Philosophy matters, but does academic philosophy have more impact than philosophy done outside the academy? A list of historically influential philosophers:
| Academic | Non-academic |
| Plato | Socrates |
| Aristotle | Locke |
| Aquinas | Descartes |
| Galileo | Spinoza |
| Smith | Hume |
| Kant | Kierkegaard |
| Hegel | Marx |
| Russell | Mill |
| Heidegger | Rand |
| Popper | Sartre |
Split: Nietzsche was an academic early in his career and then quit for a non-academic intellectual career.
