Recent history of philosophy (and other thoughts)

Lengths of Philosophy Articles

word usage

history of analytic

Are articles getting longer? Yes, yes they are. A lot longer.

Word Counts over Time

word usage

history of analytic

Some graphs about changes in word frequencies over 1980-2019 in twenty leading philosophy journals.

Most Cited Articles at the Time

citations

history of analytic

Imagine people at different times over the past half-century asking the following question: What philosophy journal article, published less than ten years ago, has the most citations in philosophy journals? That’s a pretty good operationalisation of the question, what current philosophy work are philosophers talking about the most. It isn’t a great guide to what the best work is, or what the most important work will turn out to be, but it does say something important about how philosophy felt at different times. In this note I run through some data on that question.

Most Cited Articles

history of analytic

An automated post listing (with correct bibliographic information) the top 500 articles in the citation database I’m using, plus graphs of their absolute and relative citation rates over time. The study is of articles published from 1965 onwards, and cited from 1980 onwards.

Changes in Citation Patterns

citations

history of analytic

Which journal articles are cited surprisingly often in recent times, given how often they were cited soon after publication? Conversely, which articles have a lot more citations soon after publication than you’d expect from their current prominence. This note goes over some data on these questions.

The Modal Era in Analytic Philosophy

history of analytic

An attempt at a periodization of recent Anglophone philosophy.

Some Data about Citation Trends

history of analytic

In the future I plan to write something substantive about trends in citations in philosophy journals. This is a presentation of some of the underlying data, with some small remarks about the big picture trends. (I earlier published a version of this that used data starting in 1976. I’ve now added 20 years more data.)

A Question about Inaccuracy

probability

In which I hope someone can solve a mathematical problem that looks simple, but which I haven’t actually figured out.

Bandwidth and Learning

non-ideal decision theory

Another way in which minds and organisations are similar.

Decisions, Knowledge, and Close Calls

epistemology

interest-relativity

My preferred version of interest-relative epistemology leads to odd results in ordinary situations when paired with standard models of decision. Happily, those standard models are wrong.

Desire as Belief and Two Kinds of Valuation

lewis

probability

Lewis’s (in)famous argument against Desire-As-Belief turns on an interesting equivocation.

Knowledge: A Human Interest Story

epistemology

I have a book draft.

Keynes on Social Metaphysics

social science

economics

keynes

Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Better Experiments

probability

epistemic logic

A surprising consequence of Blackwell’s Theorem.

Blackwell on the Value of Information

probability

epistemic logic

A quick run through a very powerful result.