The Sooty Empiric

Josh Habgood-Coote  recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall. He noted that a recent informative Weatherson post , who was looking at a slightly different thing - citation networks within philosophy journals. What Habgood-Coote ended up doing was extracting the ten most cited papers from the 2019-2023 period using google scholar, and linked them here . Using my blog to brag a bit, I am happy to see Vindicating Methodological Triangulation there! But I decided I would like to look at something slightly different while we are here having this conversation. I wanted to see what topics philosophers are writing on that are actually getting attention. What are the areas of interest that drive conversation in or through our field, where is it that our work seems to get recognition and uptake, or at least spark conversation? That I thought I could do by looking at some of the highly cited philosophy journals and lookin...

Back when I was in grad school I kept a previous blog that I ended up replacing with this one. The other day I wanted to share Reichenbach's soliloquy that I had previously posted there, so I searched through my old archives to repost it. Along the way I found this old piece, which considering that I was a first or second year grad student when I posted it kind of shocked me by its effrontery. I reproduce below, then follow up with some reflections on what I now think of young me's presuming to give methodological advice to a field he'd made precisely 0 contributions to. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The humanities are often attacked for fairly silly reasons. People don't really understand what goes on therein and they say ignorant things about the scholarship that workers in the humanities produce. What is m...

Here's a dynamic that I think shapes a lot of politics in the West right now, though I am going to focus on here in the UK. I think this dynamic arises from the interplay of two facts about widespread voter preferences, and then another fact about the world more broadly. I suspect this dynamic is basically perennial, and it has just become more salient to me because it appeared much more salient later on in my life - I came of age in the high-growth-and-expectations thereof world of Britain in the late 90s through the crash, which suppresses this dynamic to a considerable extent. But I can't prove that so will just focus on the present. Finally, more generally, I won't be able to prove any of these points here, but I will try and provide links to indicate the sort of stuff that makes me think as I do. Obviously in something as far reaching as this I am far from expert on any particular element, so if I am wrong mea culpa, but you will at least see why I think as I do. Ok e...

This is another in the series of "things I often find myself saying so I want there to just be one blog I can point to rather than repeat myself" posts. This one is prompted by the University of Sussex facing a (to my mind) ludicrous fine  from a government organisation for failing to protect free speech whose head is, at the same time, lecturing universities on the need to "stimulate debate on contentious topics". These two aims - protect free speech, foster debate in universities - seem complementary and laudatory. But I think they are being interpreted in a way that puts them fundamentally at odds. And, what's more, the way they are being implemented at the moment creates an incentive system which will get us little open debate while punishing speech. Cards on the table: I am closer to the "free speech purist" end of things than most. I am, for instance, pretty cynical about speech codes when they are made parts of organisational codes of conduct. ...

                                            Hamlet -    Absolute time would exist in a causal structure for which the concept   "indeterminate as to time" order lends to a unique simultaneity,  i.e., for which there is no finite interval of time between the   departure and return of a first-signal... So the Logical Positivists are some of my favourite philosophers. Those involved in the movement were also very much involved in artistic movements of their day, though nowadays philosophers tend to see them as rather humourless and dry. And often they could be. But I'd just like to draw attention to this rather odd piece from a positivist which combines wry humour with a bit of literary interpretation. Behold, Hans Reichenbach's "Hamlet's Soliloquy", which is chapter 15 in  The Rise of Scientific Philosophy . Enjoy!   " To be or not...

Today's post is a bit of a ramble on a topic that I often think about yet have no firm opinion regarding. The issue is the tendency to treat leftists as in some sense more agential than right wingers. We see this in articles that frame behaviour from right wingers as an inevitable response to leftist excess. A particularly shocking example of this became somewhat infamous on Twitter: But you can also sometimes see this in cases wherein more centrist pundits blast left wingers for making right wing victory more likely. It's at least a fairly common genre so I hope readers will be familiar from their own experience. It even crops up in how we talk, since "reactionary" as a term for extreme right wingers presents them as, well, reactive; and in more fancy academic socialist circles there will be debates about who the "historical subject" is or similar that more or less presuppose this group will be using their agency to advance progressive causes - at least whe...