Philosophers have always referred to other philosophers in their writing, but not always with citations.

Since most bibliographic tools track connections between philosophers merely by tracking who has cited whom, many such connections may be missed.

But now there’s a new way to find out about them, as Sander Verhaegh and Gregor Bös, both of Tilburg University, explain in the following guest post. It’s called edhiphy, and it’s free for you to use.

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A New Tool to Track and Analyze Philosophers’ Mentions
by Sander Verhaegh and Gregor Bös

Who was the most mentioned philosopher in English philosophy journals in the 1910s—more popular than Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel? (Hint: it is not a British or an American philosopher) Who was the most mentioned female philosopher in this period? And how dominant were the logical empiricists in the first decades after World War II?

These and similar questions can now be answered.* A group of philosophers based at Tilburg University has just launched edhiphy.org, an online platform to find and analyze mentions to and from philosophers. edhiphy, an acronym for ‘Enriched Data for the History of Philosophy’, currently contains more than one million mention links extracted from over twenty thousand journal articles and can help historians to investigate philosophical discourse in different periods and journals.

Standard bibliometric tools link documents and authors through citations. Philosophers, however, only started using standardized citations from the 1970s onwards. edhiphy is based on the idea that philosophers have always referenced colleagues and predecessors, but sometimes only through mentioning them by name. R. M. Blake’s 1926 paper “The Paradox of Temporal Process”, for example, does not include standardized citations but mentions dozens of philosophers, including William James, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and Zeno (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Philosophers mentioned in the first paragraph of R. M. Blake’s “The Paradox of Temporal Process” (Journal of Philosophy, 1926).

edhiphy can be used to find articles mentioning specific (combinations of) philosophers, and to visualize mention structures in interactive maps. The database tracks mentions to and from thousands of different philosophers (Figure 2) and allows historians to generate statistics about the most-mentioned philosophers in specific periods and journals (Table 1). It can also be used to create co-mention networks—visualizations of the frequencies with which philosophers are mentioned in the same articles—to analyze the state of a debate in a particular period or journal (Figure 3). All of these searches can also be limited to articles that contain key phrases, like ‘sense data’ or ‘existentialism’.

Table 1: Top-10 most-mentioned 20th-century philosophers (df. alive in or born after 1901) in American philosophy journals by decade.

To create the database, the edhiphy team had to find a method to assign ambiguous references to the correct philosophers. When an article mentions ‘Sellars’, for example, it is often unclear whether it is a reference to Wilfrid or his father Roy Wood. edhiphy employs a variety of strategies, including data about co-mention frequencies, to predict the intended reference. At the moment, edhiphy has linked 93% of the database’s mentions to specific philosophers with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. The team hopes to further increase the reliability of the database in the future.

Figure 2: Number of articles mentioning Susan Stebbing by year.

Currently, edhiphy contains data from twelve major British and American philosophy journals** published between 1890 and 1979. The group is working on extending the database with French and German journals and continues to add new ways of interacting with the database. The current version is now made available to a wider audience to gather user feedback and guide further development. Some of this development will concern the elimination of remaining errors. Especially common names (‘James’, ‘Moore’) or names that also occur as nouns in other contexts (‘White, ‘Church’) still contain false positives. Also ambiguities between the philosophers and non-philosophers (e.g. Gertrud Jung and C. G. Jung) can still be misinterpreted. Other names can be extracted very reliably. To be transparent about the data quality, the website displays the context for each mention. Users can log mistakes by clicking the flag (⚐) button. Flagged mentions will not be retracted automatically, nor displayed as flagged, but help the development of better mention extraction and disambiguation.

Figure 3: Co-mention network of the most-mentioned philosophers in the period 1951-1960. Nodes represent individual authors; node sizes reflect numbers of mentions, and the distance between nodes reflects how often the corresponding authors are co-mentioned in articles from this period. Complete interactive network available online.

edhiphy is created as part of the project “Exiled Empiricists: American Philosophy and the Great Intellectual Migration“, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), in collaboration with JSTOR’s Data for Research service. The project is led by Sander Verhaegh and hosted by Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The underlying database was originally conceived by Eugenio Petrovich (now based at the University of Turin) and designed with the help of Fons Dewulf (now based at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Claudia Cristalli, Ties van Gemert, and Nina IJdens. The edhiphy database is currently developed by Gregor E. Bös, who also created the web application edhiphy.org with technical expertise from Wessel Dankers.

Further reading:

• The paper “Bibliometrics Beyond Citations: Introducing Mention Extraction and Analysis” (Scientometrics 2024), explains the rationale and technical implementation of edhiphy.
• The paper “The American Reception of Logical Empiricism: A Mention-Based Bibliometric Analysis” (preprint) uses edhiphy to quantitatively study the American reception of logical empiricism (Table 1 and Figure 3 are extracted from this paper).

* Answers to the questions in the opening paragraph: Henri Bergson was the most mentioned philosopher of the 1910s (here), Mary Whiton Calkins was the most-mentioned female philosopher of the 1910s (see first tutorial here). One in seven philosophy articles published in the 1950s mention Carnap at least once (here).

** Analysis, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Synthese, The Journal of Philosophy, The Monist, The Philosophical Quarterly, The Philosophical Review