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The most cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

82 points by bbor 2y ago

robwwilliams 2y ago
Odd, interesting, and surprising ranking to me. Note that this is a ranking of “authors” and not of “philosophers”. However fewer than 20 would likely have been uncomfortable with the tag of philosopher. I just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to rank philosophers; Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Here's a revised list of 100 philosophers born after 1899, ranked approximately by their impact on philosophy and related fields. I've ensured they primarily considered themselves philosophers or worked in closely related fields: 1. Michel Foucault (1926) 2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905) 3. Simone de Beauvoir (1908) 4. Jacques Derrida (1930) 5. Jürgen Habermas (1929) 6. Noam Chomsky (1928) 7. Hannah Arendt (1906) 8. John Rawls (1921) 9. Judith Butler (1956) 10. Thomas Kuhn (1922) 11. Karl Popper (1902) 12. Theodor Adorno (1903) 13. Gilles Deleuze (1925) 14. Frantz Fanon (1925) 15. Simone Weil (1909) 16. Albert Camus (1913) 17. Emmanuel Levinas (1906) 18. Martha Nussbaum (1947) 19. Richard Rorty (1931) 20. Peter Singer (1946) 21. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954) 22. Julia Kristeva (1941) 23. Roland Barthes (1915) 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942) 25. Edward Said (1935) 26. Slavoj Žižek (1949) 27. Hilary Putnam (1926) 28. Daniel Dennett (1942) 29. Iris Murdoch (1919) 30. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929) 31. Paul Ricoeur (1913) 32. Charles Taylor (1931) 33. Cornel West (1953) 34. bell hooks (1952) 35. Donna Haraway (1944) 36. Luce Irigaray (1930) 37. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919) 38. Donald Davidson (1917) 39. W.V.O. Quine (1908) 40. Saul Kripke (1940) 41. Bernard Williams (1929) 42. Alvin Plantinga (1932) 43. Patricia Churchland (1943) 44. Robert Nozick (1938) 45. Derek Parfit (1942) 46. Thomas Nagel (1937) 47. Philippa Foot (1920) 48. Susan Haack (1945) 49. Alain Badiou (1937) 50. Jacques Lacan (1901) 51. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929) 52. John McDowell (1942) 53. Onora O'Neill (1941) 54. David Chalmers (1966) 55. Bruno Latour (1947) 56. Michael Walzer (1935) 57. Christine Korsgaard (1952) 58. Giorgio Agamben (1942) 59. Charles Mills (1951) 60. Hubert Dreyfus (1929) 61. Seyla Benhabib (1950) 62. Jerry Fodor (1935) 63. Patricia Hill Collins (1948) 64. David Lewis (1941) 65. Catharine MacKinnon (1946) 66. Michael Sandel (1953) 67. Ernesto Laclau (1935) 68. Peter Sloterdijk (1947) 69. Carol Gilligan (1936) 70. Hélène Cixous (1937) 71. Sally Haslanger (1955) 72. Ernest Gellner (1925) 73. Marilyn Frye (1941) 74. Kwame Gyekye (1939) 75. Chantal Mouffe (1943) 76. Ian Hacking (1936) 77. Eva Feder Kittay (1946) 78. Enrique Dussel (1934) 79. Iris Marion Young (1949) 80. Simon Critchley (1960) 81. Rosi Braidotti (1954) 82. Axel Honneth (1949) 83. Linda Alcoff (1955) 84. Robert Brandom (1950) 85. Uma Narayan (1948) 86. Elizabeth Anderson (1959) 87. Paulin J. Hountondji (1942) 88. Nancy Fraser (1947) 89. Jürgen Moltmann (1926) 90. Ruth Millikan (1933) 91. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929) 92. Harry Frankfurt (1929) 93. Stanley Cavell (1926) 94. Jurgen Mittelstrass (1936) 95. Cora Diamond (1937) 96. Charles Larmore (1950) 97. Bas van Fraassen (1941) 98. Susan Neiman (1955) 99. Kwasi Wiredu (1931) 100. John Searle (1932) This list includes philosophers from various traditions and geographical regions, focusing on those who have had significant impact on philosophical discourse in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The ranking is subjective and based on perceived influence in academic philosophy and broader intellectual impact. ————— I love Rorty’s clarity and humor and general ironic and deflationary approach to philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  The fact that post-modernist/post-structuralists dominate the top spots says something about philosophy in general. A lot of those names thought that the age of consent in France was way too high - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_of_consent_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_o...
  - gizajob 2y ago
    Your point being? Waving the makings of an ad hominem in their direction doesn’t discount their entire philosophies. Postmodernists and post-structuralists are used and cited all across the Arts outside of philosophy, particularly in literary theory.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      A significant portion of the humanities is literally poisoned by Postmodernism/Post-structuralism/Critical Theory. Yes. We call a lot of these fields "Grievance Studies". They're all bunk in the same way that Chiropractors are - despite many "authoritative" insurance companies buying into the scam. Let's open up a random quote from one of the champions of the Pomo movement, Deleuze and Guattari, in their famous work "Anti-oedipus": "we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors." You might respond with "Oh this quote is out of context, they're satirizing freud and Freud's reading of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge, trying to go beyond him" except that their initial OG champion, Freud, was literally 100% wrong to the point that no one can find ANY experimental evidence for the actual existence of the Oedipus[1] OR Electra[2] Complex or any of the rest of the nonsense that Freud, Jung, Lacan, or any of their disciples peddled through the academy. French post-modernism/post-strcturalism is so incoherent that trying to argue against it is a category error as it makes no claim to exist the same realm as reason (a hegemonic concept ignored by them), rather, it is poetry by another name - and it's particularly poor poetry. The academy would be better off disavowing it, as it's produced nothing of value except an army of unemployable ivory tower elitist "revolutionaries". [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex
bbor 2y ago
Fascinating list that I thought yall would enjoy! If you’re not yet aware, https://plato.stanford.edu https://plato.stanford.edu is as close to “philosophical canon” as it gets in modern American academia. Shoutout to Gödel and Neumann taking top spots despite not really being philosophers, at least in how they’re remembered. Comparatively, I’m honestly shocked that neither Bohr nor Heisenberg made the cut, even though there’s multiple articles on quantum physics… Turing also managed to sneak in under the wire, with 33 citations. The bias inherent in the source is discussed in detail, and I would also love to hear HN ideas on how to improve this project, and how to visualize the results! I’m not the author, but this is right up my alley to say the least, and I’d love to take a crack at it.
- defrost 2y ago
  > and how to visualize the results! There's bound to be something to be teased out from who referenced whom and when. Eg: (random example) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest had a great many students from the 1980s onwards, coinciding with the rise of plato.stanford.edu personal computers and the internet. He's come in at #51 or so likely on the back of a generation of philosophy students with technology crossover writing up early articles on plato and throwing in a citation to Priest. I'm in no way implying this is undeserved, just as an example of some of the weighting bias coming from the era when many plato stub articles originated.
- westurner 2y ago
  From "Show HN: WhatTheDuck – open-source, in-browser SQL on CSV files" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836220 : > datasette-lite can load [remote] sqlite and Parquet but not yet DuckDB (?) with Pyodide in WASM, and there's also JupyterLite as a datasette plug-in: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net JSON-LD with https://schema.org/Person https://schema.org/Person records with wikipedia/dbpedia RDF URIs would make it easy to query on whichever datasets can be joined on common RDFS properties like schema: :identifier and rdfs:subPropertyOf sub-properties, https://schema.org/url https://schema.org/url, :sameAs, Plato in RDF from dbpedia: https://dbpedia.org/page/Plato https://dbpedia.org/page/Plato Today there are wikipedia URLs, DOI URN URIs, shorturls in QR codes, ORCID specifically to search published :ScholarlyArticle by optional :author, and now there are W3C DIDs Decentralized Identifiers for signing, identifying, and searching of unique :Thing and skos:Concept that can be generated offline and optionally registered centrally, or centrally generated and assigned like DOIs but they're signing keys. Given uncertainty about time intervals, plot concepts over time with charts for showing graph growth over time. Maybe philosophy skos:Concept intervals (and relations, links) from human annotations thereof and/or from LLM parsing and search snippets of Wikipedia, dbpedia RDF, wikidata RDF, and ranked Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy terminological occurrence frequency.
halfcat 2y ago
> ”Only authors born 1900 or later are included.” Ah, that’s why Plato isn’t #1
- fsckboy 2y ago
  Plato cited Socrates a lot
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- gizajob 2y ago
  A series of footnotes to David Lewis doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  For the uninformed: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979]; <https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.html https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.h...> (There's a fair bit of truth to this.)
alephnerd 2y ago
> 2. Quine, Willard van Orman (213) It's easy to become number 2 when you reference yourself /s (For reference, a Quine is a type of computer program that takes no input and only reproduces it's source code, so basically self replicating. This is based on Quine's research into the logic of recursion and replication [0]) [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
kome 2y ago
very out of touch with European philosophy, and therefore global philosophy. Strange anglo-centric project. edit: that's literally the point of the post, my bad.
- Gimpei 2y ago
  I don't see why "European" philosophy (I assume you mean continental) is any more global than analytic philosophy. Both originate from what is only a small sliver of humanity. In fact continental philosophy with its heavy French and German focus, comes from an even smaller demographic base than Anglo world, which at the very least includes the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    Young Hegelian Karl Marx seems to have found a few fans worldwide.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Continental Philosophy is basically useless. Critical Theory is usually fashionable nonsense, and the best continentals are the most fashionable and the most nonsensical. You know it's bad when one of the champions of the Continentals, Zizek, is at his most coherent in a decade when he's talking about how he received the "N word pass" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvw6BUgU0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvw6BUgU0I
  - gizajob 2y ago
    Calling critical theory fashionable nonsense is itself fashionable nonsense.
  - Yodel0914 2y ago
    Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Freud, Hegel and Marx all, I believe, fall under the 'continental philosophy' banner. It seems rather, um, ambitious to call them all useless.
djha-skin 2y ago
John Von Neumann is #145, pretty cool. Anyone else spot any other programming greats in the list?
- Vecr 2y ago
  There's a few others, but people here already spotted them. Alfred Tarski on there but he was a mathematician.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    Tarski was a mathematician if and only if Tarski was a mathematician
    - ckcheng 2y ago
      Surely you mean: “Tarski was a mathematician” is true if and only if Tarski was a mathematician. [1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-schema https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-schema
citizen_friend 2y ago
Remember that like wikipedia, citing yourself, or people related to your work is a form of marketing, and important for careers.
gizajob 2y ago
Not sure the point of having a filter to select only authors born after 1900. Does show the bias towards the American end of Anglo-American analytic philosophy though. Quine is ponderous. No idea how David Lewis made it to the top of the list either. Without Wittgenstein included, to me this list seems fairly pointless. Realise he might not be close to the top but without his work most of these American philosophers would be nowhere. Maybe I have a different idea as what counts as “contemporary”. Hume seems pretty contemporary to me. So does Nietzsche.
- kome 2y ago
  modern yes, contemporary no...
  - gizajob 2y ago
    What if I cited them last week?
    - keiferski 2y ago
      In the philosophy world, Modern Western Philosophy typically means circa 1500-1600-1700 or so and a class in the subject will include Hume, Locke, Descartes, etc. Here’s a typical syllabus from Rutgers: https://philosophy.rutgers.edu/syllabus-repository-2/spring-2020-syllabi/872-205-01-intro-to-modern-phil-r-fry-spring-2020/file https://philosophy.rutgers.edu/syllabus-repository-2/spring-... Contemporary doesn’t really mean anything other than “somewhat recently”; there is no established set of thinkers considered contemporary ones.
      - robwwilliams 2y ago
        “Contemporary” as in Belonging to the same period of time. "a fact documented by two contemporary sources." Of about the same age. Current; modern. "contemporary trends in design."
        keiferski 2y ago
dredmorbius 2y ago
I love textual analysis of this sort, and have done some vaguely similar analysis of HN front page activity[1], which includes some by-submitter and by-site breakdowns. About a decade back I'd used a somewhat similar listing of "top global thinkers", compiled from Foreign Policy magazine, to come up with a proxy for substantiveness / quality ratings of various websites / domains / TLDs. I've wanted to follow that up with something based on philosophers, on the general assumption that such references tend to be more-than-topical, especially after one gets beyond the most popular / well-known names. In particular I'd found that there were disproportionately many references to the current/previous Popes (largely in highly populist publications), to Noam Chomsky (largely in leftist ones such as AlterNet), and Paul Krugman (a columnist at the NY Times whose name often appears on pages as part of the Times's teasers, in addition to his own columns and mentions in other articles). But I'd found the results overall to be informative. In particular I'm somewhat chuffed at my creation of the PF-KK ratio, which measures the prevalence of the list versus an arbitrarily-selected alternative search string to try to assess overall site substantiveness.[2] I've long wanted to do a repeat / more in-depth similar study, though there've been a few key challenges. One is coming up with a broader or more diverse list, of which TFA would be an excellent source. Another is that Google have made it far more difficult to conduct automated Web queries. My initial study required about 10,000 queries, which had to be spaced out by a minute or more if memory serves, and took over a week to run. Expanding either the domain or search lists vastly increases the number of queries required. I believe there are now some web query (as opposed to search) databases, though access to those remains challenging. Given the rise of AI and the ability to generate content based on numerous criteria, I'm not sure that such methods would be particularly useful, the Dead Internet may well be upon us. I'd also love to see the methodology of the Plato collection extended to earlier authors and philosophers, though I can see where that can be problematic, given variances in names (e.g., "Avicenna" or "Ibn Sina"?), distinguishing authors or philosophers from translators or editors, the problem of commentaries (credit to the original, the commentator, both?), etc., etc. Kudos to Eric Schwitzgebel for his work. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Nothing especially organised, though HN search will show about 25 comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22front%20page%22%20activity&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>, and there's more posted to the Fediverse under the #HackerNewsAnalytics hashtag: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics> 2. Archive as "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web" <https://web.archive.org/web/20220215192114/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220215192114/https://old.reddi...>
slowhadoken 2y ago
Good old Isaiah Berlin.
keiferski 2y ago
If you’re interested in this kind of data, https://philpapers.org/ https://philpapers.org/ is a huge resource on academic philosophy publishing.
- bbor 2y ago
  Wow, THIS is the answer, thanks for the reminder!! Now I’m off to see how they feel about web scrapers…
qrios 2y ago
> Each author is only counted once per headline entry (subentries are excluded). In 2010, I found that this generated more plausible results than counting authors multiple times per entry. In my subjective experience, a philosophical text will deal with a specific topic and name it in the title and less often the author. Papers with an author's name in the title often deal with the entire work or a phase of creation. Author names also often appear together with other names "Kant and Hume on Morality"[1]. So the list is for sure not about "… Most-Cited … Authors …". [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-morality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-morality/
oglop 2y ago
Who the hell is this David Lewis guy? Everyone else on the top 10 is kinda obvious to me but I have zero clue who this dude is.
- keiferski 2y ago
  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/
dlkf 2y ago
A neat list, but there is a bias toward authors who published one controversial (and not necessarily good) argument that got a ton of rebuttals. Williamson is the worst offender.

82 points by bbor 2y ago

Odd, interesting, and surprising ranking to me. Note that this is a ranking of “authors” and not of “philosophers”. However fewer than 20 would likely have been uncomfortable with the tag of philosopher. I just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to rank philosophers; Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Here's a revised list of 100 philosophers born after 1899, ranked approximately by their impact on philosophy and related fields. I've ensured they primarily considered themselves philosophers or worked in closely related fields: 1. Michel Foucault (1926) 2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905) 3. Simone de Beauvoir (1908) 4. Jacques Derrida (1930) 5. Jürgen Habermas (1929) 6. Noam Chomsky (1928) 7. Hannah Arendt (1906) 8. John Rawls (1921) 9. Judith Butler (1956) 10. Thomas Kuhn (1922) 11. Karl Popper (1902) 12. Theodor Adorno (1903) 13. Gilles Deleuze (1925) 14. Frantz Fanon (1925) 15. Simone Weil (1909) 16. Albert Camus (1913) 17. Emmanuel Levinas (1906) 18. Martha Nussbaum (1947) 19. Richard Rorty (1931) 20. Peter Singer (1946) 21. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954) 22. Julia Kristeva (1941) 23. Roland Barthes (1915) 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942) 25. Edward Said (1935) 26. Slavoj Žižek (1949) 27. Hilary Putnam (1926) 28. Daniel Dennett (1942) 29. Iris Murdoch (1919) 30. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929) 31. Paul Ricoeur (1913) 32. Charles Taylor (1931) 33. Cornel West (1953) 34. bell hooks (1952) 35. Donna Haraway (1944) 36. Luce Irigaray (1930) 37. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919) 38. Donald Davidson (1917) 39. W.V.O. Quine (1908) 40. Saul Kripke (1940) 41. Bernard Williams (1929) 42. Alvin Plantinga (1932) 43. Patricia Churchland (1943) 44. Robert Nozick (1938) 45. Derek Parfit (1942) 46. Thomas Nagel (1937) 47. Philippa Foot (1920) 48. Susan Haack (1945) 49. Alain Badiou (1937) 50. Jacques Lacan (1901) 51. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929) 52. John McDowell (1942) 53. Onora O'Neill (1941) 54. David Chalmers (1966) 55. Bruno Latour (1947) 56. Michael Walzer (1935) 57. Christine Korsgaard (1952) 58. Giorgio Agamben (1942) 59. Charles Mills (1951) 60. Hubert Dreyfus (1929) 61. Seyla Benhabib (1950) 62. Jerry Fodor (1935) 63. Patricia Hill Collins (1948) 64. David Lewis (1941) 65. Catharine MacKinnon (1946) 66. Michael Sandel (1953) 67. Ernesto Laclau (1935) 68. Peter Sloterdijk (1947) 69. Carol Gilligan (1936) 70. Hélène Cixous (1937) 71. Sally Haslanger (1955) 72. Ernest Gellner (1925) 73. Marilyn Frye (1941) 74. Kwame Gyekye (1939) 75. Chantal Mouffe (1943) 76. Ian Hacking (1936) 77. Eva Feder Kittay (1946) 78. Enrique Dussel (1934) 79. Iris Marion Young (1949) 80. Simon Critchley (1960) 81. Rosi Braidotti (1954) 82. Axel Honneth (1949) 83. Linda Alcoff (1955) 84. Robert Brandom (1950) 85. Uma Narayan (1948) 86. Elizabeth Anderson (1959) 87. Paulin J. Hountondji (1942) 88. Nancy Fraser (1947) 89. Jürgen Moltmann (1926) 90. Ruth Millikan (1933) 91. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929) 92. Harry Frankfurt (1929) 93. Stanley Cavell (1926) 94. Jurgen Mittelstrass (1936) 95. Cora Diamond (1937) 96. Charles Larmore (1950) 97. Bas van Fraassen (1941) 98. Susan Neiman (1955) 99. Kwasi Wiredu (1931) 100. John Searle (1932) This list includes philosophers from various traditions and geographical regions, focusing on those who have had significant impact on philosophical discourse in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The ranking is subjective and based on perceived influence in academic philosophy and broader intellectual impact. ————— I love Rorty’s clarity and humor and general ironic and deflationary approach to philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty

Der_Einzige 2y ago
The fact that post-modernist/post-structuralists dominate the top spots says something about philosophy in general. A lot of those names thought that the age of consent in France was way too high - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_of_consent_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_o...
- gizajob 2y ago
  Your point being? Waving the makings of an ad hominem in their direction doesn’t discount their entire philosophies. Postmodernists and post-structuralists are used and cited all across the Arts outside of philosophy, particularly in literary theory.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    A significant portion of the humanities is literally poisoned by Postmodernism/Post-structuralism/Critical Theory. Yes. We call a lot of these fields "Grievance Studies". They're all bunk in the same way that Chiropractors are - despite many "authoritative" insurance companies buying into the scam. Let's open up a random quote from one of the champions of the Pomo movement, Deleuze and Guattari, in their famous work "Anti-oedipus": "we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors." You might respond with "Oh this quote is out of context, they're satirizing freud and Freud's reading of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge, trying to go beyond him" except that their initial OG champion, Freud, was literally 100% wrong to the point that no one can find ANY experimental evidence for the actual existence of the Oedipus[1] OR Electra[2] Complex or any of the rest of the nonsense that Freud, Jung, Lacan, or any of their disciples peddled through the academy. French post-modernism/post-strcturalism is so incoherent that trying to argue against it is a category error as it makes no claim to exist the same realm as reason (a hegemonic concept ignored by them), rather, it is poetry by another name - and it's particularly poor poetry. The academy would be better off disavowing it, as it's produced nothing of value except an army of unemployable ivory tower elitist "revolutionaries". [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex

bbor 2y ago

Fascinating list that I thought yall would enjoy! If you’re not yet aware, https://plato.stanford.edu https://plato.stanford.edu is as close to “philosophical canon” as it gets in modern American academia. Shoutout to Gödel and Neumann taking top spots despite not really being philosophers, at least in how they’re remembered. Comparatively, I’m honestly shocked that neither Bohr nor Heisenberg made the cut, even though there’s multiple articles on quantum physics… Turing also managed to sneak in under the wire, with 33 citations. The bias inherent in the source is discussed in detail, and I would also love to hear HN ideas on how to improve this project, and how to visualize the results! I’m not the author, but this is right up my alley to say the least, and I’d love to take a crack at it.

defrost 2y ago
> and how to visualize the results! There's bound to be something to be teased out from who referenced whom and when. Eg: (random example) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest had a great many students from the 1980s onwards, coinciding with the rise of plato.stanford.edu personal computers and the internet. He's come in at #51 or so likely on the back of a generation of philosophy students with technology crossover writing up early articles on plato and throwing in a citation to Priest. I'm in no way implying this is undeserved, just as an example of some of the weighting bias coming from the era when many plato stub articles originated.
westurner 2y ago
From "Show HN: WhatTheDuck – open-source, in-browser SQL on CSV files" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836220 : > datasette-lite can load [remote] sqlite and Parquet but not yet DuckDB (?) with Pyodide in WASM, and there's also JupyterLite as a datasette plug-in: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net JSON-LD with https://schema.org/Person https://schema.org/Person records with wikipedia/dbpedia RDF URIs would make it easy to query on whichever datasets can be joined on common RDFS properties like schema: :identifier and rdfs:subPropertyOf sub-properties, https://schema.org/url https://schema.org/url, :sameAs, Plato in RDF from dbpedia: https://dbpedia.org/page/Plato https://dbpedia.org/page/Plato Today there are wikipedia URLs, DOI URN URIs, shorturls in QR codes, ORCID specifically to search published :ScholarlyArticle by optional :author, and now there are W3C DIDs Decentralized Identifiers for signing, identifying, and searching of unique :Thing and skos:Concept that can be generated offline and optionally registered centrally, or centrally generated and assigned like DOIs but they're signing keys. Given uncertainty about time intervals, plot concepts over time with charts for showing graph growth over time. Maybe philosophy skos:Concept intervals (and relations, links) from human annotations thereof and/or from LLM parsing and search snippets of Wikipedia, dbpedia RDF, wikidata RDF, and ranked Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy terminological occurrence frequency.

halfcat 2y ago

> ”Only authors born 1900 or later are included.” Ah, that’s why Plato isn’t #1

fsckboy 2y ago
Plato cited Socrates a lot
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gizajob 2y ago
A series of footnotes to David Lewis doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
dredmorbius 2y ago
For the uninformed: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979]; <https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.html https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.h...> (There's a fair bit of truth to this.)

alephnerd 2y ago

> 2. Quine, Willard van Orman (213) It's easy to become number 2 when you reference yourself /s (For reference, a Quine is a type of computer program that takes no input and only reproduces it's source code, so basically self replicating. This is based on Quine's research into the logic of recursion and replication [0]) [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

kome 2y ago

very out of touch with European philosophy, and therefore global philosophy. Strange anglo-centric project. edit: that's literally the point of the post, my bad.

Gimpei 2y ago
I don't see why "European" philosophy (I assume you mean continental) is any more global than analytic philosophy. Both originate from what is only a small sliver of humanity. In fact continental philosophy with its heavy French and German focus, comes from an even smaller demographic base than Anglo world, which at the very least includes the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
- gizajob 2y ago
  Young Hegelian Karl Marx seems to have found a few fans worldwide.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Continental Philosophy is basically useless. Critical Theory is usually fashionable nonsense, and the best continentals are the most fashionable and the most nonsensical. You know it's bad when one of the champions of the Continentals, Zizek, is at his most coherent in a decade when he's talking about how he received the "N word pass" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvw6BUgU0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvw6BUgU0I
- gizajob 2y ago
  Calling critical theory fashionable nonsense is itself fashionable nonsense.
- Yodel0914 2y ago
  Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Freud, Hegel and Marx all, I believe, fall under the 'continental philosophy' banner. It seems rather, um, ambitious to call them all useless.

djha-skin 2y ago

John Von Neumann is #145, pretty cool. Anyone else spot any other programming greats in the list?

Vecr 2y ago
There's a few others, but people here already spotted them. Alfred Tarski on there but he was a mathematician.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Tarski was a mathematician if and only if Tarski was a mathematician
  - ckcheng 2y ago
    Surely you mean: “Tarski was a mathematician” is true if and only if Tarski was a mathematician. [1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-schema https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-schema

citizen_friend 2y ago

Remember that like wikipedia, citing yourself, or people related to your work is a form of marketing, and important for careers.

gizajob 2y ago

Not sure the point of having a filter to select only authors born after 1900. Does show the bias towards the American end of Anglo-American analytic philosophy though. Quine is ponderous. No idea how David Lewis made it to the top of the list either. Without Wittgenstein included, to me this list seems fairly pointless. Realise he might not be close to the top but without his work most of these American philosophers would be nowhere. Maybe I have a different idea as what counts as “contemporary”. Hume seems pretty contemporary to me. So does Nietzsche.

kome 2y ago
modern yes, contemporary no...
- gizajob 2y ago
  What if I cited them last week?
  - keiferski 2y ago
    In the philosophy world, Modern Western Philosophy typically means circa 1500-1600-1700 or so and a class in the subject will include Hume, Locke, Descartes, etc. Here’s a typical syllabus from Rutgers: https://philosophy.rutgers.edu/syllabus-repository-2/spring-2020-syllabi/872-205-01-intro-to-modern-phil-r-fry-spring-2020/file https://philosophy.rutgers.edu/syllabus-repository-2/spring-... Contemporary doesn’t really mean anything other than “somewhat recently”; there is no established set of thinkers considered contemporary ones.
    - robwwilliams 2y ago
      “Contemporary” as in Belonging to the same period of time. "a fact documented by two contemporary sources." Of about the same age. Current; modern. "contemporary trends in design."
      - keiferski 2y ago

dredmorbius 2y ago

I love textual analysis of this sort, and have done some vaguely similar analysis of HN front page activity[1], which includes some by-submitter and by-site breakdowns. About a decade back I'd used a somewhat similar listing of "top global thinkers", compiled from Foreign Policy magazine, to come up with a proxy for substantiveness / quality ratings of various websites / domains / TLDs. I've wanted to follow that up with something based on philosophers, on the general assumption that such references tend to be more-than-topical, especially after one gets beyond the most popular / well-known names. In particular I'd found that there were disproportionately many references to the current/previous Popes (largely in highly populist publications), to Noam Chomsky (largely in leftist ones such as AlterNet), and Paul Krugman (a columnist at the NY Times whose name often appears on pages as part of the Times's teasers, in addition to his own columns and mentions in other articles). But I'd found the results overall to be informative. In particular I'm somewhat chuffed at my creation of the PF-KK ratio, which measures the prevalence of the list versus an arbitrarily-selected alternative search string to try to assess overall site substantiveness.[2] I've long wanted to do a repeat / more in-depth similar study, though there've been a few key challenges. One is coming up with a broader or more diverse list, of which TFA would be an excellent source. Another is that Google have made it far more difficult to conduct automated Web queries. My initial study required about 10,000 queries, which had to be spaced out by a minute or more if memory serves, and took over a week to run. Expanding either the domain or search lists vastly increases the number of queries required. I believe there are now some web query (as opposed to search) databases, though access to those remains challenging. Given the rise of AI and the ability to generate content based on numerous criteria, I'm not sure that such methods would be particularly useful, the Dead Internet may well be upon us. I'd also love to see the methodology of the Plato collection extended to earlier authors and philosophers, though I can see where that can be problematic, given variances in names (e.g., "Avicenna" or "Ibn Sina"?), distinguishing authors or philosophers from translators or editors, the problem of commentaries (credit to the original, the commentator, both?), etc., etc. Kudos to Eric Schwitzgebel for his work. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Nothing especially organised, though HN search will show about 25 comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22front%20page%22%20activity&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>, and there's more posted to the Fediverse under the #HackerNewsAnalytics hashtag: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics> 2. Archive as "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web" <https://web.archive.org/web/20220215192114/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220215192114/https://old.reddi...>

slowhadoken 2y ago

Good old Isaiah Berlin.

keiferski 2y ago

If you’re interested in this kind of data, https://philpapers.org/ https://philpapers.org/ is a huge resource on academic philosophy publishing.

bbor 2y ago
Wow, THIS is the answer, thanks for the reminder!! Now I’m off to see how they feel about web scrapers…

qrios 2y ago

> Each author is only counted once per headline entry (subentries are excluded). In 2010, I found that this generated more plausible results than counting authors multiple times per entry. In my subjective experience, a philosophical text will deal with a specific topic and name it in the title and less often the author. Papers with an author's name in the title often deal with the entire work or a phase of creation. Author names also often appear together with other names "Kant and Hume on Morality"[1]. So the list is for sure not about "… Most-Cited … Authors …". [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-morality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-morality/

oglop 2y ago

Who the hell is this David Lewis guy? Everyone else on the top 10 is kinda obvious to me but I have zero clue who this dude is.

keiferski 2y ago
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/

dlkf 2y ago

A neat list, but there is a bias toward authors who published one controversial (and not necessarily good) argument that got a ton of rebuttals. Williamson is the worst offender.