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,
#451
Jonathan Schaffer
#10659
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and also working in epistemology, mind, and language. He is best known for his work on grounding and his development of monism, and is also a notable proponent of contrastivism.
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Paul Virilio
#1791
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military. Virilio was a prolific creator of neologisms, most notably his concept of "Dromology", the all-around, pervasive inscription of speed in every aspect of life.
Go to Profile#453
Nino Cocchiarella
#12318
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Nino Cocchiarella is an American philosopher who is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. He is best known for his work in formal logic and ontology. Among his important articles are:"Nominalism and Conceptualism as Predicative Second Order Theories of Predication", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 21 "Richard Montague and the Logical Analysis of Language", in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol. 2, Philosophy of Language/Philosophical Logic, G. Fløistad, ed., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague "The Development of the Theory of Logical Types and the Notion of a Logical Subject in Russell's Early Philosophy", Synthese, vol.
Go to Profile#454
Barbara Cassin
#5113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida. In 2006 she succeeded Jonathan Barnes to the directorship of the leading centre of excellence in Ancient philosophy, Centre Leon-Robin, at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#455
Jonathan Glover
#5884
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jonathan Glover is a British philosopher known for his books and studies on ethics. He currently teaches ethics at King's College London. Glover is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in the United States, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Go to Profile#456
Colin Wilson
#1147
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Colin Henry Wilson was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".
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Alan Gewirth
#8148
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Alan Gewirth was an American philosopher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and author of Reason and Morality , Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications , The Community of Rights , Self-Fulfillment , and numerous other writings in moral philosophy and political philosophy.
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Jennifer Hornsby
#11296
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jennifer Hornsby, FBA is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.
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Cornelio Fabro
#6747
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Cornelio Fabro CSS was an Italian Catholic priest of the Stigmatine Order and a scholastic Thomist philosopher. He was the founder of the Institute for Higher Studies on Unbelief, Religion and Cultures.
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Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez
#5095
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez was a Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, writer and professor born in Algeciras, Andalucia. Biography After studying philosophy at the University of Madrid, Vázquez emigrated to Mexico in 1939 with thousands of other intellectuals, scientists and artists following the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, in which he participated as editor of the central publication of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas “Ahora”. Sánchez was appointed a full-time professor of philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1959, becoming a professor emeritus of the university in 1985.
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John Haugeland
#3386
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
John Haugeland was a professor of philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, and Heidegger. He spent most of his career at the University of Pittsburgh, followed by the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World.
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Nicholas Maxwell
#4769
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Nicholas Maxwell is a British philosopher. Maxwell taught philosophy of science at University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader. In 2003 he founded Friends of Wisdom. He has published fifteen books. He has published over eighty papers in scientific and philosophical journals on problems that range from consciousness, free will, value, and art to the rationality of science, simplicity, scientific realism, explanation, time and quantum theory.
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Samuel Scheffler
#8231
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Samuel Ira Scheffler is a moral and political philosopher, who is University Professor of Philosophy and Law in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University. Education and career Before moving to NYU in 2008, Scheffler taught for 31 years at the University of California, Berkeley. Scheffler received his PhD from Princeton University, where he was a student of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
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Mary Daly
#1807
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Once a practicing Roman Catholic, she had disavowed Christianity by the early 1970s. Daly retired from Boston College in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes. She allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.
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Paul Farmer
#868
Overall Influence
1959 - 2022 (63 years)
Paul Edward Farmer was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he was a University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health , an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He was professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equ...
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Thomas Jay Oord
#4268
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and multidisciplinary scholar who directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He formerly taught for sixteen years as a tenured professor at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho and before that a philosophy professor at Eastern Nazarene College. Oord is the author or editor of more than thirty books and hundreds of articles. He is known for his contributions to research on love, open theism, process theism, open and relational theology, postmodernism, the relationship betwe...
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Willem de Kooning
#618
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
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Newton da Costa
#4201
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions.
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Deborah Mayo
#6806
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Deborah G. Mayo is an American philosopher of science and author. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech and holds a visiting appointment at the Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics.
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John Hawthorne
#12231
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.
Go to Profile#471
John Sallis
#7136
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Sallis is an American philosopher well known for his work in the tradition of phenomenology. Since 2005, he has been the Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has previously taught at Pennsylvania State University , Vanderbilt University , Loyola University of Chicago , Duquesne University and the University of the South .
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Stephen Neale
#7640
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York .
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Timothy Sprigge
#11188
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge , usually cited as T. L. S. Sprigge, was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and latterly an Emeritus Fellow.
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Thomas Molnar
#6628
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Thomas Steven Molnar was a Catholic philosopher, historian and political theorist. Life Molnar completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Brussels in Belgium and received his Ph.D. in philosophy and history from Columbia University in New York City.
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Peter Boghossian
#3910
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Peter Gregory Boghossian is an American philosopher and pedagogue. Born in Boston, he was a non-tenure track assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for ten years, and his areas of academic focus include atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists and How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
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Alain Finkielkraut
#1625
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alain Luc Finkielkraut is a French essayist and public intellectual. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, many on the ideas of tradition and identitary nonviolence, including Jewish identity and antisemitism, French colonialism, the mission of the French education system in immigrant assimilation, and the Yugoslav Wars. He often appears on French television.
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Frank Ankersmit
#5763
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen. Ankersmit, member of the family of textile manufacturers Ankersmit, initially studied physics and mathematics in Leiden for three years and then did his military service. He next studied both history and philosophy at the University of Groningen. In 1981 he took his doctoral degree at that same University with a dissertation entitled Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. In 1986 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences .
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Stephen Law
#4756
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Stephen Law is an English philosopher. He is currently Director of the Certificate in Higher and Education and Director of Philosophy at The Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Law was previously Reader in Philosophy and Head of Department of Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, until its closure in June 2018. He also edits the philosophical journal Think, which is sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and published by the Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce and in 2008 became the provost of the...
Go to Profile#479
Eleonore Stump
#10398
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eleonore Stump is an American philosopher and the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. Biography Eleonore Stump received her first degree, a B.A. in classical languages from Grinnell College in 1969. She was class valedictorian and received the Archibald Prize for scholarship. She has an M.A. in biblical studies from Harvard University , and an M.A. and Ph.D. in medieval studies from Cornell University . Before coming to Saint Louis University, she taught at Oberlin College, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and University of Notre Dame.
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Roger Crisp
#11730
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Roger Stephen Crisp is fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford. He holds the university posts of Professor of Moral Philosophy and Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy. His work falls principally within the field of ethics, in particular metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. In addition, he is chairman of the Management Committee of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
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Vincent Descombes
#7749
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Vincent Descombes is a French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Philosophical work Descombes is particularly noted for a lengthy critique in two volumes of the project he calls cognitivism, and which is, roughly, the view current in philosophy of mind that mental and psychological facts can ultimately be treated as, or reduced to, physical facts about the brain.
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Peter Suber
#3813
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Peter Dain Suber is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project . Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access movement, and as the creator of the game Nomic.
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Rushworth Kidder
#8631
Overall Influence
1944 - 2012 (68 years)
Rushworth Moulton Kidder was an American author, ethicist, and professor. Kidder founded the Institute for Global Ethics in 1990, and is the author of Moral Courage and How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living. He was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. He worked as a columnist and editor for The Christian Science Monitor. Kidder died in 2012 of natural causes in Naples, Florida at the age of 67. Kidder earned a doctorate from Columbia University in English and comparative literature and wrote the foreword to Compassion Wins, by Godfrey John. He wrote an award ...
Go to Profile#484
David M. Rosenthal
#10247
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Rosenthal is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly in the area of consciousness and related topics. He is professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He was educated at the University of Chicago and then Princeton University. Rosenthal also has research interests in cognitive science, and is Coordinator of the CUNY Graduate Center's Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science. And he has done work in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and 17th-centur...
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Andreas Kinneging
#5751
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Andreas Antonius Maria Kinneging is Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Leiden, and a conservative philosopher in the Netherlands. Background Kinneging was raised in a Catholic family in the Dutch province of Zeeland. He studied political science at the Catholic University of Nijmegen , graduating with the highest honours.
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Paul Oskar Kristeller
#7172
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Paul Oskar Kristeller was a scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, where he mentored both Irving Louis Horowitz and A. James Gregor.
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Oswald Hanfling
#9075
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Oswald Hanfling was an English philosopher who worked from 1970, until his death, at the Open University in the UK. Early life Oswald Hanfling was born in Berlin in 1927. His parents were Jewish and when their business was vandalised on Kristallnacht in 1938, he was sent to England by Kindertransport and lived in Bedford with a foster family. After the Second World War, he traced his family to Israel, with the help of the Red Cross.
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David Sztybel
#11340
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
David Sztybel is a Canadian philosopher specializing in animal ethics. Education and career Sztybel was born in Toronto, Ontario. He obtained his BA in philosophy in 1991, his MA in 1994, and his PhD in 2000 – for a thesis entitled "Empathy and Rationality in Ethics" – from the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#489
David DeGrazia
#12033
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
David DeGrazia is an American moral philosopher specializing in bioethics and animal ethics. He is Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1989, and the author or editor of several books on ethics, including Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status , Human Identity and Bioethics , and Creation Ethics: Reproduction, Genetics, and Quality of Life .
Go to Profile#490
Nick Zangwill
#9284
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Nick Zangwill is a British philosopher and honorary research professor at University College London and Lincoln University. He is known for his expertise on moral philosophy , and aesthetics . He has also written on metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and logic.
Go to Profile#491
Jean Grondin
#7326
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jean Grondin is a Canadian philosopher and professor. He is a specialist in the thought of Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger. His research focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, German classical philosophy and the history of metaphysics.
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Isaac Levi
#10577
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Isaac Levi was an American philosopher who served as the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is noted for his work in epistemology and decision theory. Education and career Levi was one of several doctoral students of Ernest Nagel at Columbia University who were influential in American post-war philosophy; others were Morton White, Patrick Suppes, and Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. Levi taught at Case Western Reserve University before joining the Columbia faculty in 1970. He was elected in 1986 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Mark Fisher
#4542
Overall Influence
1968 - 2017 (49 years)
Mark Fisher , also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture.
Go to Profile#494
Susanne Bobzien
#10660
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Susanne Bobzien is a German-born philosopher whose research interests focus on philosophy of logic and language, determinism and freedom, and ancient philosophy. She currently is senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.
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Kendall Walton
#8872
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Kendall Lewis Walton is an American philosopher, the Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work mainly deals with theoretical questions about the arts and issues of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. His book Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts develops a theory of make-believe and uses it to understand the nature and varieties of representation in the arts. He has also developed an account of photography as transparent, defending the idea t...
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Richard Boyd
#8592
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.
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Maṇḍana Miśra
#6746
Overall Influence
Mandana Mishra was a Hindu philosopher who wrote on the Mīmāṃsā and Advaita systems of thought. He was a follower of the Karma Mimamsa school of philosophy and a staunch defender of the holistic sphota doctrine of language. He was a contemporary of Adi Shankara, and while it is said that he became a disciple of Adi Sankara, he may actually have been the most prominent Advaitin of the two until the 10th century CE. He is often identified with Sureśvara, though the authenticity of this is doubtful. Still, the official Sringeri documents recognises Mandana Mishra as Sureśvara.
Go to Profile#498
Hilary Kornblith
#12966
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Hilary Kornblith is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of contemporary epistemology's most prominent proponents of naturalized epistemology.
Go to Profile#499
David Miller
#7406
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David William Miller is an English philosopher and prominent exponent of critical rationalism. He taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. where he is Reader in Philosophy. He has been Honorary Treasurer of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
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Jerrold Katz
#6835
Overall Influence
1932 - 2002 (70 years)
Jerrold Jacob Katz was an American philosopher and linguist. Biography After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy there in 1963, and became Professor in 1969. From 1975 until his death, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the City University of New York.
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