Most Influential Philosopher
Most influential Philosopher
I will restrict this question to recent philosophers. It not an easy question, because influence is hard to measure or estimate; and it varies over time, sometimes quite dramatically. It is certainly not me, not by a long chalk. There are the usual suspects, whom I do not need to mention. After giving it some thought, I am going to nominate Jerry Fodor. I think he overturned Wittgensteinian orthodoxy, or what remained of it. He destroyed behaviorism (preceded by Chomsky). For my money, Saul Kripke comes second: his influence was no doubt massive, but he didn’t destroy a whole school of thought—and Fodor kept at it, relentlessly. He also changed the way philosophers write (not always for the best). David Lewis had some influence, but it wasn’t so widespread. So did John Rawls, but it was limited to political philosophy. Thomas Nagel re-introduced depth to philosophy, and a concern with traditional problems. All these people had have had undeniable influence, but I think Fodor stands out, if not by a wide margin. I wonder what other people think.
The entry on Fodor in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://iep.utm.edu/fodor/ — speaks of his “enormous influence on virtually all parts of the literature in the philosophy of mind since 1960, Fodor’s work had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences. In the 1960s, along with Hilary Putnam, Noam Chomsky, and others, Fodor presented influential criticisms of the behaviorism.” Part of this is quoted in the second sentence of the Wikipedia entry on Fodor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor#CITEREFIEP_Fodor
He is hard to beat.
As you say, influence is not always for the better. It seems like a question that might get the person most responsible for the formation of the conventional view, and some might think that’s a dubious honor. As for Fodor, I’m in no position to judge whether that assessment is true, but he always struck me as somebody who, if he were trying to be a poet, he would be called a poetaster; I don’t know if there’s a corresponding term for philosophers. Could there have been some “sociological” influence involved? You get a better question when you turn to Nagel, about getting people on the right track. As an example of influence, I might offer Michael Friedman in philosophy of science, but that’s just a narrow area, not overall.
I see there is such a word as “philosophaster”, a “pretender or dabbler in philosophy”. This raises the question os to whether we are all philophasters to some degree (some more than others).