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...