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,

#4851

Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese

#12911

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Abraham Verghese is an American physician, author and Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School. He is the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015. He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the podcast Medscape Medicine and the Machine.

#4852

Thomas Davidson

Thomas Davidson

1840 - 1900 (60 years)

Thomas Davidson was a Scottish-American philosopher and lecturer. Biography Davidson was born of Presbyterian parents at Old Deer, near Aberdeen. After graduating from Aberdeen University as first graduate and Greek prizeman, he held the position of rector of the grammar school of Old Aberdeen . From 1863 until 1866, he was master in several English schools, spending his vacations on the continent. In 1866 he moved to Canada, to occupy a place in the London Collegiate Institute. In the following year, he came to the United States, and, after spending some months in Boston, moved to St. Louis...

#4853

Samuel Todes

#44996

Overall Influence

1927 - 1994 (67 years)

Samuel Todes was an American philosopher who made notable contributions to existentialism, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. Biography Todes taught philosophy at MIT after graduation from Harvard, alongside Hubert Dreyfus. He taught courses on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes developed a philosophy of needs, based on his critique of Kant's schematism and Merleau-Ponty's critique of Heidegger. This contribution was never published, beyond its basis in his dissertation. Gerry Stahl and Ralph D. Sawyer attended his courses as undergraduates. When Todes and Dreyfus we...

#4854

Ferdinand Ebner

1882 - 1931 (49 years)

Ferdinand Ebner , was an Austrian elementary school teacher and philosopher. Together with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, he is considered one of the most outstanding representatives of dialogical philosophy. Ebner's philosophy is about man existing in a I-Thou personal relationship with God and with others. His thought has similarities with the Christian existentialism of Gabriel Marcel. On the basis of the unity of I and Thou, which has in language , and in love its expressions, Ebner developed a religiously informed philosophy of language which led to his practical-ethical understanding...

#4855

Hipparchia of Maroneia

Hipparchia of Maroneia

350 BC - 280 BC (70 years)

Hipparchia of Maroneia was a Cynic philosopher, and wife of Crates of Thebes. She was the sister of Metrokles, the cynic philosopher. She was born in Maroneia, but her family moved to Athens, where Hipparchia came into contact with Crates, the most famous Cynic philosopher in Greece at that time. She fell in love with him, and, despite the disapproval of her parents, she married him. She went on to live a life of Cynic poverty on the streets of Athens with her husband.

#4856

Aizawa Seishisai

Aizawa Seishisai

1782 - 1863 (81 years)

Aizawa Seishisai, born Aizawa Yasushi, was a Japanese samurai and a nationalist thinker of the Mito school during the late shogunate period. In 1799 he became involved in the compilation of the Dai Nihon-shi being undertaken by the Mito school.

#4857

Silvio Danese

#83205

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

#4858

W. Robert Godfrey

#15033

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

W. Robert Godfrey is a minister in the United Reformed Churches in North America and formerly served as the third president of Westminster Seminary California. As of 2017 he is president emeritus and professor emeritus of church history. He currently is chairman of Ligonier Ministries, located in Sanford, Florida, a position he took over from the late Dr. R. C. Sproul.

#4859

Paul Souriau

1852 - 1926 (74 years)

Paul Souriau was a French philosopher known for his works on invention theory and aesthetics. Biography He studied at the École normale supérieure where he wrote a doctoral thesis entitled Théorie de l'invention published in 1881. In his thesis, he argues that inventions are not the result of a rigorous scientific method but rather come as a deterministic consequence of a set of conditions in which the inventor lives. This theory was contested very soon after its publication in the 1882 edition of the Revue Internationale de l'Enseignement. The French thesis was created simultaneously with a Latin thesis titled De motus perceptione.

#4860

Eugénie Ginsberg

1870 - 1944 (74 years)

Eugénie Ginsberg or Eugénie Ginsberg-Blaustein was a Polish philosopher and psychologist noted for her works on descriptive psychology and her analysis of existential dependence, independence, and related concepts as applied in the area of psychology.

#4861

George Turnbull

1698 - 1748 (50 years)

George Turnbull was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, teacher, writer on education and an early but little-known figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He taught at Marischal College, Aberdeen, worked as a tutor and became an Anglican clergyman. Aside from his published writings on moral philosophy, he is also known for the influence he exerted on Thomas Reid and as the first member of the Scottish Enlightenment to publish a formal treatise on the theory and practice of education.

#4862

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

1809 - 1885 (76 years)

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle was a German physician, pathologist, and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. His essay, "On Miasma and Contagia," was an early argument for the germ theory of disease. He was an important figure in the development of modern medicine.

#4863

Evelyn Pluhar

#83176

Overall Influence

Evelyn B. Pluhar-Adams is an American philosopher specialising in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind, especially concerning the moral status of animals. Biography Evelyn Pluhar studied for a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of Denver before going on to read for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her doctoral thesis was entitled The Ontological Status of Colour. She has spent much of her career at Pennsylvania State University, Fayette Campus, where she was an assistant professor of philosophy from 1978 to 1984, an associate professor of philoso...

#4864

Ali Harb

#59313

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Ali Harb is a Lebanese writer, intellectual, and philosopher, he has many works and is known for his style of writings. He is influenced by Jacques Derrida, particularly with his theory of deconstruction. His book Critique of the Text is part of the curriculum in the University of Paris. He stands against elitism, intellectual fundamentalism, and formal logic which is based on holistic thinking not abstract intellectual tools and mechanisms for consideration and thought. As Harb follows Kant’s approach of critiquing the mind and its mechanics and intellectual structure.

#4865

Lucilio Vanini

1585 - 1619 (34 years)

Lucilio Vanini , who, in his works, styled himself Giulio Cesare Vanini, was an Italian philosopher, physician and free-thinker, who was one of the first significant representatives of intellectual libertinism. He was among the first modern thinkers who viewed the universe as an entity governed by natural laws . He was also an early literate proponent of biological evolution, maintaining that humans and other apes have common ancestors. He was executed in Toulouse.

#4866

Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs

1794 - 1861 (67 years)

Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs was a German right Hegelian philosopher. Biography Hinrichs was the son of a Protestant pastor. He studied theology at Strassburg, and, following a crisis of faith, philosophy at Heidelberg under Hegel, who wrote a preface to his Religion im innern Verhältniss zur Wissenschaft , describing Hinrichs's work as turgid and difficult to follow. Hinrichs was convinced that philosophy was superior to theology in knowing and reconciling with God.

#4867

Brian Copenhaver

#50262

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Brian P. Copenhaver is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at The University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches and writes about philosophy, religion and science in late medieval and early modern Europe.

#4868

Uta Francke

#62077

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Uta Francke is a German-American physician-geneticist known for her accomplishments in mapping genes to specific chromosome locations and discovering the genes and underlying mutations responsible for Prader-Willi and Rett syndromes. Her work on detailed mapping of human chromosome laid the foundation of the Human Genome Project and discovery of many other rare genetic disorders. She is currently a professor of Genetics and Pediatrics Emerita at Stanford University. She has also served as a consultant to 23andMe Inc since 2007, and as a part-time employee from 2010-2013.

#4869

Attilio Maseri

#51622

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Attilio Maseri OMRI KSG was an Italian academic and physician specialized in cardiology, considered a leading researcher in the field of ischemic heart disease. His patients included Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II.

#4870

Joe Nickell

#1252

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Joe Nickell is an American skeptic and investigator of the paranormal. Nickell is senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and writes regularly for their journal, Skeptical Inquirer. He is also an associate dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute. He is the author or editor of over 30 books.

#4871

Bernardino Varisco

1850 - 1933 (83 years)

Bernardino Varisco , was an Italian philosopher and a professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome La Sapienza from 1905 to 1925. Life Bernardino Varisco was born on April 20, 1850, in Chiari, a commune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy, northern Italy. His mother was the daughter of the Italian philosopher Francesco Bonatelli and his father, Carlo, was the director of the Ginnasio Locale in Chiari. After the death of his mother in 1864, Varisco pursued classical studies at the Collegio Nazionale di Torino, and finally completed them first at the University of Padua then later at the University of Pavia where he graduated with a degree in mathematics.

#4872

William Nyhan

#10700

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (100 years)

William Leo Nyhan is an American physician best known as the co-discoverer of Lesch–Nyhan syndrome. Nyhan currently serves as professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine in La Jolla, California. He has held positions at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine and has served on a number of advisory committees, pediatric advisory boards, and research foundation boards.

#4873

Boetius of Dacia

1240 - 1284 (44 years)

Boetius de Dacia, OP was a 13th-century Danish philosopher. Name The rendering of his name Danske Bo into Medieval Latin as Boetius de Dacia stems from the fact that the toponym Dania, meaning Denmark, was occasionally confused with Dacia during the Middle Ages.

#4874

I. Glenn Cohen

#20812

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

I. Glenn Cohen is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also the director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. Cohen has written a number of articles, appearing in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine; JAMA; Cell; Nature; the Harvard, Stanford, Southern California, Minnesota, Iowa, and Hastings Law Reviews; the Harvard Journal of Law and Negotiation; the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology; the Food and Drug Law Journal; the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics; and the Hastings Center Reports. He has giv...

#4875

Gerald O'Collins

#12864

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Gerald Glynn O'Collins is an Australian Jesuit priest and academic. He was a research professor and writer-in-residence at the Jesuit Theological College in Parkville, Victoria, and a research professor in theology at St Mary's University College in Twickenham. For more than three decades, he was professor of systematic and fundamental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University .

#4876

Luca Incurvati

#65488

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Luca Incurvati is a logician and philosopher, currently an Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. Incurvati's research areas include set theory, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and metaethics. In set theory and philosophy of maths, Incurvati has argued for the iterative conception of sets, based on a methodology he terms inference to the best conception. Incurvati is currently the principal investigator in the Amsterdam-based project From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics, for which he was awarded a prestigious ERC grant of 1.5 million euros.

#4877

Henry Hudson

1565 - Present (461 years)

Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator during the early 17th century, best known for his explorations of present-day Canada and parts of the northeastern United States. In 1607 and 1608, Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a rumoured Northeast Passage to Cathay via a route above the Arctic Circle. In 1609, he landed in North America on behalf of the Dutch East India Company and explored the region around the modern New York metropolitan area. Looking for a Northwest Passage to Asia on his ship Halve Maen , he sailed up the Hudson River, which was later named after him, and thereby laid the foundation for Dutch colonization of the region.

#4878

Klaus Döring

#55786

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Klaus Döring is a German classical philologist and philosophical historian. Life and work Döring studied Classical philology, philosophy and musicology at the Universities of Kiel, Würzburg, Hamburg and Freiburg from 1957 to 1964. In 1964 he took the first state examination in Greek and Latin. From 1966, he worked at the University of Freiburg, initially in an assistant position. After he received his doctorate in 1970, he became an Academic Assistant. In 1976 he achieved his habilitation in classical philology at Freiburg. From 1978 to 1980 he completed a clerkship at the South Baden higher education authority.

#4879

Arno Ros

#23977

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Arno Ros is a German philosopher and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in Magdeburg, Germany. Biography Studies and initial teaching positions Ros studied Ibero-Romance languages, sociology, literature and philosophy in Hamburg, Madrid and Coimbra . He received his doctorate in 1971 for the dissertation On the theory of literary narrative. He earned his habilitation in Saarbrücken as an assistant of Kuno Lorenz. The title of his habilitation thesis was Philosophy as a methodological critique of meaning. In subsequent years, Ros was a visiting...

#4880

Paul Whelton

#48966

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Paul Kieran Whelton is an Irish-born American physician and scientist who has contributed to the fields of hypertension and kidney disease epidemiology. He also mentored several public health leaders including the deans of the schools of public health at Johns Hopkins and Columbia . He currently serves as the Show Chwan Health Care System Endowed Chair in Global Public Health and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is the founding director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinica...

#4881

François Picavet

1851 - 1921 (70 years)

François Picavet was a French philosopher, translator and authority on Kant. He is now best known for an 1891 essay, Les idéologues, on the history of ideas and of scientific theories, philosophy and religious and political ideas in France since 1789.

#4882

Gabriel M. Rebeiz

#83509

Overall Influence

#4883

Ismail al-Faruqi

1921 - 1986 (65 years)

Ismaʻīl Rājī al-Fārūqī was a Palestinian-American philosopher. He spent several years at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, then taught at universities in North America, including McGill University in Montreal. He was Professor of Religion at Temple University, where he founded and chaired the Islamic Studies program. Al-Faruqi was also the founder of the International Institute of Islamic Thought. He wrote over 100 articles for various scholarly journals and magazines in addition to 25 books, of the most notable being Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas. ...

#4884

Johannes Sløk

#27420

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

Johannes Sløk was a Danish philosopher, professor at the University of Aarhus and founder of "Idéhistorie" , an interdisciplinary discipline mainly about writings pertaining to the ideas of Western culture since Antiquity. The concept is now the "Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas" a department under the faculty of humanities of Aarhus University. During the student rising of 1968, Sløk was forced to leave his position as professor at Idéhistorie, and the institute became oriented around the Marxist theory. Sløk instead was granted a special position at the Department of Theology, as professor of analytic theology.

#4885

Stephen Park Turner

#35848

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Stephen Park Turner is a researcher in social practice, social and political theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Florida, where he also holds the title Distinguished University Professor. He has held a NEH Fellowship, was Simon Honorary Professor at Manchester University and has twice been the Advanced Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies

#4886

Origen the Pagan

200 - 300 (100 years)

Origen the Pagan was a Platonist philosopher who lived in Alexandria. He was a student of Ammonius Saccas and a contemporary of Plotinus in Ammonius's philosophy school in Alexandria. Some researchers posit that this Origen is the very same famous Christian philosopher and theologian Origen of Alexandria, who was educated by Ammonius Saccas. The pagan philosopher is sometimes referred to as Origenes to distinguish him more easily from the Christian Origen.

#4887

Robert Weingard

#46206

Overall Influence

Robert Weingard was a philosopher of science and professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. Biography He became faculty member at Rutgers University and later joined the Department of Philosophy of Rutger University's School of Arts and Sciences in 1988. On 14 September 1996, Robert Weingard died of a heart attack; some of his articles were published posthumously.

#4888

William J. Catalona

#83542

Overall Influence

#4889

Sergio Romagnani

#83543

Overall Influence

#4890

Christos Pantelis

#33688

Overall Influence

Professor Christos Pantelis is an Australian professor of medicine who is the Director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre. Profile Prof. Christos Pantelis is an Australian of Greek background. He completed his medical degree at the University of Melbourne and trained at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. Two years later, in 1979, he commenced his training in psychiatry at the Royal Free Hospital in London, England. During his training, he spent 18 months as a Research Registrar at University College Hospital to undertake an epidemiological study of schizophrenia in Inner London. He was appointed as a lecturer at Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School in 1988.

#4891

Gerd Heusch

#74511

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Gerd Heusch is a German physician, physiologist, and professor as well as chair of the Institute for Pathophysiology at the University of Essen Medical School. Biography Heusch attended the Medical Schools at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Bonn, where he graduated in 1979 and received his MD degree in 1980. Following obligatory military service as medical officer, he was postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physiology at the University of Düsseldorf Medical School where he completed his PhD in 1985. From 1985 to 1986 Heusch was research cardiologist at the University of California, San Diego under the mentorship of Dr.

#4892

Barry Kay

#75730

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Anthony Barrington "Barry" Kay was a British immunologist known for his research in asthma and allergy. He was a professor at Imperial College London and a consultant immunologist to Royal Brompton Hospital.

#4893

William A. Haseltine

William A. Haseltine

#42510

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

William A. Haseltine is an American scientist, businessman, author, and philanthropist. He is known for his groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS and the human genome. Haseltine was a professor at Harvard Medical School, where he founded two research departments on cancer and HIV/AIDS. He is a founder of several biotechnology companies, including Cambridge Biosciences, The Virus Research Institute, ProScript, LeukoSite, Dendreon, Diversa, X-VAX, and Demetrix. He was a founder chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, a company that pioneered the application of genomics to drug discovery.

#4894

Ernesto Grassi

#54645

Overall Influence

1902 - 1991 (89 years)

Ernesto Grassi was an Italian philosopher. Life He maintained an intimate friendship with Donald Phillip Verene. Thought Grassi sought to take up the Heideggerean Destruktion of metaphysics, grounding his philosophical enterprise instead in the tradition of rhetoric. He identified the Italian humanist tradition as a potential site to begin this development of philosophy, and his works often contain copious references to the Italian humanists. In this tradition, "work and metaphor are the source of human history and society", an approach to thought which must reject the rational, proceeding a...

#4895

Engelbert Mveng

#24421

Overall Influence

1930 - 1995 (65 years)

Engelbert Mveng, SJ , was a Cameroonian Jesuit priest, artist, historian, theologian, and anthropologist. Early life and religious education Born in a Presbyterian family but baptized in a Catholic church, Mveng received a Christian education from his parents. His intelligence was noticed by a priest, Father Herbard, who sent him to school in Efok, Cameroon from 1943 to 1944. As a teenager, his talent for draftsmanship led him to tutor younger students at a nearby mission school in Minlaba. The next stage of his studies followed in the minor seminary of Akono from 1944 to 1949.

#4896

James Fraser Mustard

James Fraser Mustard

#29418

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

James Fraser Mustard was a Canadian doctor and renowned researcher in early childhood development. Born, raised and educated in Toronto, Ontario, Mustard began his career as a research fellow at the University of Toronto where he studied the effects of blood lipids, their relation to heart disease and how Aspirin could mitigate those effects. He published the first clinical trial showing that aspirin could prevent heart attacks and strokes. In 1966, he was one of the founding faculty members at McMaster University's newly established medical school. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and the medical school at McMaster University from 1972 to 1982.

#4897

Robert A. Bruce

#17072

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

Robert Arthur Bruce was an American cardiologist and a professor at the University of Washington. He was known as the "father of exercise cardiology" for his research and development of the Bruce Protocol.

#4898

Max Oelschlaeger

#74044

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Max Oelschlaeger is an American ecological philosopher, active in the study of Environmental Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology, Philosophy of Ecology, Contemporary Environmental Issues, Postmodern Environmental Ethics, and the Philosophy of Wilderness.

#4899

Dorthe Jørgensen

Dorthe Jørgensen

#71307

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Dorthe Jørgensen is a Danish philosopher, theologian, and historian of ideas. In 2006, she became the first Danish woman to be awarded the honorary higher doctoral degree dr.phil.habil., in recognition of several successful publications. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Philosophy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University.

#4900

Amalie J. Hathaway

#82032

Overall Influence

Amalie John Hathaway was a German-American philosopher and lecturer, who contributed to the pessimism controversy in Germany. Life and work Hathaway was born in Mühlhausen, Germany. She moved with her family to Wisconsin when she was 12 and ran a country school from the age of 15, as a source of income. She was introduced to philosophy by the lecturer Benjamin Cocker who brought to her attention the works of "German metaphysicians and philosophers", including Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, which she could read and understand in their original language. While pursuing her studies, ...

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