The network science of philosophy

Philosophy is one of the oldest forms of institutional knowledge production, predating modern science by thousands of years. Analyses of science and other systems of collective inquiry have shown that patterns of discovery are shaped not only by individual insight but also by the social structures that guide how ideas are generated, shared, and evaluated. While the structure of scientific collaboration and influence can be inferred from co-authorship and citations, philosophical influence and interaction are often only implicit in published texts. It thus remains unclear how intellectual vitality relates to social structure within philosophy. Here, we build on the work of historians and sociologists to quantify the social structure of global philosophical communities consisting of thousands of individual philosophers, ranging from ancient India (c. 800 BCE) to modern Europe and America (1980 CE). We analyze the time-evolving network structure of philosophical interaction and disagreement within these communities. We find that epistemically vital communities become more integrated over time, with less fractionated debate, as a few centralizing thinkers bridge fragmented intellectual communities. The intellectual vitality and creativity of a community, moreover, is predicted by its social structure but not overall antagonism among individuals, suggesting that epistemic health depends more on how communities are organized than on how contentious they are. Our approach offers a framework for understanding the health and dynamism of epistemic communities. By extending tools from collective intelligence to the study of philosophy, we call for a comparative “science of philosophy” alongside the science of science and the philosophy of science.

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