The most cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Fascinating list that I thought yall would enjoy! If you’re not yet aware, 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.

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.

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

> ”Only authors born 1900 or later are included.”

Ah, that’s why Plato isn’t #1

> 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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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I love Rorty’s clarity and humor and general ironic and deflationary approach to philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty

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&que...>, and there's more posted to the Fediverse under the #HackerNewsAnalytics hashtag: <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.reddi...>

Good old Isaiah Berlin.

> 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)

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