Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#4301

Nicholas Wiseman

Nicholas Wiseman

1802 - 1865 (63 years)

Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman was a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who became the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.

#4302

Heinrich Ritter

1791 - 1869 (78 years)

Heinrich August Ritter was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was born in Zerbst, and studied philosophy and theology at the University of Göttingen and Berlin until 1815. In 1824 he became an associate professor of philosophy at Berlin, later transferring to Kiel, where he occupied the chair of philosophy from 1833 to 1837. He then accepted a similar position at the University of Göttingen, where he remained till his death. Friedrich Schleiermacher was a major influence in his thinking.

#4303

Daniel Sulmasy

#51871

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Daniel Sulmasy is an American medical ethicist and former Franciscan friar. He has been Acting Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and on the faculty of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioetics was also named He is the inaugural Andre Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Medicine at Georgetown.

#4304

Domenico Ribatti

#75369

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

#4305

Lacydes of Cyrene

300 BC - 205 BC (95 years)

Lacydes of Cyrene , Academic Skeptic philosopher, was head of the Platonic Academy at Athens in succession to Arcesilaus from 241 BC. He was forced to resign c. 215 BC due to ill-health, and he died c. 205 BC. Nothing survives of his works.

#4306

Pope Pius V

1504 - 1572 (68 years)

Pope Pius V, OP , born Antonio Ghislieri , was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 7 January 1566 to his death, in May 1572. He is venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church. He is chiefly notable for his role in the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, and the standardization of the Roman Rite within the Latin Church, known as Tridentine mass. Pius V declared Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church.

#4307

Lawrence Stark

#56790

Overall Influence

1926 - 2004 (78 years)

Lawrence W. Stark was an American neurologist and a recognized authority in the use of engineering analysis to characterize neurological systems. He was a longtime professor of physiological optics and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Stark was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. His father Edward Stark was a chemical engineer trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lawrence credited his early interest in engineering to him.

#4308

Leonard I. Zon

#34696

Overall Influence

Leonard I. Zon, M.D., is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Director of the Stem Cell Program, Children’s Hospital Boston.

#4309

Christian Gottfried Schütz

1747 - 1832 (85 years)

Christian Gottfried Schütz was a German classical scholar and humanist, known for his contributions in philosophy and philology, and for his work as an academic and literary editor and publisher. Life Christian Gottfried Schütz was the eldest of eight recorded children born to the Protestant minister Gottfried Schütz and his wife, in the village of Dederstädt, a couple of hours walk to the south of Eisleben, in an area administered, under a slightly convoluted arrangement by Saxony. Shortly after his birth his father was appointed to a senior preaching position in nearby Aschersleben, to where the family relocated, and it was here that the boy received his early schooling.

#4310

Eberhard Nieschlag

#75428

Overall Influence

#4311

Piet Borst

#75434

Overall Influence

#4312

Carla Cordua

#29826

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Carla Cordua is a Chilean philosopher. Life Cordua was born in Los Ángeles, Chile on Christmas Day, 1925. She entered the University of Chile in 1948 and studied under Bogumil Jasinowski and Oscar Marín.

#4313

John MacFarlane

#52753

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

John MacFarlane is an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley interested in logic and metaphysics. He has made influential contributions to truth-value theory inferential semantics. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also known for his contributions to open source software, especially the Pandoc document converter and other Markdown parsers and verifiers. MacFarlane was among the group of people that helped launch the CommonMark standardization effort for Markdown.

#4314

David Sidransky

#75471

Overall Influence

#4315

Thom Brooks

#19445

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Thomas "Thom" Brooks, is an American-British political philosopher and legal scholar. He has been Professor of Law and Government at Durham University since 2014, and was the Dean of Durham Law School from 2016 to 2021. He was previously a lecturer then Reader at Newcastle University. He has been a visiting scholar at several Ivy League and Russell Group universities. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.

#4316

Johann Joachim Lange

Johann Joachim Lange

1670 - 1744 (74 years)

Johann Joachim Lange was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher. Lange was born in Gardelegen and educated in Leipzig, Erfurt and Halle. He was influenced by Christian Thomasius and the pietist August Hermann Francke. He became a professor of theology at Halle in 1709, and opposed the philosophy of Christian Wolff. He died in Halle on 7 May 1744.

#4317

Tom Stoneham

#62756

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Thomas William Charles Stoneham is a British philosopher. He has published on a range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of George Berkeley. Currently, Stoneham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Head of the Department of Philosophy at York . He is Honorary Treasurer of the UK Council for Graduate Education , an Editorial Board member of White Rose University Press, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College .

#4318

Henry Horace Williams

1858 - 1940 (82 years)

Henry Horace Williams was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1890 to 1940. From 1921 to 1935 he was a Kenan Professor of philosophy at UNC, and from 1936-1940 he was a professor emeritus. After being invited to teach at UNC, he became the first chair of the Mental and Moral Sciences Department, which is today better known as the Department of Philosophy.

#4319

Christopher W. Morris

#63129

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Christopher Warren Morris is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Maryland, where he is also a member of the Faculty of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Policy. His main research areas are moral, legal and political philosophy as well as practical rationality.

#4320

Alexander Mitscherlich

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

Alexander Harbord Mitscherlich was a German psychoanalyst. Life Alexander Mitscherlich grew up in Munich and took up studies in history, the history of art, and philosophy at Munich University. When Mitscherlich's Jewish-born dissertation thesis supervisor Paul Joachimsen died, in 1932, his chair was passed to an antisemite, Karl Alexander von Müller, who declined to take over the dissertation projects begun by his predecessor. This is why Mitscherlich left Munich for Berlin in order to open a bookstore there, where he sold writings critical of the current developments in Germany, bringing him to the attention of the SA.

#4321

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

1867 - 1940 (73 years)

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge was a teacher at various American universities. Woodbridge considered himself a naïve realist, deeply impressed with Santayana. He spent much of his career as a dean at Columbia University, where a residence hall and a professorship in philosophy are named in his honor. He was editor of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. David and Lillian Swenson, translators of some of the works of Søren Kierkegaard, dedicated Concluding Unscientific Postscript, to Professor Woodbridge.

#4322

Leslie Armour

#49997

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Leslie Armour was a Canadian-born philosopher and writer on social economics. He is the father of the cellist and impresario Julian Armour. Academic career Armour completed a BA at the University of British Columbia in 1952 and a PhD at the University of London in 1956. At the time of his death, he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Research Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Adjunct Professor of Philosophical Theology at St. Paul University, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He taught at universities in Montana, California, and Ohio.

#4323

Radhika Ramana Dasa

#18477

Overall Influence

#4324

Marta Petreu

#52004

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Marta Petreu is the pen name of Rodica Marta Vartic, née Rodica Crisan , a Romanian philosopher, literary critic, essayist and poet. A professor of philosophy at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, she has published eight books of essays and seven of poetry, and is the editor of the monthly magazine Apostrof. Petreu is also noted as a historian of fascism, which she notably dealt with in her book about the controversial stances of philosopher Emil Cioran .

#4325

Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben

Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben

1744 - 1777 (33 years)

Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben was a German naturalist from Quedlinburg. Erxleben was professor of physics and veterinary medicine at the University of Göttingen. He wrote Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre and Systema regni animalis . He was founder of the first and oldest academic veterinary school in Germany, the Institute of Veterinary Medicine, in 1771.

#4326

Paul Bruce Beeson

#66915

Overall Influence

1908 - 2006 (98 years)

Paul Bruce Beeson was an American physician and professor of medicine, specializing in infectious diseases and the pathogenesis of fever. Biography After undergraduate study at the University of Washington in Seattle, Paul Beeson studied medicine at McGill University Medical School, where he received his MD in 1933. After two years as an intern at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he joined his father's and elder brother's practice in Wooster, Ohio. In 1937 he became a research fellow at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There he worked for two years in the laboratory of Oswald Avery.

#4327

Nima Rezaei

#43064

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Nima Rezaei is an Iranian scientist, a professor of clinical immunology and allergy at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Associate Dean of International Affairs in the School of Medicine and the Director of Global Academic Program . Nima Rezaei is the mastermind, founder and current president of the Universal Scientific Education and Research Network . Rezaei is known for his research in Primary Immunodeficiencies, characterization and treatment. He initiated the Iranian Primary Immunodeficiency Diseases Registry in 1999 under supervision of Professor Asghar Aghamohammadi, which earned...

#4328

John N. Warfield

#9569

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

John Nelson Warfield was an American systems scientist, who was professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences at George Mason University, and president of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society.

#4329

Alain Deneault

#31114

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Alain Deneault is a French Canadian author from Quebec. He is known for his book Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique and the legal proceedings that followed its publishing. Biography Deneault was born in Outaouais, Quebec. He has a research doctorate from Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, and a PhD in philosophy from Paris 8 University under the supervision of Jacques Rancière. His studies focused on philosophy from nineteenth-century Germany and twentieth-century France, particularly the work of Georg Simmel. He lives in Petite-Rivière-de-l’Île, and he teaches philosophy at t...

#4330

Donatella Di Cesare

Donatella Di Cesare

#54885

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Donatella Ester Di Cesare is an Italian political philosopher, essayist, and editorialist. She currently serves as professor of theoretical philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome. Di Cesare collaborates with various Italian newspapers and magazines, including L'Espresso and il manifesto. Her books and essays have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Croatian, Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, and Chinese.

#4331

Jeffrey Beall

#1910

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

#4332

Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin

1883 - 1956 (73 years)

Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d'Or. Biography Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at the Académie Humbert, where she changed her focus to oil painting. During the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde. A member of both the circle of Pablo P...

#4333

David Braybrooke

#43769

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

David Braybrooke was a political philosopher and professor emeritus at both Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and the University of Texas at Austin. Early life and education Braybrooke was born on October 18, 1924, in Hackettstown, New Jersey. He graduated from Boonton High School in 1942 and volunteered for the army. After the war, he received a BA in economics from Harvard in 1948, followed by a MA in philosophy from Cornell University and a PhD in philosophy at Cornell in 1953, where he wrote a dissertation on welfare and happiness. He also studied English for a term under F. R.

#4334

Nasreddin

1208 - 1284 (76 years)

Nasreddin or Nasreddin Hodja is a character in the folklore of the Muslim world from the Balkans to China, and a hero of humorous short stories and satirical anecdotes. There are frequent statements about his existence in real life and even archaeological evidence in specific places, for example, a tombstone in the city of Akşehir, Turkey. At the moment, there is no confirmed information or serious grounds to talk about the specific date or place of Nasreddin's birth, so the question of the reality of his existence remains open.

#4335

Shannon Sullivan

#36927

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Shannon Sullivan is chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches and writes on feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy.

#4336

Michael Prof. Dr. Weller

#75786

Overall Influence

#4337

Karl Friedrich Köppen

1808 - 1863 (55 years)

Karl Friedrich Köppen was a German teacher and political journalist. He was one of the Young Hegelians. Life Köppen was from a born in a pastor's family in Altmark. He studied theology at the University of Berlin from 1827 to 1831, but later turned to religio-critical Hegelianism. After his studies and military service in 1833, he taught at the secondary school Dorotheenstädtischer. In 1837, he met Karl Marx, with whom he developed a close friendship.

#4338

Huang Zongxi

1610 - 1695 (85 years)

Huang Zongxi , courtesy name Taichong , was a Chinese naturalist, political theorist, philosopher, and soldier during the latter part of the Ming dynasty into the early part of the Qing. Biography Huang was a native of Yuyao in Zhejiang province. He was the son of Huang Zunsu, an official of the Ming court and an adherent of the Donglin Movement who died in prison after opposing the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian.

#4339

Marc Crépon

#42165

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Marc Crépon is a French philosopher and academic who writes on the subject of languages and communities in the French and German philosophies and contemporary political and moral philosophy. He has also translated works by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Franz Rosenzweig and Leibniz.

#4340

Michael P. Lynch

Michael P. Lynch

#42048

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Michael Patrick Lynch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also the director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. As director of the Humanities Institute, he has headed a Templeton-funded project on humility and conviction in public life.

#4341

Varol Akman

#19273

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Varol Akman is Professor of Computer Engineering in Bilkent University, Ankara. An academic of engineering background, Akman obtained his B.A in Electrical Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He then continued his graduate studies and obtained his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the tutelage of influential logician William Randolph Franklin.

#4342

Susanne Sreedhar

#65724

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Susanne Sreedhar is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. Sreedhar's work on social contract theory has been influential, and has mostly been aimed at the nature and scope of obligation within political systems, and the possibility of ethical civil disobedience within a Hobbesian system.

#4343

Samuel Guttenplan

#75383

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Samuel D. Guttenplan is a professor in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Guttenplan earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford with a dissertation directed by John McDowell. He has interests in the philosophies of mind, language, philosophical logic and ethics. His current work centres on the origins of human conceptual thought, and he is contracted to produce The Roots of Categorization for Oxford University Press in 2009–10.

#4344

Yoshitaka Fujii

#19232

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Yoshitaka Fujii is a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology, who in 2012 was found to have fabricated data in at least 219 scientific papers, of which 172 have been retracted. Summary of professional career Fujii graduated from Tokai University School of Medicine in 1987 and holds an M.D. degree. He attended the Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, where he majored in anesthesiology and received his Ph.D. in 1991. During his career, he worked at institutions including Tokyo Medical and Dental University, the University of Tsukuba, and Toho University.

#4345

Lennart Åqvist

#56445

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Lennart Åqvist is a Swedish logician. He was a founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of Philosophical Logic. Åqvist received his PhD from Uppsala University in 1960 and has subsequently worked at Uppsala as Docent of Practical Philosophy. On 5 June 1992 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University, Sweden He is currently a Reader in Practical Philosophy in the College of Law at Uppsala.

#4346

Philip of Opus

400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)

Philip of Opus , was a philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. He was a member of Plato’s Academy and after the master's death, edited his last work, Laws. He is generally considered the author of the Platonic Epinomis , a follow-on conversation among the same interlocutors.

#4347

Paolo Ruffini

1765 - 1822 (57 years)

Paolo Ruffini was an Italian mathematician and philosopher. Education and career By 1788 he had earned university degrees in philosophy, medicine/surgery and mathematics. His works include developments in algebra:an incomplete proof that quintic equations cannot be solved by radicals . Abel would complete the proof in 1824.Ruffini's rule, which is a quick method for polynomial division.contributions to group theory.He also wrote on probability and the quadrature of the circle.

#4348

Peter Morris

#53316

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Sir Peter John Morris, AC, FRS, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCS was an Australian surgeon and Nuffield professor of surgery at the University of Oxford. Morris was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, founder of the Oxford Transplant Centre and director of the Centre for Evidence in Transplantation at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

#4349

Philip A. Wolf

#76053

Overall Influence

#4350

Truls Lie

#29636

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

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