[HN Gopher] The most cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia ...
___________________________________________________________________
The most cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Author : bbor
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-08-11 04:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
| bbor wrote:
| 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 Godel 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 wrote:
| > 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 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 wrote:
| From "Show HN: WhatTheDuck - open-source, in-browser SQL on CSV
| files" 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://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
|
| JSON-LD with 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, :sameAs,
|
| Plato in RDF from dbpedia: 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.
| westurner wrote:
| - "Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for
| augmenting your data" (2023) by row with asyncio and
| optionally httpx:
| https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/1/datasette-enrichments/
| halfcat wrote:
| > _"Only authors born 1900 or later are included."_
|
| Ah, that's why Plato isn't #1
| fsckboy wrote:
| Plato cited Socrates a lot
| gizajob wrote:
| A series of footnotes to David Lewis doesn't have quite the
| same ring to it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.h...>
|
| (There's a fair bit of truth to this.)
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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)
| kome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Young Hegelian Karl Marx seems to have found a few fans
| worldwide.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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
| gizajob wrote:
| Calling critical theory fashionable nonsense is itself
| fashionable nonsense.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| 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.
| Vecr wrote:
| I don't think Nietzche is useless, but I'd trade a #251 on
| the list, Judea Pearl for him every time. And he's probably
| the most useful in your "continental" list, thinking a bit
| about replaceability.
| Vecr wrote:
| I think of Slavoj Zizek similarly to a comedian. If you judge
| him on those terms someone like Norm McDonald had better and
| more influential lines, but he's okay.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Philosophy basically forked after Kant pointed out that the
| human brain does a sort of computation on sensory data.
|
| Kant basically handed it off to the scientists, mathematicians
| and computer scientists except for a lot of fiddly bits around
| justifications and foundations. This is essentially the
| analytic school.
|
| The other school jumped the shark and aligned with the
| Romantics and produced Hegel and Fichte and their descendants.
| This group tends to be opposed to the idea that truth exits and
| politically has a reactionary longing toward an imagined
| primitive past. And that longing combined with the belief in
| the inevitability of history and the valuelessness of human
| life has led to immense amounts of destruction. For the most
| part there just isn't anything to cite there that counts as
| philosophy in the sense it was understood since ancient times.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Contemporary philosophy is Anglo-centric. Why is it strange?
| djha-skin wrote:
| John Von Neumann is #145, pretty cool. Anyone else spot any other
| programming greats in the list?
| Vecr wrote:
| There's a few others, but people here already spotted them.
| Alfred Tarski on there but he was a mathematician.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Tarski was a mathematician if and only if Tarski was a
| mathematician
| ckcheng wrote:
| 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
| citizen_friend wrote:
| Remember that like wikipedia, citing yourself, or people related
| to your work is a form of marketing, and important for careers.
| gizajob wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| modern yes, contemporary no...
| gizajob wrote:
| What if I cited them last week?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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-...
|
| Contemporary doesn't really mean anything other than
| "somewhat recently"; there is no established set of
| thinkers considered contemporary ones.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| "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."
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| I have always felt Wittgenstein's work is a non-philosopher's
| (or a mediocre philosopher's) idea of outstanding philosophy.
| Wittgenstein wasn't universally inspirational.
| I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
| anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand
| why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages.
| Psychologically this is surprising. The earlier Wittgenstein,
| whom I knew intimately, was a man addicted to passionately
| intense thinking, profoundly aware of difficult problems of
| which I, like him, felt the importance, and possessed (or at
| least so I thought) of true philosophical genius. The later
| Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of
| serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would
| make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment
| believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is
| true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong
| bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a
| slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table
| amusement. - Bertrand Russell
|
| Another analogy, Wittgenstein is the equivalent of fast food in
| the philosophy world. Ubiquitous but not super rich in quality,
| whatever nourishment you can find there, you can find from
| other earlier philosophers if you look hard enough (notably
| Indian philosophers from millennia ago [1]).
|
| Funnily, your criticism of not citing Wittgenstein also applies
| to Wittgenstein not citing Easter philosophers.
|
| [1] https://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/various-
| aspects-o...
| keiferski wrote:
| Your quote is Russell criticizing the later Wittgenstein
| work, while praising the earlier work. It is a known thing
| that his late work was something of a repudiation of his
| early work. And that's not mentioning that Russell was
| literally the person that recognized Wittgenstein's genius
| and brought him into academia.
|
| _"He was perhaps the most perfect example I known of genius
| as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense,
| and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never
| known equalled except by G.E.Moore."_
|
| - Russell in his autobiography, about Wittgenstein
|
| Your comment seems to not understand this distinction, which
| to me indicates that you aren't actually familiar with
| Wittgenstein's work at all.
| scoofy wrote:
| Russell being used to criticize Wittgenstein also seems
| just bizarre when considering their relationship, and how
| Wittgenstein was plucked from obscurity specifically by
| Russell.
| gizajob wrote:
| Comparing Wittgenstein to fast food is a poor analogy.
| Wittgenstein is a complicated meal of mitteleuropa haute
| cuisine that will leave you with a headache and indigestion
| if you even attempt to finish it.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| I think your argument is exactly backward, and cherry-picking
| a quote from Russell doesn't really buttress your argument if
| you know the full philosophical background of these two.
|
| Russell saw Wittgenstein's brilliance early on and supported
| him in his work, but as he was near the end of his career and
| his mental faculties were on the decline, Russell found it
| increasingly difficult to understand Wittgenstein's
| philosophy.
|
| Russell in hindsight was the lightweight next to
| Wittgenstein's brilliance.
|
| If you want a non-philosopher's idea of outstanding
| philosophy, I would have pointed out Nietzsche instead.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think the point is to get a snapshot of contemporary working
| thinkers and not merely a list of the heavy hitters like Plato
| and Aristotle. Otherwise there wouldn't be a ton of insight
| here.
| bbor wrote:
| I would agree on Wittgenstein, but the author clearly has a
| coder's sensibility and wanted to stick to the rules. He didn't
| really start to impact the broader field sustainably until the
| 40s and 50s, so I totally understand the urge to see him on the
| list. I think you might be putting your own goals onto this
| work, tho: you seem to be trying to think of the best
| philosophers, whereas this is a more narrow attempt to
| understand 2024 philosophy and its priorities.
|
| Nietzsche is on the line for sure, but I'd say including
| classical thinkers (namely Hume, Kant, and Hegel) would be less
| interesting because their dominance is pretty stable at this
| point. I'm much more interested to see how the fight against
| Quineanism is going ;)
|
| Either way thanks for the insightful comment; will be taking
| these thoughts into consideration as I try to improve on this.
| It's good to see academic philosophy discussed meaningfully on
| HN!
| defrost wrote:
| Speaking of "putting own goals onto this work"
| The encyclopedia was created in 1995 by Edward N. Zalta, with
| the explicit aim of providing a dynamic encyclopedia that is
| updated regularly
|
| ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Encyclopedia_of_Phil
| o...
|
| I recall when this first appeared online and how a core
| "early gang" fleshed out a skeletal framework, eg: the first
| draft of the _Sorites Paradox_ was belted out in 1997 by
| Dominic Hyde
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
|
| https://hpi.uq.edu.au/profile/388/dominic-hyde
|
| and I can still see today the residual hand of he and his
| various peers that worked together to build an outline that
| represents the largely computer literal | math | logical
| philosphy student of the late 1980s|early 1990's PoV.
| gizajob wrote:
| Yes thanks for doing it. It was interesting for me to see.
| There is a big gulf between analytic philosophy in UK and
| American universities which this list highlights - at no
| point did I read anything by Quine at university in England,
| nor did I need to, yet he's used at length in the US. Hope
| the fight gets won.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I'm not at all surprised by Quine, given that his impact in
| contemporary philosophy is immense. I'm more surprised by
| Carnap's non-appearance on this list, given that he was one of
| Quine's mentors, more influential, and his arguments have
| better withstood the test of time.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Carnap born 1891.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is what SEP is though. Its not meant to be canonical in
| anyway and aims to be a (maybe anglo/analytic-skewed) non-
| public wiki for philosophy. If you read any of the articles its
| easy understand this decision, which are more about
| communicating concepts than writing exegesis of primary source
| material.
|
| This shows neither "modern philosophy" nor something more
| essential, its a particular snapshot of a particular facet of
| academic philosophy, that is all.
| rudolfwinestock wrote:
| >Quine is ponderous.
|
| No kidding. I tried to learn predicate logic by reading his
| works (mainly Methods of Logic). I wanted to throw his books
| across the room. I made it, but comparing his treatment of the
| completeness and compactness theorems with Tao's treatment was
| enlightening (and infuriating).
|
| It's as though Quine worked hard at being obscure.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| 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. Jurgen 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 Zizek (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. Helene 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. Jurgen 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
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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_o...
| gizajob wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 [2] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex
| gizajob wrote:
| I'll respond with: this doesn't constitute an argument
| either.
| sramsay wrote:
| Yeah, my first reaction is that this list is more-or-less
| the philosophy an American lit. scholar would be expected
| to know. Heavy on continental philosophy, hermeneutics,
| recastings of traditional metaphysics, neo-Marxism . . .
| way less Anglo-American analytical stuff, but some.
| defrost wrote:
| More realistically, a lot of those names got drunk in cafes
| and signed anything put in front of them:
| Philippe Sollers later stated in 2001 that "there were so
| many manifestos, we signed them almost automatically"
|
| which has a ring of truth and marks them down as a bit stupid
| in their youth but not _all_ supporters of removing the age
| of consent. Sure, _some_ would have but it 's not as clear
| cut as you imply.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This brings up just how toxic "Situationalist
| International" was and it's connection/relation to the
| Post-modernist/Post-Structuralist movement.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_(Sartre)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_est_interdit_d%27interdire
| _!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
|
| This stuff almost literally destroyed the french
| government, they claim so close that Charles de Gualle fled
| paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68
| defrost wrote:
| Uniquely evil people that almost destroyed Charles de
| Gaulle who definitely did no wrong and absolutely didn't
| deserve that?
|
| Or, a group of people that reflected parts of the
| zeitgeist that organically arose in a post war France
| over run by nazi's, collaboraters, struggle for existence
| and first hand witnessnes to horror?
| robwwilliams wrote:
| The first entry is fascinating but not toxic. The concept
| of living in an artificial spectacle resonates with me
| after 10 days of Olympics and what seems like a lifetime
| of pseudo-news.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Not Foucault. Not in Heidegger's league.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Hmm, I just asked Claude how Hans-Georg Gamader got dropped.
|
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
|
| I apologize for the oversight in not including Hans-Georg
| Gadamer. You're absolutely right to point this out, and he
| certainly deserves a place on this list. Gadamer was a highly
| influential philosopher, particularly in the field of
| hermeneutics, and his work has had a significant impact on
| philosophy, literary theory, and the humanities in general.
|
| Given his importance, Gadamer should definitely be included in
| the top 100 list. Here's where I would place him, considering
| his influence:
|
| [Insert after #11 and before #12, shifting the rest down]
|
| 11. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900)
|
| Gadamer's major work, "Truth and Method" (1960), is considered
| one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th
| century. His contributions to hermeneutics, the theory of
| interpretation and understanding, have been hugely influential
| across many disciplines.
|
| Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It's a good
| reminder of how important it is to carefully consider all
| significant figures when compiling such lists, especially those
| right at the century's turn who had long, influential careers
| throughout the 20th century.
| greenavocado wrote:
| LLMs are professional bullshitters which need constant
| supervision and expert human knowledge to guide and refine.
| They are useful but only in the hands of someone who can see
| right through their omissions and often, lies.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| In this case not an error of commission (aka BS) but an
| error of omission. That is fine with me.
| kps wrote:
| > _[Insert after #11 and before #12, shifting the rest down]_
|
| Now ask it why John Searle isn't on the list. See whether you
| eventually get to a fixed point or a cycle.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Here is Claude's apology for you. Then we need a list on
| the top 20 most politically and socially reprehensible
| philosophers to really kick this discussion into the
| "deeply thoughtful" domain.
|
| Claude 3.5 responds:
|
| You're right to ask about John Searle. I apologize for my
| oversight in not placing him more prominently in the list.
| Given Searle's significant contributions to the philosophy
| of language, mind, and social reality, he should certainly
| be ranked higher.
|
| Considering Searle's influence, I would insert him into the
| list as follows:
|
| [Insert after #27 and before #28, shifting the rest down]
|
| 28. John Searle (1932)
|
| Searle's work on speech act theory, intentionality,
| artificial intelligence (including his famous "Chinese
| Room" thought experiment), and the philosophy of society
| and institutions has been highly influential. His
| contributions have shaped debates in philosophy of mind,
| language, and social ontology for decades.
|
| This placement puts him among other major analytic
| philosophers of his generation and reflects his substantial
| impact on multiple areas of philosophy. Thank you for
| prompting me to reconsider his position. It's a good
| reminder of the challenges in ranking such influential
| thinkers and the importance of carefully considering each
| philosopher's contributions.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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...>
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Good old Isaiah Berlin.
| keiferski wrote:
| If you're interested in this kind of data,
| https://philpapers.org/ is a huge resource on academic philosophy
| publishing.
| bbor wrote:
| Wow, THIS is the answer, thanks for the reminder!! Now I'm off
| to see how they feel about web scrapers...
| qrios wrote:
| > 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/
| oglop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-12 23:01 UTC)