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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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,

#4901

Peter M. Donohue

#24704

Overall Influence

Peter M. Donohue is an American academic administrator and Roman Catholic priest who was inaugurated as Villanova University's 32nd President on September 8, 2006. He had served as the Chair of the Villanova Theatre Department since 1992.

#4902

Peter T. Macklem

#83692

Overall Influence

#4903

Nikolaus Knoepffler

#63995

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Nikolaus Knoepffler is a philosopher and theologian. He currently holds the Chair of Applied Ethics and is the Director of the Ethics Center at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Knoepffler is founder and president of the Global Applied Ethics Institute a consortium mainly involved with research on bioethics and business ethics.

#4904

Inocenc Arnošt Bláha

Inocenc Arnošt Bláha

1879 - 1960 (81 years)

Inocenc Arnošt Bláha was a prominent Czech sociologist and philosopher. Since 1922 the professor of sociology at the Masaryk university, Brno, 1950 pensioned. Bláha was the leading figure of the Brno school of sociology and author of the theoretical concept of 'federative functionalism'.

#4905

Roy A. Clouser

#42459

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Roy A. Clouser is professor emeritus of the College of New Jersey. He has served as professor of philosophy, religion, and logic at the college since 1968. He serves as the resident philosopher of Christian Leaders Institute.

#4906

Michael Waterman

Michael Waterman

#6897

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Michael Spencer Waterman is a Professor of Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern California , where he holds an Endowed Associates Chair in Biological Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science. He previously held positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University.

#4907

Lorenzo Chiesa

#54854

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between ontology, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Biography Chiesa is currently a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. He also teaches at the European Graduate School. Previously, he taught at the University of Kent , where he was a Full Professor of Modern European Thought and founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He was also visiting professor in the MA programme in Socio-Political Philosophy of the European University at Saint Petersburg and at the Freud's Dream Museum in Saint Petersburg.

#4908

Giuseppe Tarantino

1857 - 1950 (93 years)

Giuseppe Tarantino was an Italian philosopher, professor of moral philosophy and pedagogy and rector at the University of Pisa, Italy. Biography Giuseppe Tarantino was born in Gravina in Puglia. His father was Filippo Tarantino, a local nobleman, while his mother was Letizia Spagnuolo.

#4909

Åsa Wikforss

#83764

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Åsa Wikforss is a professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University, and a member of the Swedish Academy. Wikforss does research in the intersection of philosophy of mind, language and epistemology and has published widely on a variety of topics in the area. She is a member of several international research networks and research councils and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In September 2017 she published Alternativa fakta: Om kunskapen och dess fiender . The book was gifted to over 100 000 gymnasium students for the Christmas of 2019, but was criticized in an a...

#4910

Bernard Zinman

#71004

Overall Influence

Bernard Zinman is a Canadian clinical and research endocrinologist, whose research at the University of Toronto focuses on type 1 and type 2 diabetes. He directed the Mount Sinai Hospital Leadership Sinai Centre for Diabetes and the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre . In 2019, he was appointed as an Officer to the Order of Canada in recognition of his scientific contributions, including the development of preventative therapies for diabetes.

#4911

Jay A. Levy

#20366

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Jay A. Levy is an American AIDS and cancer research physician. He is a professor of medicine with specialties in virology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco . Biography Levy was born in Wilmington, Delaware, with his twin brother, Stuart B. Levy. Levy received his B.A. degree with high honors from Wesleyan University in 1960 and subsequently his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1965. He conducted research for a year on regeneration in planaria at the Université de Paris on Fulbright and French government fellowships. ...

#4912

Filippo Crea

#83799

Overall Influence

#4913

Elsie Whetnall

1897 - 1998 (101 years)

Elsie Matilda Maude Whetnall was a British analytic philosopher. Life and career Elsie Whetnall was the daughter of Thomas William Ward Whetnall, a Staff Officer for the Board of Education, and Emma Cox. She was educated at Southall County Secondary School, then at Bedford College, London University, where she obtained a first-class degree in 1921. Whetnall was an external doctoral student of Susan Stebbing, at Bedford College where she wrote her thesis on the theory of symbols. They were friends, and Stebbing, in the preface to her book A Modern Introduction to Logic , wrote: "...in personal discussion I owe more than I can say to my friend, Miss E.M.

#4914

Gwenaëlle Aubry

Gwenaëlle Aubry

#68264

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Gwenaëlle Aubry is a French novelist and philosopher. Biography After two years of preparatory classes at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, Aubry began her studies at the École Normale Supérieure in 1989 at the age of eighteen, earning an agrégation in Philosophy in 1992. She then received the Knox Scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she earned a Master of Philosophy. In 1999 she received a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne.

#4915

Carl Posy

#50327

Overall Influence

Carl Jeffrey Posy is an Israeli philosopher. He is a full professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel. Carl Posy received his PhD degree from Yale University in the United States in 1971.

#4916

Alfonso Gómez-Lobo

#71963

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Alfonso Gómez-Lobo was a professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy at Georgetown University known for his critical evaluations of modern-day ethics. He was a member of The President's Council on Bioethics of the United States.

#4917

Patricia De Martelaere

Patricia De Martelaere

#49824

Overall Influence

1957 - 2009 (52 years)

Patricia De Martelaere was a Flemish philosopher, professor, author and essayist. Born in Zottegem, Belgium, her full name was Patricia Marie Madeleine Godelieve. She graduated in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven and then taught and lectured there and at the Catholic University of Brussels.

#4918

Yves Roucaute

#19304

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Yves Roucaute is a French philosopher , Phd , Phd , writer, professeur agrégé in philosophy, professeur agrégé in political science, teaching at Paris X University Nanterre, Previous President of the scientific Council of the "Institut National des Hautes Etudes de Securité et de Justice" , director of the review "Cahiers de la Sécurité", counsellor of the "réformateurs" group at the French National Assembly. He has held a number of positions in cabinet ministers of right-wing governments, and is a close friend of Alain Madelin, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Nicolas Sarkozy. He is also a journali...

#4919

Kenneth Mayer

#81815

Overall Influence

Kenneth Hugh Mayer is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the Medical Research Director and the co-chair of the Fenway Institute. Mayer is also a professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Director of HIV Prevention Research and Attending Physician at Beth Israel Lahey Health, and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Community Health at Brown University.

#4920

Brendan Sweetman

Brendan Sweetman

#61461

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Brendan Sweetman is an Irish philosopher whose research interests are in philosophy of religion, contemporary European philosophy, political philosophy, and business ethics. He is a specialist on the work of French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel. He holds the Sullivan Chair of Philosophy and is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

#4921

Carol Cleland

#57434

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Carol Edith Cleland is an American philosopher of science known for her work on the definition of life and the shadow biosphere, on the classification of minerals by their geological history, on the distinction between historical and experimental approaches to science, and on the Church–Turing thesis on theoretical limits to physical computation. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, holds affiliations with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the SETI Institute, and the CU Boulder Center for Astrobiology, and directs the Center for Study of Origins.

#4922

George K. Aghajanian

#83872

Overall Influence

#4923

David Auerbach

#15794

Overall Influence

David Auerbach is an American writer and former Microsoft and Google software engineer. He has written on a variety of subjects, including social issues and popular culture, the environment, computer games, philosophy and literature. His 2018 book Bitwise: A Life in Code was well received, and chosen by Popular Mechanics as one of its 30 "Best Sci/Tech Books of 2018".

#4924

Julius Bergmann

1839 - 1904 (65 years)

Julius Bergmann was a German philosopher. Biography At the University of Göttingen and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, he devoted himself to mathematics and philosophy, was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Königsberg in 1872, and three years later to a similar chair at the University of Marburg.

#4925

James C. Hogg

#47005

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

James C. Hogg is a Canadian physician and one of Canada's leading pulmonary pathologists. Hogg has been recognized for his research into Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. He received the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award in 2013. He became an officer of the Order of Canada in 2005 and was named to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2010. He also received the Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

#4926

Louis Marin

#30845

Overall Influence

1931 - 1992 (61 years)

Louis Marin was a French philosopher, historian, semiotician, and art critic. He was born in La Tronche, France. He is a French post-structuralistic thinker. He attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne and graduated with a Licence in Philosophy in 1952. His degree was followed in 1953 with an Agrégé in Philosophy and with a Docteur d'Etat in 1973. Marin taught at the University of Nanterre, Paris from 1967 to 1970, the University of California, San Diego from 1970 to 1974, Johns Hopkins University from 1974 to 1977, and finally at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1977 to 1992.

#4927

Erwin Ackerknecht

Erwin Ackerknecht

1906 - 1988 (82 years)

Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.

#4928

Aramesh Dustdar

#66440

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Aramesh Dustdar was an Iranian philosopher, writer, scholar, and philosophy lecturer at Tehran University. Dustdar received a Ph.D. degree in philosophy from the University of Bonn. He is known in n as a secular Heideggerian philosopher .

#4929

Truman G. Madsen

Truman G. Madsen

#60299

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Truman Grant Madsen was a professor of religion and philosophy at Brigham Young University and director of the Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. He was a prolific author, a recognized authority on Joseph Smith, and a popular lecturer among Latter-day Saints. At one point, Madsen was an instructor at the LDS Institute of Religion in Berkeley, California.

#4930

Joseph R. Bertino

#69046

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Joseph Rocco Bertino was an American researcher in the cancer pharmacology program at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and professor of medicine and pharmacology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. His research focused on the treatment of lymphoma.

#4931

Robert Nola

#38309

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Robert Nola was a New Zealand philosophy academic, and was an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. His work focussed on the philosophy and history of science, on epistemology and on metaphysics.

#4932

Pema Chödrön

#8406

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Pema Chödrön is an American Tibetan-Buddhist. She is an ordained nun, former acharya of Shambhala Buddhism and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chödrön has written several dozen books and audiobooks, and is principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia.

#4933

Gerhard Opelz

#84000

Overall Influence

#4934

Takashi Tsuruo

#84001

Overall Influence

#4935

Pedro da Fonseca

Pedro da Fonseca

1528 - 1599 (71 years)

Pedro da Fonseca was a Portuguese Jesuit philosopher and theologian. His work on logic and metaphysics made him known in his time as the Portuguese Aristotle; he projected the 'Cursus Conimbricenses' realized by Manuel de Góis and others.

#4936

Erin I. Kelly

#45666

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Erin I. Kelly is an American philosopher and author. She is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. Her book Chasing Me to My Grave, which she co-wrote with the subject Winfred Rembert, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

#4937

Riitta Hari

#28975

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Riitta Kyllikki Hari is a Finnish neuroscientist, physician and professor at Aalto University. She has led the Brain Research Unit at the Low Temperature Laboratory since 1982. Hari was appointed as Academician of Science on 26 November 2010.

#4938

Dirk Schadendorf

#84024

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

#4939

Ammonius of Athens

50 - 100 (50 years)

Ammonius of Athens , sometimes called Ammonius the Peripatetic, was a philosopher who taught in Athens in the 1st century AD. He was a teacher of Plutarch, who praises his great learning, and introduces him discoursing on religion and sacred rites. Plutarch wrote a biography of him, which is no longer extant, and also mentioned Ammonius master in other works like the De E apud Delphos within the collection of treatises known as Moralia. From the information supplied by Plutarch, Ammonius was clearly an expert in the works of Aristotle, but he may have nevertheless been a Platonist philosopher ...

#4940

Heidi Ledford

#84031

Overall Influence

#4941

Laurent Poirel

#84058

Overall Influence

#4942

Ernest A. Mcculloch

#84066

Overall Influence

#4943

Daniel Stoljar

#58426

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Daniel Stoljar is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He was the President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy . Stoljar is known for his works on physicalism and philosophical progress.

#4944

Simon Flexner

1863 - 1946 (83 years)

Simon Flexner was a physician, scientist, administrator, and professor of experimental pathology at the University of Pennsylvania . He served as the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was also a friend and adviser to John D. Rockefeller Jr.

#4945

Antonio Gasbarrini

#84134

Overall Influence

#4946

Étienne Klein

#18481

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Étienne Klein is a French physicist and philosopher of science, born in 1958. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, he holds a DEA in theoretical physics, as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy of science and an accreditation to supervise research .

#4947

Edward J. Goetzl

#84168

Overall Influence

#4948

Jan Westerhoff

#57497

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Jan Christoph Westerhoff is a German philosopher and orientalist with specific interests in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. He is currently Professor of Buddhist Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Oxford.

#4949

Pierre-Simon Ballanche

Pierre-Simon Ballanche

1776 - 1847 (71 years)

Pierre-Simon Ballanche was a French writer and counterrevolutionary philosopher, who elaborated a theology of progress that possessed considerable influence in French literary circles in the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was the ninth member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1842.

#4950

Scott Aikin

#72663

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Scott F. Aikin is an American philosopher and assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he also holds a joint appointment in Classics. He earned an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Montana in 1999 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2006. His principal areas of research are epistemology, argumentation theory, ancient philosophy, and pragmatism.

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