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,

#4551

Alfred Einstein

Alfred Einstein

1880 - 1952 (72 years)

Alfred Einstein was a German-American musicologist and music editor. He was born in Munich and fled Nazi Germany after Hitler's Machtergreifung, arriving in the United States by 1939. He is best known for being the editor of the first major revision of the Köchel catalogue, which was published in the year 1936. The Köchel catalogue is the extensive catalogue of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

#4552

Luis Buñuel

1900 - 1983 (83 years)

Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the great and more influential filmmakers of all time. Buñuel’s works were known for their avant-garde surrealism which were also infused with political commentary.

#4553

Paul Cilliers

#22834

Overall Influence

1956 - 2011 (55 years)

Friedrich Paul Cilliers was a South-African philosopher, complexity researcher, and Professor in Complexity and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University. He was known for his contributions in the field of complex systems.

#4554

Sidney Farber

1903 - 1973 (70 years)

Sidney Farber was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him.

#4555

Max Harry Weil

#79279

Overall Influence

#4556

Christine Overall

#55940

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Christine Overall FRSC is a Canadian philosopher specialising in feminist theory and applied ethics. She currently holds a Research Chair at Queen's University. Her books include Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry, which was awarded the 2006 Abbyann D. Lynch Medal in Bioethics, and Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate. In 1998, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#4557

John Watson

1847 - 1939 (92 years)

John Watson was a Canadian philosopher and academic. Life He was born in Gorbals parish, Glasgow, Scotland, on 25 February 1847, the son of John Watson, a printer from Lanarkshire, and his wife Elizabeth Robertson from Northumberland. He attended the Free Church School in Kilmarnock. He then worked as a clerk to 1866.

#4558

Dietrich Mahnke

1884 - 1939 (55 years)

Dietrich Mahnke was a German philosopher and historian of mathematics. From 1902–1906, Mahnke studied at Göttingen under Edmund Husserl and David Hilbert. After serving in the First World War , he graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1925 with a thesis on Leibniz. The thesis was later published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung as Leibnizens Synthese von Universalmathematik und Individualmetaphysik. In 1926 he habilitated at Greifswald with a thesis entitled Neue Einblicke in die Entdeckungsgeschichte der höheren Analysis. In 1927 he became a professor of...

#4559

Mark Addis

#60363

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Mark Addis FRSA is a British philosopher who is known for his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein Biography Addis grew up in Bolton, England, and was educated at Bolton School, Mansfield College, Oxford, the University of Leeds, the University of York and Birmingham City University. He has been a visiting scholar at Georgia State University, USA and at Aarhus University, Denmark. Addis has since 2006 been general editor of the Philosophy Insights series for Humanities-Ebooks LLP. He was treasurer of the British Philosophical Association. Addis was a consultant for the film Le Week-End.

#4560

Manuel Chrysoloras

Manuel Chrysoloras

1355 - 1415 (60 years)

Manuel Chrysoloras was a Byzantine Greek classical scholar, humanist, philosopher, professor, and translator of ancient Greek texts during the Renaissance. Serving as the ambassador for the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in medieval Italy, he became a renowned teacher of Greek literature and history in the republics of Florence and Venice, and today he's widely regarded as a pioneer in the introduction of ancient Greek literature to Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages.

#4561

M. M. Sharif

1893 - 1965 (72 years)

Mian Mohammad Sharif TI was a Pakistani philosopher, Islamic scholar, and college professor. He is noted for his work in analytical philosophy and pioneered the idea of Muslim philosophy. His work was published in international philosophical journals.

#4562

August Batsch

1761 - 1802 (41 years)

August Johann Georg Karl Batsch was a German naturalist. He was a recognised authority on mushrooms, and also described new species of ferns, bryophytes, and seed plants. Life and career Batsch was born in Jena, Saxe-Weimar to George Lorenz Bratsch and Ernestine Bratsch. He studied at the Jena City School, and then had private tuition. He showed an aptitude for natural sciences and drawing, and so subsequently studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Jena , entering in 1772 and obtaining his doctorate in philosophy in 1781 and in medicine in 1786, his supervisor being Justus Christian Loder.

#4563

Domingo de Soto

Domingo de Soto

1494 - 1560 (66 years)

Domingo de Soto, O.P. was a Spanish Dominican priest and Scholastic theologian born in Segovia , and died in Salamanca , at the age of 66. He is best known as one of the founders of international law and of the Spanish Thomistic philosophical and theological movement known as the School of Salamanca.

#4564

Ralph Weichselbaum

#69002

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Ralph R. Weichselbaum is an American physician specializing in radiation oncology, a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Ludwig professor, He is Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor of Radiation Oncology and Chairman, Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology, at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and Head of the University of Chicago Center for Radiation Therapy, and the director of the Chicago Tumor Institute. Weichselbaum is also Co- Director of the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research at the University o...

#4565

Niccolò Lorini

1544 - Present (482 years)

Niccolò Lorini was born in Florence in 1544. He served as a Preacher General Dominican Order and a lecturer in ecclesiastical history at the University of Florence. He is most famous for his involvement in the Galileo trails, the Galileo affair. He was a member of the Pigeon League named for one of Galileo's rivals, Lodovico delle Colombe. Lorini instigated the events of 1616 by sending the Roman Inquisition a copy of Galileo's letter to Benedetto Castelli.

#4566

David H. Spodick

#79434

Overall Influence

#4567

Edith Wyschogrod

Edith Wyschogrod

#52186

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Edith Wyschogrod was an American philosopher. She received her A.B. from Hunter College in 1957 and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970. Wyschogrod joined Rice's Religious Studies Department in 1992, as the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought; she retired in 2002, and held the title of professor emeritus from 2003. Wyschogrod was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , a Guggenheim Fellow , and a fellow of the National Humanities Center . She served one term as president of the American Academy of Religion .

#4568

Wacław Szybalski

Wacław Szybalski

#24563

Overall Influence

1921 - 2020 (99 years)

Wacław Szybalski was a Polish-American medical researcher, geneticist and professor of oncology at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin–Madison Medical School. Early life Wacław Szybalski was born in September 1921 in Lwów, Poland, into a Polish intelligentsia family. His father Stefan was an engineer, and his mother, Michalina née Rakowska, was a Doctor of Chemistry. The Szybalski family maintained close friendships with numerous leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia in Lwów, including Professor Jan Czekanowski, the father of Polish anthropology,...

#4569

Andy Miah

#46833

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Andy Miah is an English bioethicist, academic and journalist. His work often focuses on technology and posthumanism. Early life Andy Miah was born in Norwich to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother.

#4570

Timothy Binkley

Timothy Binkley

#43360

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Timothy Binkley , is an American philosopher, artist, and teacher, known for his radical writings about conceptual art and aesthetics, as well as several essays that help define computer art. He is also known for his interactive art installations.

#4571

Francesco Blasi

#78492

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Francesco Blasi is an Italian Medical scientist and professor. His domain of research is respiratory medicine. He has been the president of European Respiratory Society during 2012–13. He has served as the president of Italian Respiratory Society during 2015–17. He is presently serving as one of the board of directors of University of Milan and is the professor of respiratory medicine in department pathophysiology and transplantation in University of Milan.

#4572

Slavoj Žižek

#79496

Overall Influence

#4573

Neophytos Doukas

Neophytos Doukas

1760 - 1845 (85 years)

Neophytos Doukas or Dukas was a Greek priest and scholar, author of many books and translations from ancient Greek works, and one of the most important personalities of the modern Greek Enlightenment during the Ottoman occupation of Greece. His contributions to Greek education have been neglected because of the traditional ideas he advocated concerning the Greek language question .

#4574

Javier Gomá

#37885

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Javier Gomá Lanzón is a Spanish philosopher, writer and essayist, author of the Tetralogía de la ejemplaridad and a theatrical trilogy. He is also the Executive Director of the Juan March Foundation.

#4575

William Thompson

William Thompson

1775 - 1833 (58 years)

William Thompson was an Irish political and philosophical writer and social reformer, developing from utilitarianism into an early critic of capitalist exploitation whose ideas influenced the cooperative, trade union and Chartist movements as well as Karl Marx.

#4576

Iwao Hirose

#76088

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Iwao Hirose is a Japanese philosopher and economist. He is currently associate professor at McGill University. Background Iwao Hirose was educated at Waseda University and at University of St Andrews, where he received a PhD. Iwase has previously had tenures at the University College, Oxford and Harvard University.

#4577

Gerd Buchdahl

#47780

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Gerd Buchdahl was a German-English philosopher of science. Life Buchdahl was born to German-Jewish parents in Mainz; his younger brother, Hans Adolph Buchdahl was a well-known physicist. Both were transported from Britain to Australia as enemy aliens in 1940 on the Dunera. He became the first lecturer in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. A founding fellow of Darwin College, he became University Reader in 1966 and was the Tarner Lecturer at Trinity College in 1973, speaking on Science and rational structures.

#4578

Joseph Warkany

#79602

Overall Influence

#4579

Karel van Mander

Karel van Mander

1548 - 1606 (58 years)

Karel van Mander or Carel van Mander I was a Flemish painter, poet, art historian and art theoretician, who established himself in the Dutch Republic in the latter part of his life. He is mainly remembered as a biographer of Early Netherlandish painters and Northern Renaissance artists in his Schilder-boeck. As an artist and art theoretician he played a significant role in the spread and development of Northern Mannerism in the Dutch Republic.

#4580

George F. Cahill Jr.

#50220

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

George F. Cahill Jr. was an American scientist who significantly advanced the diabetes mellitus research of the 20th century. He focused on metabolic research, especially concerning human glucose metabolism in diabetic and normal conditions; he also investigated the effect of hunger and fasting on metabolic pathways and ketose processes. He was author and co-author of nearly 200 articles in scientific magazines and books.

#4581

Johannes Bouwmeester

1634 - 1680 (46 years)

Johannes Bouwmeester was a Dutch physician, philosopher and a founding member of the literary society Nil volentibus arduum. He enrolled at Leiden University in 1651 and in 1658 graduated there in medicine. He was a close friend of Lodewijk Meyer, co-founder of Nil volentibus arduum, and acquainted with the philosophers Benedictus de Spinoza and Adriaen Koerbagh. His father, Claes Bouwmeester, was tailor by trade and several family members were builders of musical instruments. He was born in Amsterdam.

#4582

Irene Higginson

#76862

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Irene J. Higginson is a British professor, head of department and the director of King's College London's Cicely Saunders Institute. Higginson has a medical degree from the University of Nottingham.

#4583

Carl Davidson

#20214

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Carl Davidson is a former student leader of the New Left of the 1960s, serving as a Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. From 1968 to 1976, he worked on the Guardian newsweekly as a writer and news editor. Born in 1943, he graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Penn State, and later taught and did graduate work at the University of Nebraska, between 1965 and 1966.

#4584

Didier Kaphagawani

#66973

Overall Influence

Didier Njirayamanda Kaphagawani or Didier Kaphagawani was a Malawian philosopher. He is known for his ideas on African philosophy. This included ideas on African epistemology and African understandings of personhood.

#4585

Isaac Orobio de Castro

Isaac Orobio de Castro

1617 - 1687 (70 years)

Balthazar Orobio de Castro , was a Portuguese Jewish philosopher, physician and religious apologist. Life While still a child, he was taken to Seville by his parents, who were Marranos. He studied philosophy at Alcalá de Henares and became teacher of metaphysics at the University of Salamanca. Later he devoted himself to the study of medicine, and became a popular practitioner in Seville, and physician in ordinary to the duke of Medina-Celi and to a family nearly related to the king.

#4586

Paul Nizan

1905 - 1940 (35 years)

Paul-Yves Nizan was a French philosopher and writer. He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and much of his writing reflects his political beliefs, although he resigned from the party soon after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He died in the Battle of Dunkirk, fighting against the German army in World War II.

#4587

Julius Schaller

1810 - 1868 (58 years)

Julius Schaller was a German philosopher born in Magdeburg. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Halle, where in 1834 he received his habilitation. In 1838 he became an associate professor at Halle, where in 1861 he was appointed a full professor.

#4588

Włodzimierz Julian Korab-Karpowicz

Włodzimierz Julian Korab-Karpowicz

#41141

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Włodzimierz Julian Korab-Karpowicz is a Polish philosopher and political theorist. Biography W. J. Korab-Karpowicz was born in Gliwice, Poland in 1953. He comes from a noble Polish family. Korab, included in his family name, refers to the Korab coat of arms. His grandfather Jan Korab-Karpowicz was a distinguished lawyer and cavalry officer in the pre-war Poland. In his early youth he lived in Gdańsk and then in Sopot, where he completed high school. He studied engineering at the Gdańsk University of Technology, where, in 1977, he completed a master's degree in Electronic Engineering.

#4589

Joseph Kaipayil

#79307

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Joseph Kaipayil is an Indian philosopher, who expounds a relationalist theory of reality. He is professor of philosophy at Jeevalaya Institute of Philosophy, Bangalore. In his writings one finds a sustained and systematic articulation of relationalism as a distinct philosophical theory. His works include: The Epistemology of Comparative Philosophy , Critical Ontology: An Introductory Essay , Human as Relational: A Study in Critical Ontology , An Essay on Ontology , and Relationalism: A Theory of Being .

#4590

Graeme Nicholson

#59061

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Graeme Nicholson was a Canadian philosopher and Emeritus Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto known for his research on ontology, hermeneutics, and anarchism. He completed his doctorate at the University of Toronto with a thesis on Heidegger directed by Emil Fackenheim.

#4591

Walter Schweidler

#63615

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Walter Rudolf Schweidler is a German philosopher. Life Since 2009, Schweidler has occupied the chair for philosophy at the Catholic University of Eichstätt; having previously taught philosophy at the Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Dortmund, and PH Weingarten. He is a student of Robert Spaemann, and was his assistant from 1985 to 1992 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he completed graduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy, Catholic theology, political science and law. His master’s thesis on Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy was published in 1983 , his doc...

#4592

James Higginbotham

#37769

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

James Higginbotham FBA was a distinguished professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He taught previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and at the University of Oxford as a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

#4593

Kohei Saito

#28411

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

is a Japanese philosopher. He is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. Saito works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His book, Capital in the Anthropocene, has been credited for inspiring a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought in Japan.

#4594

Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis

#10371

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Jannis Kounellis was a Greek Italian artist based in Rome. A key figure associated with Arte Povera, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Life and work Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece in 1936. He lived in Greece during the Second World War and Greek Civil War before he moved to Rome in 1956.

#4595

Aedesius

280 - 355 (75 years)

Aedesius was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic. He was born into a wealthy Cappadocian family, but he moved to Syria, where he was apprenticed to Iamblichos. None of his writings have survived, but there is an extant biography by Eunapius, a Greek sophist and historian of the 4th century who wrote a collection of biographies titled Lives of the Sophists. Aedesius's philosophical doctrine was a mixture between Platonism and eclecticism and, according to Eunapius, he differed from Iamblichus on certain points connected with theurgy and magic.

#4596

Ike Odimegwu

#54711

Overall Influence

Ike Ferdinand Odimegwu is a Nigerian professor of philosophy and political philosopher. Early life He was born at Obiaruku, a city in Delta State, southern Nigeria. He was a student under the tutelage of Theophilus Okere, a renowned Nigerian philosopher at Owerri, the capital of Imo State, Nigeria. He later obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Nigeria.

#4597

Yin Haiguang

1919 - 1969 (50 years)

Yin Haiguang was a Chinese author, educator and philosopher from Taiwan. Biography Yin was born to missionary parents in Huanggang, Hubei in December 1919 and was raised in Wuchang. His uncle, Yin Ziheng , was a revolutionist who took part in Xinhai Revolution.

#4598

Jay A. Nadel

#79857

Overall Influence

#4599

Christian Barry

#30612

Overall Influence

Christian Barry is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy and a former head of the School of Philosophy in the Research School of the Social Sciences at the ANU. Barry is known for his research on international justice. Christian was a program officer at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs before joining the ANU and is the Ethics Matters podcast co-presenter.

#4600

Christos Socrates Mantzoros

Christos Socrates Mantzoros

#68187

Overall Influence

Christos Socrates Mantzoros is a Greek American physician-scientist, practicing internist-endocrinologist, teacher and researcher. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an adjunct professor at Boston University School of Medicine. He currently serves as the chief of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the VA Boston Healthcare System, where he created de novo a leading academic division true to its tripartite mission and as the founding director of human nutrition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center , Harvard Medical School. Finally, he holds the editor-in-chief ...

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