The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses

Abstract

We present evidence that mainstream Anglophone philosophy is insular in the sense that participants in this academic tradition tend mostly to cite or interact with other participants in this academic tradition, while having little academic interaction with philosophers writing in other languages. Among our evidence: In a sample of articles from elite Anglophone philosophy journals, 97% of citations are citations of work originally written in English; 96% of members of editorial boards of elite Anglophone philosophy journals are housed in majority-Anglophone countries; and only one of the 100 most-cited recent authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spent most of his career in non-Anglophone countries writing primarily in a language other than English. In contrast, philosophy articles published in elite Chinese-language and Spanish-language journals cite from a range of linguistic traditions, as do non-English-language articles in a convenience sample of established European-language journals. We also find evidence that work in English has more influence on work in other languages than vice versa and that when non-Anglophone philosophers cite recent work outside of their own linguistic tradition it tends to be work in English.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Wesley Fang, Tzu-Wei Hung, and Qiaoying Lu for their help with the information regarding the elite philosophy journals in China and Taiwan; four anonymous experts who helped with evaluating Spanish-language journals; commenters on our posts on these topics at The Splintered Mind and Eric Schwitzgebel’s public Facebook page; and the editors of this special issue.

Notes

1 Related studies of the centrality of English in science and in cultural influence include Ronen, Gonçalves, Hu, Vespignani, Pinker, and Hidalgo 2014; and Gordin 2015. On whether ‘analytic philosophy’ ought to be written in English, see Hurtado 2013; Perez 2013; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2013; Ruffino 2013; Siegel 2014.

2 For some evidence that these measures converge, compare Schwitzgebel 2010, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Healy 2013; Leiter 2013, 2014; Brogaard and Leiter 2014.

3 The full list in ranked order: Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Noûs, Mind, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosopher’s Imprint, Analysis, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy & Public Affairs. The top four journals also match the top four journals analyzed in Healy 2013.

4 The analysis was conducted in 2013, using the PhilPapers database as it existed then. We believe this is recent enough to still be representative. We downloaded the full list of journals and searched for language-specific pronouns, prepositions, or conjunctions. When the journal’s language was unclear from the title, the journals were manually checked by looking at the languages of their most recent publications. Given that the list runs to more than 1000 titles, a few misclassifications are likely, but note that the method described does not misclassify Noûs, Erkenntnis, etc., as non-Anglophone journals.

5 This study was inspired by a similar study of the almost complete absence, from bioethics journals, of editorial board members from low-HDI (Human Development Index) countries: Chattopadhyay, Myser, and De Vries 2013.

6 Included journals are those listed in note 3 plus Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and Synthese.

7 We also noted the Philosophical Gourmet Report ranking of editorial board members’ universities, finding that 40% of editorial board members were housed in the 17 ‘top 15’-ranked universities in the Anglophone world.

8 For example, a 2007 Thomson-Reuters ISI Web of Science list of ‘most cited authors of books in the humanities’ (Thomson-Reuters 2007) features philosophers most of whose influence has been in other humanities disciplines or outside of the mainstream Anglophone tradition, with Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Butler, and Deleuze topping the list. A Google Scholar search for profiles in the topic of ‘Philosophy’ has Derrida, Arendt, Rawls, Popper, and Žižek as the top five among twentieth- to twenty-first century philosophers (accessed August 8, 2017, from Riverside, California). Some convergent evidence of the SEP list’s surface plausibility comes from a Brian Leiter poll of ‘Best Anglophone philosophers since 1957?’ (Leiter 2017), which has Quine, Kripke, Lewis, Rawls, and Putnam at the top, thus overlapping with our SEP measure in four of the top five positions.

9 Disclosure: In this regard, the first author of this article appears to be a typical mainstream Anglophone philosopher in his own SEP entries on ‘Belief’ and ‘Introspection’.

10 Included journals (H for history journals) were Archives de Philosophie, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, Gregorianum, Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik, Les Études Philosophiques, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Revue de Philosophie Ancienne (H), Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, Rivista di Storia della Filosofia (H), Roczniki Filozoficzne, Rue Descartes, Sartre Studies International (H), Studi Kantiani (H), and Studia Leibnitiana (H). Three journals were excluded for not being on the PhilPapers journal list (https://philpapers.org/journals, accessed August 13, 2017): Bruniana and Campanelliana, Esprit, and Méthexis. One journal, Philosophische Rundschau, was excluded because it published only reviews.

11 See https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size [accessed September 17, 2017].

12 Included journals were 臺灣大學哲學論評 (National Taiwan University Philosophical Review), 政治大學哲學學報 (NCCU Philosophical Journal), 東吳哲學學報 (Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies), 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 哲学动态 (Philosophical Trends), 自然辩证法研究 (Studies in Dialectics of Nature), 道德与文明 (Morality and Civilization), 世界哲学 (World Philosophy), 自然辩证法通讯 (Journal of Dialectics of Nature), 伦理学研究 (Studies in Ethics), 现代哲学 (Modern Philosophy), 周易研究 (Studies of Zhouyi; history journal), 孔子研究 (Confucius Studies; history journal), 中国哲学史 (History of Chinese Philosophy; history journal), and 科学技术哲学研究 (Studies in Philosophy of Science and Technology).

13 To put this trend in a larger historical context, we can compare it with an earlier study on the citation patterns of one elite general philosophy journal, 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches) (梁 (Liang) 1989). According to 梁 (Liang) (1989), 90% of the citations in articles published between 1984 and 1988 are to sources written originally in or translated into Chinese. These data are not strictly comparable with our data, because they do not distinguish between the original and translated languages. However, they do provide a floor number for that journal over that period of time. At least 10% of citations in it were of sources originally written in foreign languages, and presumably considerably more than 10% once translated works are taken into account.

14 Included journals were Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Análisis Filosófico, Contrastes, Crítica, Daimon, Diánoia, Ideas y Valores, Isegoría, Pensamiento, Teorema, Theoria, and Tópicos. Articles published in languages other than Spanish in these journals were excluded from analysis. In some cases, no Spanish-language articles appeared in a targeted journal issue for a particular year, in which case the journal contributed no data in that year. For example, Teorema and Theoria had no qualifying articles in 2016.