally from Phalerum, an ancient port of Athens. A student of Theophrastus, and perhaps of Aristotle, he was one of the first members of the Peripatetic school of philosophy. Demetrius had been a distinguished statesman who was appointed by Cassander, the King of Macedon, to govern Athens, where Demetrius ruled as sole ruler for ten years. During this time, he introduced important reforms of the legal system, while also maintaining pro-Cassander oligarchic rule.

#4072

Norman Pittenger

#42182

Overall Influence

1905 - 1997 (92 years)

William Norman Pittenger was an Anglican minister, teacher, and theologian. He wrote about and promoted process theology, and became one of the first acknowledged Christian defenders for the open acceptance of homosexual relations among Christians. He served as Vice-Chairman and the Chairman of the Theological Commission of the World Council of Churches from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s. He lived most of his life in the United States, though from 1966 until his death he lived at King's College at Cambridge University as an honorary member of the university.

#4073

Andrew Taylor Still

Andrew Taylor Still

1828 - 1917 (89 years)

Andrew Taylor Still was the founder of osteopathic medicine. He was also a physician and surgeon, author, inventor and Kansas territorial and state legislator. He was one of the founders of Baker University, the oldest four-year college in the state of Kansas, and was the founder of the American School of Osteopathy , the world's first osteopathic medical school, in Kirksville, Missouri.

#4074

Michel E. Safar

#71810

Overall Influence

#4075

Ratnakīrti

#42958

Overall Influence

Ratnakīrti was an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the Yogācāra and epistemological schools who wrote on logic, philosophy of mind and epistemology. Ratnakīrti studied at the Vikramaśīla monastery in modern-day Bihar. He was a pupil of Jñānaśrīmitra, and Ratnakīrti refers to Jñānaśrīmitra in his work as his guru with phrases such as yad āhur guravaḥ.

#4076

Thoralf Mauritz Sundt

#71829

Overall Influence

#4077

Eva Picardi

#63144

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Eva Picardi was an Italian philosopher. Picardi's contributions have been in analytic philosophy and linguistics. Early life and education Picardi graduated from the University of Bologna, in 1970, under the supervision of Alberto Pasquinelli. In 1984, she received her PhD at Somerville College, Oxford under the supervision of Michael Dummett, with a dissertation on assertibility and truth. She studied at Erlangen/Nürnberg as a Von Humboldt Fellow and served as visiting professor at the University of Helsinki in 1986 and at the University of Bielefeld. In 2009, Picardi was visiting fellow at ...

#4078

Diana Schaub

#16773

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Diana J. Schaub is professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland. Schaub received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She teaches and writes on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and American political thought. Schaub was also a member of The President's Council on Bioethics.

#4079

Jean-Pierre de Crousaz

Jean-Pierre de Crousaz

1663 - 1748 (85 years)

Jean-Pierre de Crousaz was a Swiss theologian and philosopher. He is now remembered more for his letters of commentary than his formal works. Life De Crousaz was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was a many-sided man, whose numerous works on many subjects had a great vogue in their day, but are now largely forgotten. He has been described as an initiateur plutôt qu'un créateur , chiefly because he introduced the philosophy of Descartes to Lausanne in opposition to the reigning Aristotelianism, and also as a Calvinist pedant of the French abbés of the 18th century.

#4080

John Stuart Mackenzie

1860 - 1935 (75 years)

John Stuart Mackenzie was a British philosopher, born near Glasgow, and educated at Glasgow, Cambridge, and Berlin. In 1884-89 he was a fellow at Edinburgh and from 1890 to 1896 fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He lectured on political economy at Owens College, Manchester, in 1890-93, and in 1895 became professor of logic and philosophy in University College, Cardiff. Mackenzie was an idealist philosopher and a Hegelian of the type of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Caird.

#4081

Robert Sinnerbrink

#63787

Overall Influence

Robert Sinnerbrink is an Australian philosopher and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is an ARC Future Fellowship recipient and a former Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy . Sinnerbrink is known for his research on aesthetics and philosophy of film.

#4082

Daniel J. Drucker

Daniel J. Drucker

#33903

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Daniel Joshua Drucker is a Canadian endocrinologist. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he is a professor of medicine at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. He is known for his research into intestinal hormones and their use in the treatment of diabetes and other metabolic diseases.

#4083

Melchiorre Gioia

Melchiorre Gioia

1767 - 1829 (62 years)

Melchiorre Gioja was an Italian writer on philosophy and political economy. His name is spelled Gioia in modern Italian. Biography Gioja was born at Piacenza, in what is now northern Italy. Originally intended for the church, he took orders, but renounced them in 1796 and went to Milan, where he devoted himself to the study of political economy. Having obtained the prize for an essay on "the kind of free government best adapted to Italy" he decided upon the career of a publicist.

#4084

Friedrich Kambartel

#58572

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Friedrich Kambartel was a German philosopher. Biography Kambartel was born on 17 February 1935 in Münster, Germany. He studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Münster, where he received his PhD and his “habilitation”, the postdoctoral lecture qualification . In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Constance, where he took active part in making it a reform university . Kambartel had close ties to the Erlangen School of constructivist philosophy of science. He taught in Frankfurt am Main from 1993 until his retirement in 2000. He died on A...

#4085

John W. Kirklin

#72017

Overall Influence

#4086

Juha Sihvola

#37331

Overall Influence

1957 - 2012 (55 years)

Juha Sihvola was a Finnish philosopher and historian. He was a university professor of general history from 2000, and part of The Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence program upon Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Politics, serving as the Deputy Director of the Centre of Excellence from 2008. In the years 2004–2009, he was the Director of Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

#4087

Andrei Oișteanu

Andrei Oișteanu

#13920

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Andrei Oișteanu is a Romanian historian of religions and mentalities, ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, literary critic and novelist. Specialized in the history of religions and mentalities, he is also noted for his investigation of rituals and magic and his work in Jewish studies and the history of antisemitism. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he also became noted for his articles and essays on the Holocaust in Romania.

#4088

Félicité de La Mennais

Félicité de La Mennais

1782 - 1854 (72 years)

Félicité Robert de La Mennais was a French Catholic priest, philosopher and political theorist. He was one of the most influential intellectuals of Restoration France. Lamennais is considered the forerunner of liberal Catholicism and social Catholicism.

#4089

Patrick Mollison

Patrick Mollison

#67858

Overall Influence

1914 - 2011 (97 years)

Patrick Loudon Mollison, , was a British haematologist, described as 'the father of transfusion medicine'. Life Mollison was born on 17 March 1914, to Beatrice Marjorie, née Walker, and William Mayhew Mollison. His father was an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Guy's Hospital, and his paternal grandfather, William Loudon Mollison, was a Scottish mathematician and Master of Clare College, Cambridge.

#4090

John Newsome Crossley

#40813

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

John Newsome Crossley is a British-Australian mathematician and logician who writes in the field of logic in computer science, history of mathematics and medieval history. He is involved in the field of mathematical logic in Australia and South East Asia.

#4091

George Frederic Watts

George Frederic Watts

1817 - 1904 (87 years)

George Frederic Watts was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said "I paint ideas, not things." Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.

#4092

Ernesto Schiffrin

#72094

Overall Influence

Ernesto Luis Schiffrin is an Argentinian-Canadian physician and researcher specialized in cardiovascular diseases. Schiffrin is a distinguished James McGill Professor of Medicine at the Department of Medicine, McGill University . Canada Research Chair in Hypertension and Vascular Research at the Lady Davis Institute, and Physician-in-Chief at Jewish General Hospital.

#4093

Douglas P. Lackey

#21653

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Douglas P. Lackey is an American philosopher and playwright who is also a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Lackey was born in Staten Island, New York. As a graduate student, he studied under J. N. Findlay at Yale University. His post-graduate work on the ethics of nuclear warfare was influenced by his attention to earlier works by Bertrand Russell. His drama Kaddish in East Jerusalem was produced in 2003. The play was later expanded and revised as The Gandhi Nonviolent Soccer Club. He has also had plays produced about Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and Lud...

#4094

Carl Van Vechten

Carl Van Vechten

1880 - 1964 (84 years)

Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He gained fame as a writer, and notoriety as well, for his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. In his later years, he took up photography and took many portraits of notable people. Although he was married to women for most of his adult years, Van Vechten engaged in numerous homosexual affairs over his lifetime.

#4095

Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely

#3479

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian-French artist, who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op art movement. His work titled Zebra, created in 1937, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op art.

#4096

Jeroen Groenendijk

#60314

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jeroen Antonius Gerardus Groenendijk , was a Dutch logician, linguist and philosopher, working on philosophy of language, formal semantics, pragmatics. Groenendijk wrote a joint Ph.D. dissertation with Martin Stokhof on the formal semantics of questions, under the supervision of Renate Bartsch and Johan van Benthem. He was also an important figure in the development of dynamic semantics . His later work was mainly focused on studying and developing the recently founded framework of inquisitive semantics.

#4097

Jaroslav Peregrin

#50744

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Jaroslav Peregrin is a professor of logic at Charles University in Prague and also a faculty member at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He has published almost a hundred books and articles in several languages. Peregrin writes in Czech, English, German and Portuguese.

#4098

Susanna Schellenberg

#47301

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, where she holds a secondary appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. She specializes in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language and is best known for her work on perceptual experience, evidence, capacities, mental content, and imagination. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Award, a Humboldt Prize, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for a project on the Neuroscience of Perception. She is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence .

#4099

Herbert e. Kaufman

#72184

Overall Influence

#4100

Phaedrus

500 BC - 393 BC (107 years)

Phaedrus , son of Pythocles, of the Myrrhinus deme , was an ancient Athenian aristocrat associated with the inner-circle of the philosopher Socrates. He was indicted in the profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries in 415 during the Peloponnesian War, causing him to flee Athens.

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