Such lists are typically nonsense if taken too seriously, because when we look for a qualitative impact, high level quantifying metrics to measure influence (su

Such lists are typically nonsense if taken too seriously, because when we look for a qualitative impact, high level quantifying metrics to measure influence (such as numbers of sold books, numbers of citations, etc.) misses some aspects that make someone important for a field. I do not mean, that they are useless, but need to supplemented or even challenged by other observations. So here are my observations as someone with a professional background in philosophy from Germany (my observations are more or less limited to this country) regarding Chomsky: Firstly, it is not mandatory to be a philosopher by profession to have some impact in the field (or even have considerable impact; Niels Bohr or Niklas Luhmann come to my mind). As far as Chomsky is conserned, his theory of generative grammar played an important reference point for language philosophy. Philosophers were typically not diving very deep into the details of the theory. That was indeed left to linguistics. But the general framework of generative grammar was textbook knowledge when I first came across the name Chomsky, as part of my philosophy undergraduate studies in the early 1990s. It took me some time to discover that he was also a political activist. To turn this into a (hypothetical) quantifiable metric: If you were to present my fellow (lanugage) philosophy students at the time with the task of naming any US Americans they remember from their studies, the name Noam Chomsky would have been quite prominent. Had they been asked instead for the names of US Americans to whose theories they particularly dedicated one of their essays, Chomsky would probably not have been very prominent.