Quantitative Studies of Philosophy

*Call for Abstracts: Quantitative Studies of Philosophy, 21-22 August 2024 at Tilburg University, the Netherlands

Abstract Submission: 1 April 2024

Exiled Empiricists – ERC Project at Tilburg University

In the last decade, philosophers, historians of philosophy, and scholars from the digital humanities have contributed to a new research area at the intersection of meta-philosophy, history of philosophy, and digital humanities, which may be called Quantitative Studies of Philosophy (QSP). QSP draws on methods from bibliometrics, networks science, and computational linguistics, to quantitatively investigate the discipline of philosophy and its history. Recent examples of QSP include Malaterre et al., 2019, which used topic-modeling to reconstruct the historical trajectory of key topics in philosophy of science, Bonino et al., 2020, which applied distant reading to assess the role and weight of logic in analytic philosophy, Noichl, 2019, which mapped the sub-disciplinary structure of philosophy by advanced citation analysis techniques, and Petrovich, 2021, which analyzed informal collaboration in analytic philosophy by a quantitative analysis of the acknowledgments appearing in academic publications.

This workshop aims to gather researchers interested in QSP and its various branches to present their research and discuss the status and future directions of this new research area. We invite papers addressing topics including (but not limited to) the following:

• Distant reading and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques applied to philosophy corpora (e.g., topic modeling)
• Network analysis applied to philosophy and philosophical ideas (including epistolary networks)
• Citation analysis of philosophy
• Scientometric and bibliometric techniques applied to philosophy (e.g., science mapping)
• Quantitative models of philosophical change, including quantitative studies of gatekeeping and peer review in philosophy (e.g., agent-based models)
• Data-driven history of philosophy and quantitative studies of philosophical concepts
• Digital infrastructures, information retrieval, and knowledge management in philosophy (e.g., databases and computational ontologies for philosophy)
• Surveys of the philosophical communities around the world, especially outside the Anglophone context
• Sociological studies of philosophy based on quantitative techniques, including statistics about gender and minorities in philosophy
• Comparison between quantitative and qualitative/close-reading methods in the history of philosophy
• Theoretical and meta-philosophical reflections on the status of QSP

Even if most of QSP has so far focused on twentieth-century and contemporary philosophy, we warmly welcome quantitative studies of other periods in the history of philosophy, including ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy, and of philosophical traditions outside the analytic mainstream. We especially encourage submissions from PhD students and early-career researchers.

The workshop will host two special events:

- Presentation of EDHIPHY, an open, extensible database for the history of Anglophone philosophy in the Twentieth century

- A book symposium on Petrovich E. (forthcoming) A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy. Looking through the Margins. (Springer)

This workshop is organized in conjunction with the conference “New Narratives and Methods in the History of 20th Century Philosophy”, which will take place on 10-20 August, also at Tilburg University.

*Keynote Speaker*

Christophe Malaterre (Université du Québec à Montréal)

*Submission details*

Please submit an abstract of max. 2500 characters (± 500 words) suitable for blind review at quantitativestudiesofphilconf[at]gmail.com [gmail.com]. Presentation slots are 30 minutes, including discussion. The deadline for submissions is April 1. Please include ‘QSP’ in the title.

*Dates and deadlines*

April 1: Submission deadline

April 15: Notifications

August 21-22: Workshop

*Organizing committee*

Gregor Bös (Tilburg University), Ties van Gemert (Tilburg University), Eugenio Petrovich (University of Turin)

Cited references

Bonino, G., Maffezioli, P., & Tripodi, P. (2020). Logic in analytic philosophy: A quantitative analysis. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02770-5 [doi.org]

Malaterre, C., Chartier, J.-F., & Pulizzotto, D. (2019). What Is This Thing Called Philosophy of Science? A Computational Topic-Modeling Perspective, 1934–2015. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, 9(2), 215–249. https://doi.org/10.1086/704372 [doi.org]

Noichl, M. (2019). Modeling the structure of recent philosophy. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02390-8 [doi.org]

Petrovich, E. (2021). Acknowledgments. Informal collaboration and symbolic power in recent analytic philosophy. Logique et Analyse, 256, 425–448. https://doi.org/10.2143/LEA.256.0.3290352 [doi.org]

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Gregor Bös
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University
Associated Researcher, Husserl Archives, KU Leuven

gregorboes.com