The Not-So-Silent Generation in Philosophy (guest post)
“What explains the Silent Generation’s disproportionate representation among the most influential philosophers in the mainstream Anglophone tradition?”
That’s the question taken up Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) in the following post.
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(It first appeared at his blog, The Splintered Mind.)
The Not-So-Silent Generation in Philosophy
by Eric Schwitzgebel
The Silent Generation (born 1928-1945) is disproportionately represented among the most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Let’s look at the numbers and think about why.
Background: This post is based on my analyses of citation rates in the Stanford Encyclopedia in 2010, 2014, 2019, and 2024. As a measure of prominence in (as I call it) “mainstream Anglophone philosophy”, no measure has better face validity than SEP citation rates. For example, in my most recent analysis, the top five are David Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, and Saul Kripke—a much more plausible top 5, if the aim is to capture influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy — than top five lists from, say, Scopus, Google Scholar, or PhilPapers.
The Ten Most-Cited Philosophers, Generation by Generation
In the following lists, the initial number before each philosopher’s name indicates their ranking in the most recent analysis and the number in parentheses indicates the number of main-page SEP entries in which they are cited.
[NOTE (5:15pm): Some of the rankings below that were originally published earlier today were incorrect due to a problem with the tie-counting algorithm I used today. This does not affect the analysis or August’s original rankings. The rankings have now been corrected. HT Daniel Nolan for the catch.]
“Greatest Generation” (born 1900-1927):
2. Quine, Willard van Orman (213)
3. Putnam, Hilary (190)
4. Rawls, John (168)
7. Davidson, Donald (151)
16. Strawson, Peter F. (116)
23. Dummett, Michael A. E. (110)
26. Armstrong, David M. (106)
26. Chisholm, Roderick M. (106)
34. Popper, Karl R. (94)
35. Goodman, Nelson (90)
“Silent Generation” (born 1928-1945)
1. Lewis, David K. (307)
5. Kripke, Saul A. (159)
8. Williams, Bernard (146)
10. Nagel, Thomas (137)
11. Nozick, Robert (135)
12. Jackson, Frank (130)
13. Searle, John R. (120)
14. Van Fraassen, Bas C. (117)
16. Harman, Gilbert H. (116)
18. Fodor, Jerry A. (115)
“Baby Boomers” (born 1946-1964)
6. Williamson, Timothy (152)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C. (140)
19. Fine, Kit (112)
24. Kitcher, Philip (109)
29. Sober, Elliott (101)
32. Hawthorne, John (97)
40. Anderson, Elizabeth S. (83)
45. Korsgaard, Christine M. (80)
51. Priest, Graham (79)
53. Burge, Tyler (77)
“Generation X” or “Millennial” (born 1965 and later) [list extended to 14 due to a tie]
14. Chalmers, David J. (117)
45. Schaffer, Jonathan (80)
78. Sider, Theodore (68)
129. Godfrey-Smith, Peter (53)
138. Stanley, Jason (51)
156. Enoch, David (48)
156. Prinz, Jesse J. (48)
165. Weatherson, Brian (47)
173. Levy, Neil (46)
203. Craver, Carl F. (42)
203. Kriegel, Uriah (42)
203. List, Christian (42)
203. Nolan, Daniel (42)
203. Thomasson, Amie L. (42)
(In most cases, I have exact birth years from publicly available sources such as Wikipedia, but in some cases I estimate based on year of Bachelor’s degree, PhD, or first publication. I welcome corrections.)
As discussed in a previous post, one striking thing about this list is its lack of gender and cultural/racial diversity (see also these articles on lack of diversity in philosophy). But another striking feature is the prominence of the Silent Generation. Analyzed another way: Among the 25 most-cited authors, 6 are Greatest, 14 are Silent, 4 are Boomers, and 1 is Gen X. Among the top 100 (104 with ties), it’s Greatest 25, Silent 47, Boomer 27, and Gen X 3.
Citation Patterns Over Time
A natural first thought is that the 2020s might just be peak-citation time for the Silent Generation. Maybe the work of the Greatest Generation is starting to fall back into the mists of history, and maybe the Boomers and Gen Xers haven’t yet had their full impact on philosophical discourse.
However, this appears not to be the explanation.
As an initial analysis, I looked at what years (1900 through forthcoming) are most commonly cited in the SEP. The results:
As the graph shows, citation year peaks around 2011-2013. Members of the Silent Generation were in their late 60s to mid-80s in those years. Some of them were definitely still publishing, but age 65-85 is not most philosophers’ peak productive period. Consider the top ten Silents, for example. Lewis, Williams, and Nozick were already deceased by 2011. The most influential work of the remaining seven was published in the late 1960s to early 1990s.
Now I do think that raw publication-year data are potentially somewhat misleading. Stanford Encyclopedia entries tend, I suspect, to disproportionately cite recent work (5-10 years old) that has gained some attention, even if that work has not (yet) been very impactful, so as to stay up to date. (2011-2013 was more than ten years ago, but the entries tend to get substantial updates only every 5-10 years.) A better measure might be longitudinal trends in citation rank. My methods haven’t been exactly the same year to year, but close enough.
All but five of the 202 most-cited philosophers in 2010 are among the 376 most cited in 2024, and the greatest decline in citation rank has been among the Silent Generation. We can see this by subtracting the natural logarithms of the ranks. (I use a negative log basis, because a decline from rank 11 to 20 is much more significant than a decline from rank 191 to 200). For the Greatest generation the average change is -0.13, for Silent it’s -0.19, for Boom it’s -0.09, and for Generation X there’s an average rank gain of +0.21. There’s a similar pattern if we compare the 2014 and 2019 analyses with 2024: The Gen Xers are rising in relative rank while all other generations are declining.
These numbers exclude people who are new to the rankings (or who fall completely off the rankings), and most of my ranking updates contain some new authors from each generation—partly because I expand the length of the list every year but also partly because some people gain in citation rate even well past their death.
One approach to that analytic problem is to compare authors ranked at least 300 (304 with ties) in 2024 with the 2019 list of 295 authors: approximately comparable lists, five years separated. Twenty-seven authors were among the 2019 top 295 but not the 2024 top 304: 6 Greatest, 10 Silent, 9 Boomer, and 2 Gen X. Conversely, thirty-six authors not on the list in 2019 were among the top 304 in 2024: 0 Greatest, 9 Silent, 12 Boomer, and 15 Gen X.
As one might expect from the various analyses so far, the Silents are even more disproportionately represented in the 2010 rankings than in the 2024 rankings: Among the top 25 in 2010, 16 were Silent, compared to 7 Greatest, 2 Boomer, and 1 Gen X.
The analyses thus all tell a similar story: The high representation of Silent Generation philosophers in my list of the most-cited Stanford Encyclopedia authors cannot be that it is currently their peak citation time.
Further indirect support for this claim also comes from an old finding of mine, drawing on Philosophers Index abstracts, that philosophers tend to have their work discussed most when they are approximately age 55-70.
The Not-So-Silent Generation and the Baby Boom Philosophy Bust
So, what explains the Silent Generation’s disproportionate representation among the most influential philosophers in the mainstream Anglophone tradition?
I suggest that their influence is due to their objective importance. They achieved this importance through lucky timing and rising to a cultural occasion.
In the Anglophone world, especially the United States, the 1960s and 1970s were times of sharp university enrollment growth, as Silent Generation scholars were hired to teach the Boomers, as the college degree came to be seen as the standard path to social status and economic security, and as universities basked in the high prestige of science in this era (cultural pride in the space race, the success of the Manhattan Project, the polio vaccine, computers, antibiotics….). The academic job market was ridiculously easy by the standards of every subsequent decade, and professors from this era tell tales of how they landed jobs in the most prestigious universities sometimes with a single phone call.
The Silent Generation thus had a great demographic advantage: They were entering the profession in boom times.
They engaged with their elders (Quine, Rawls, and Strawson, for example; Putnam and Davidson are edge cases due to Putnam’s near-cutoff age and Davidson’s late start), but even more, they engaged directly with one another, filling the journals with articles about the issues that interested them. Much of their seminal work was published in the 1970s while they were relatively young, and this work framed the debates of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s, and to a substantial extent (as my SEP analyses suggest) even today.
The Boomers entered the academic job market mostly in the doldrums of 1980s, when there were far fewer open positions at elite universities. They grew in the shade of the Not-So-Silents, who were then mid-career and in no mood to yield the floor. Their work was largely shaped in reaction to leading Silents, such as Lewis, Kripke, Williams, Nagel, Searle, Van Fraassen, and Fodor. (I suspect this was especially so in the so-called “core” areas of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics, somewhat less so in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and history of philosophy.) There was just less of an opportunity for Boomers to shape the dialogue.
To some extent, a similar story holds for Generation X: The older Gen Xers (like myself) entered academia as the (Not-So-)Silents were senior professors in their sixties—young enough to still be active, old enough to have the most senior positions in academia, in that sweet-spot between ages 55 and 70 when philosophers tend to receive the most prestige and attention. It is perhaps a little early to tell how badly shaded out the Gen X philosophers have been. Still, I’m inclined to think it’s clear that we have been at least somewhat shaded out. We Gen Xers are now on average about age fifty, and so far probably only Chalmers has had the kind of impact on the field that the leading Greatest and Silent generation philosophers generally had by age fifty. (As noted above, in the 2024 SEP rankings, only three Gen Xers rank among the top 100: Chalmers at #14, Schaffer at #45, and Sider at #78.)
A Golden Age of Philosophical Naturalism?
All this said, I don’t think demographics is the whole story. The Silents also had an occasion to rise to: the articulation of a thoroughly secular philosophical worldview.
There have of course been atheists and scientific naturalists in every generation of philosophers in modern history, but in all previous historical contexts, these “naturalist” philosophers were to some extent on the defensive. The Silent generation was the first generation that took atheism and scientific materialism for granted. (Of course not everyone was a naturalist, but in mainstream Anglophone academic philosophy circles, critics of atheism and scientific materialism were very much on the defensive.) This created a context in which that generation could begin to explore in detail, and in dialogue with one another, in a supportive but also competitive context of shared secular assumptions, scientifically inspired approaches to the mind, language, meaning, and value. Arguably, it was a Golden Age of philosophical naturalism, laying the foundations on which all subsequent naturalist approaches have been built.
This is my theory, then, of the Not-So-Silent Generation in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. They had a huge demographic advantage in being hired just as university enrollments were booming, and a major philosophical task fell in their laps through cultural timing: the task laying the foundations of a thoroughly secular, scientific philosophy. They rose to this task and thus became not just a demographically dominant but a philosophically important generation, which will collectively be remembered (perhaps through a few emblematic names).
Is there a broad philosophical task of similar magnitude facing the now-rising generation of philosophers?
I’m not sure. (As Hegel said, the owl of Minera flies only at dusk: We understand our cultural moment only in retrospect, as it is fading into history.) But maybe Artificial Intelligence and breakthroughs in the capacity to control human and non-human physiology will radically transform world, enabling new types of life on the planet (conscious machines? post- or trans-humans?). If so, then maybe Millennial and Zoomer philosophers will have their own world-historical task to rise to: that of helping us understand the philosophical implications of the radical transformations such technologies enable.
Daniel Nolan caught an error in the tie-breaking algorithm which results in some slight changes in the rank numbers, but does not affect the analysis (or the original SEP analysis in August). Thanks, Daniel! Correction pending.
“The academic job market was ridiculously easy by the standards of every subsequent decade, and professors from this era tell tales of how they landed jobs in the most prestigious universities sometimes with a single phone call.”
Excuse me as I try to suppress my jealous anger.
Ridiculously easy for those with the right supervisor and from the right institution, but not for others, perhaps?
my advisor was perfectly ordinary back then, from a perfectly ordinary school. one day his future employer called and said they needed someone, they sent him up, that was that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most scholars from that generation I’ve spoken to are the same; trained at solid-but-not-particularly-remarkable programs. I can only hope that one day those days of plenty will return. This might require an unreasonable level of optimism, though.
That needs a period of expansion of the hiring institutions. This happened in the late 1960s due to the coincidence of the Baby Boom coming of age at a time of broadening access to higher education, so that suddenly a whole lot more educators were needed. Since nearly half of young people are already in college, and the past dozen or so years have had fewer births than previous years, there’s not much room for expansion any time soon, unless we find new types of job.
They sent *him* up
I might also be worth noting that the Greatest and Silent generation philosophers are able to use and develop the tools of the early analytics, but also to part ways with positivism.
Eric Schwitzgebel writes:
“In the Anglophone world, especially the United States, the 1960s and 1970s were times of sharp university enrollment growth…. The academic job market was ridiculously easy by the standards of every subsequent decade….” (emphasis added)
I think these statements do not apply to the second half of the 1970s.
In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021), Louis Menand writes (p. 452):
“American higher education had two periods of explosive growth. The first was between 1880 and 1920, when the modern research university came into being in the United States. Student enrollment in those years increased by 500 percent and the number of faculty increased by 400 percent. The second period was between 1945 and 1975, when the number of institutions doubled, the number of undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent, and the number of graduate students by almost 900 percent. In the 1960s alone, undergraduate enrollments more than doubled; the number of doctorates awarded every year tripled; and more faculty positions were created than had been created in the entire 325-year history of American higher education prior to 1960.”
Note the cutoff year in this passage: not 1980, but 1975. I graduated from college in 1979, and everyone knew anecdotally that the academic job market was not good, i.e., considerably worse than it had been. Everyone heard stories about new PhDs struggling to find jobs and in some cases giving up and going to law school (or doing something else other than academia) instead. In short, the cutoff date of roughly 1975 seems right to me; I don’t believe the academic job market in the second half of the 1970s was “ridiculously easy” in comparison to subsequent decades (though it was presumably better than it is today).
If we’re trying to explain why the 1930-1945 cohort is more prominent in philosophy than the boomers, despite being roughly 1/2 the size of the boomers, you’d want the theory to say that boomers graduated into bad job markets.
So if the job market started getting tougher around 1975, that would I think make Eric’s view stronger than if the cutoff was around 1980.
My sense is that by the mid-1980s, the forces you’re describing led to a job market that was considerably worse than it is today, and probably worse than any time except perhaps the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis in the very early 2010s. But it would be good to have data on this.
Thanks, Louis and Brian! Yes, Louis, I think you might be right that 1975 is a better cutoff than 1980 for the end of the explosive growth in undergrad enrollment in the U.S., though it’s slightly odd from the perspective of the typical birthyear division between “Boomer” and “Gen X”, since the younger boomers didn’t enter college until the late 1970s and even the early 1980s.
Regardless of that, as Brian notes, if 1975 is the cutoff, that turns out even better for my thesis, since that’s when the youngest Silents would be 30. If we go into the late 1970s, then we’re starting to look at the academic job market for the older Boomers.
This is a belated contribution, but …
I’m skeptical of the naturalism explanation. If one looked just a moral philosophy, where naturalism has been much less dominant, I suspect one would find the same dominance of the Silents. Not just Williams, Nagel, and Nozick from the list above but also Parfit, Dworkin and Scanlon. An alternative explanation cites, what’s often been noted, the increased and still increasing specialization of philosophical work from the 1960s to the present.
This is especially relevant given Eric’s way of deriving a ranking from citations in the SEP. By counting only main entries in which a philosopher has at least one citation, and giving no extra credit for additional citations in an entry, it tends to favour generalists, or those who worked on many topics. Thus It can give a higher ranking to a philosopher who made comparatively minor contributions on 50 topics than to one who made immense contributions on 20 topics.
I confess this is just an impression, but my sense is that philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s wrote on more topics than has been common since then. There may be several reasons for this: a smaller literature to read before writing on a given topic; less onerous demands for publication pre-tenure; (what I think were) more varied teaching assignments; and more topics where it was possible to make first moves and so initiate a literature.
An anecdote: I recall an APA (I think) where a younger philosopher asked another Boomer moral philosopher and me why our generation’s work was so much less interesting than that of the philosophers before us, e.g. (I think) Rawls and Nozick. Whereas they wrote synoptic books addressing a wide range of topics in normative ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy, we wrote narrower books on just equality or just killing or just virtue or just desert. Nothing like the scope or ambition of the greats before.
The observation about increased narrowness seems right — would anyone write something as wide-ranging as A Theory of Justice today? And it too may have several causes: much more literature to read on a topic, more onerous publication demands pre-tenure, more specialized teaching. But another may be just that that’s how an intellectual field develops, for intellectual reasons.
You read e.g. what Rawls says about equality and think “It’s not that simple; there are complexities there he’s not recognizing.” So you think more about the complexities, and so do other philosophers, and the result is a large literature just about the various different versions of egalitarianism and the different objections they can be open to or avoid. And the process is driven largely by philosophical interest, i.e. by what the initial less complicated statements stimulate you to think about.
Anyway, that’s a possible alternative explanation, or partial explanation, of the dominance of the Silent Generation in Eric’s SEP-based ranking: that those philosophers tended — obviously only in general and with exceptions — to write on a broader range of topics than their successors and that Eric’s methodology tends to favour that kind of generalism.
Interesting alternative hypothesis. You might be right. I’m a little skeptical about the idea that the field now favors specialists over people with wide-ranging interests. I can definitely see why that seems plausible, and maybe it’s true. One related thing that seems very plausible: The sheer number of philosophers who now publish does probably mean that there are many more total people who contribute to just a few narrow areas, as well as probably a higher *ratio* of specialists to wide-ranging contributors.
Still, the most influential philosophers of every generation often follow up success in one area by branching ambitiously into other areas, and philosophy as a field seems to be much more welcoming of area-hopping (even across the LEMM / value divide) than the sciences.
It would be interesting to think of a way to explore your hypothesis rigorously. My inclination is to think that even if the most prominent Boomers and Gen Xers aren’t *quite* as broad-ranging as the most prominent Greatests and Silents, that by itself probably isn’t enough of a difference to explain the large effect size.
Besides demographic advantage and the task of naturalism, there is a clear third cause: the rise of professionalization in the 1970s. Professionalization requires a sense of who is most to be emulated – that is naturally the people with the most sought after jobs. These authors became the most cited because the pluralist revolt against the analytic dominance of the APA failed in 1979, and so professionalization got identified with the naturalist program of analytic philosophy. Of the ten philosophers of the silent generation mentioned here, 4 got their PhDs at Harvard (BA only for Kripke), 2 from Princeton, 1 from Oxford, 1 from Cambridge, 1 from Pittsburgh and 1 from La Trobe; and they taught mainly at Princeton (5), Harvard (1) Cambridge (1), Berkeley (1), Rutgers (1) and ANU (1).
When Schwitzgebel says their influence is because of “their objective importance,” what he seems to mean is that the most important research program for philosophy in the 70s-90s was that of philosophical naturalism as defined by these authors. Which is another way of saying, these thinkers were the best, these departments were the best, and so that is why they are most cited.
All the graphs, statistical analysis, etc covers over how conservative this analysis actually is. A kind of nostalgia for that time. To reject this conservativeness, one doesn’t have to focus on how the list doesn’t have women, people of color, etc, or that none of these most cited philosophers had nothing to say about feminism, or global philosophy, etc. One can point as well to how these citation practices are just the winners writing the history, and that many other traditions like ordinary language philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology and other forms of naturalism were pushed out – not through argument or careful debate, but because these guys who hung out in the same 10 or 15 departments happened to oversee a monopoly of their interests in the profession.
This isn’t to deny the obvious point that these are great thinkers and their brand of philosophy is fascinating and important. But that’s not why they are the most cited. The reason for that is the competition was put out of business, sometimes willfully as at the 1979 APA, and often without so much as having to recognize there were competitor paradigms.
Thanks for the comment, Bharath. I agree that there was narrow-minded institution-guarding with insufficient appreciation of the value of other forms and traditions in philosophy! However, I also think that in a very broad historical perspective, few moments in philosophical history will prove in retrospect to have been as momentous as the rise of naturalism that we saw with the Silent Generation.
Thanks, Eric, for your response. What do you think is the relation between (a) the narrow-minded institution guarding of that time and (b) the momentous rise of naturalism? It sounds like you are saying these are independent issues. But they are connected because the institution guarding was against other forms of naturalism. The naturalism of the Silent Generation is a very particular kind of naturalism – which sought to understand the mind in relation to the then ascendent cognitive sciences, as opposed to connecting the mind more broadly to culture. Foucault’s project is naturalistic, as are the projects of Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, and McDowell and Rorty. What their projects lacked however was the coming together of naturalism with professionalization – Rorty’s project resisted professionalization, whereas Lewis and Fodor’s projects, different as they are, embraced it. I think as the structures of academia shift, the analytic naturalism of the 70s-90s will seem as archaic as the institutional practices back then, and different forms of naturalism can arise.