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This book offers an unprecedented quantitative portrait of analytic philosophy focusing on two seemingly marginal features of philosophical texts: citations and acknowledgements in academic publications. Originating from a little network of philosophers based in Oxford, Cambridge, and Vienna, analytic philosophy has become during the Twentieth century a thriving philosophical community with thousands of members worldwide. Leveraging the most advanced techniques from bibliometrics, citations and acknowledgments are used in this book to shed light on both the epistemology and the sociology of this philosophical field, illuminating the intellectual trajectory of analytic philosophy as well as the social characteristics of the analytic community. Special attention is dedicated to the last forty years, providing insights into a phase of analytic philosophy which is still understudied by historians of philosophy.
In the eight chapters of the book, readers will find not only numerous quantitative investigations and technical explanations, but also a robust theoretical framework and epistemological reflections on the strengths and limitations of quantitative methods for the study of philosophy. With its strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will engage a wide range of scholars, including historians of philosophy seeking new methodologies, analytic philosophers interested in a new look at their discipline, and scholars in digital humanities, bibliometrics, and quantitative studies of science, who will find many innovative techniques for investigating disciplinary fields.
List of contents
On the margins of philosophy.- Theoretical frameworks.- The research object.- Structure and dynamics of analytic philosophy.- Knowledge accumulation in analytic philosophy.- The social space of analytic philosophy.- Socio-epistemic communities in analytic philosophy.- Quantitative metaphilosophy.
About the author
Eugenio Petrovich is an assistant professor in philosophy of science at the University of Turin. Previously, he has worked at the Universities of Milan, Siena, and Tilburg. His main research interests include quantitative studies of science, quantitative methods for the history of philosophy, and science policy and research evaluation. His studies have been published in journals such as
Scientometrics,
PLOS ONE,
Synthese, and
Logique et Analyse, among others.
Report
Eugenio Petrovich s Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy is a delightful and well-crafted addition to the arsenal of examples of just this kind of complementary work. I believe this is an important book not just for its first-order content, which offers a wide array of historical insights, and which should lead to fruitful debates in the history of contemporary philosophy, but also for its second-order content, which presents a careful example of quantitative methodology . (Charles H. Pence, Metascience, Vol 34 (1), 2025)
