In law, as in many social and natural science disciplines, extensive use is made of citation studies as a measure of the impact and importance of scholarship. Such approaches have their drawbacks (those in law are discussed here). The drawbacks are even greater, I expect, in philosophy. But out of curiosity, I decided to take advantage of the search engine provided by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link to the left). SEP is a work-in-progress, but there are a sufficiently large number of entries now that an interesting search is possible.
SEP searches return two pieces of information: the number of mentions of the philosopher’s name, and the number of files (entries) in which the name is mentioned. For any philosopher who is the subject of an entry, the number of references will be quite large just from that single entry. So for purposes of even remotely meaningful comparisons, one has to take in to account the number of entries as well as the number of references. (Maybe no meaningful comparisons are possible—this exercise was strictly for amusement, not deep insight in to philosophy!)
In addition, it would be impossibly time-consuming to search very common names. As a result, some philosophers who would no doubt have substantial counts (e.g., David Lewis) weren’t searched. (But George Berkeley was, but it wasn’t too hard to cut out the references to Berkeley the school or press. Same for Russell.)
The searches were conducted on August 1, 2003.
Here are the most frequently referenced philosophers who were mentioned in at least 50 different entries; the total number of references (not entries) appears in parentheses following the name:
1. Aristotle (2529)
2. Plato (1260)
3. Descartes (1232)
4. Kant (1049)
5. Frege (1044)
6. Hume (1008)
7. Socrates (1001)
8. Russell (910)
9. Locke (733)
10. Leibniz (638)
11. Aquinas (567)
12. Spinoza (551)
13. Hegel (528)
14. Wittgenstein (468)
15. Augustine (452)
15. Rawls (452)
17. Quine (399)
18. Kripke (315)
19. Putnam (295)
By contrast, here is a non-ranked list of philosophers mentioned in at least 25 files; it’s not ranked because I’m sure there are other philosophers who weren’t searched who got at least as many references.
Fichte (383 mentions in 17 files)
Herder (350 mentions in 19 files)
Nietzsche (340 mentions in 26 files)
Jerry Fodor (336 mentions in 37 files)
Brentano (301 mentions in 22 files)
Husserl (292 mentions in 27 files)
Schopenhauer (268 mentions in 10 files)
Alvin Plantinga (246 mentions in 36 files)
Malebranche (237 mentions in 22 files)
Carnap (193 mentions in 40 files)
Marx (187 mentions in 42 files)
Gadamer (160 mentions in 9 files)
Jaegwon Kim (150 mentions in 29 files)
John Searle (147 mentions in 33 files)
Berkeley (140 mentions in 40 files)
Michael Tye (140 mentions in 28 files)
Heidegger (137 mentions in 26 files)
Michael Dummett (136 mentions in 30 files)
Robert Nozick (134 mentions in 45 files)
Nelson Goodman (111 mentions in 34 files)
Sartre (109 mentions in 24 files)
Dewey (98 mentions in 25 files)
Tyler Burge (88 mentions in 20 files)
Philip Pettit (87 mentions in 27 files)
Carl Hempel (86 mentions in 18 files)
Sydney Shoemaker (84 mentions in 18 files)
Christopher Peacocke (73 mentions in 16 files)
Jurgen Habermas (69 mentions in 25 files)
John McDowell (62 mentions in 25 files)
Epicurus (48 mentions in 17 files)
So what do we learn about philosophy from all this? I’d be happy to post reader comments, if you e-mail me (the e-mail address is at my homepage--I've been advised not to post it on the blog, lest I attract even more spam!).
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