Abstract

This paper presents an approach of unsupervised learning of clusters from a citation database, and applies it to a large corpus of articles in philosophy to give an account of the structure of the discipline. Following a list of journals from the PhilPapers-archive, 68,152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web of Science-Database. Their citation data was processed using dimensionality reduction and clustering. The resulting clusters were identified, and the results are graphically represented. They suggest that the division of analytic and Continental philosophy in the considered timespan is overstated; that analytical, in contrast to Continental philosophy does not form a coherent group in recent philosophy; and that metaphors about the disciplinary structure should focus on the coherence and interconnectedness of a multitude of smaller and larger subfields.

Highlights

  • It is clear that philosophers are fond of strong metaphors when describing the structure of their discipline

  • Following a list of journals from the PhilPapersarchive, 68,152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web of Science-Database

  • The resulting clusters were identified, and the results are graphically represented. They suggest that the division of analytic and Continental philosophy in the considered timespan is overstated; that analytical, in contrast to Continental philosophy does not form a coherent group in recent philosophy; and that metaphors about the disciplinary structure should focus on the coherence and interconnectedness of a multitude of smaller and larger subfields

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Summary

Introduction

It is clear that philosophers are fond of strong metaphors when describing the structure of their discipline. Talk about the analytical/Continental divide is a common subject of mostly informal interactions between philosophers. This is quite interesting when taken together with the result that “[...] philosophers have substantially inaccurate sociological beliefs about the views of their peers.” This article will borrow some young machine learning techniques to give a visual representation of recent philosophy as a whole This representation is hopefully interesting for various reasons, and is supposed to demonstrate the viability of the employed method as much as anything else, but it will be considered in the context of this paper only with regard to its bearing on the analytic-Continental question

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