A few days ago I posted a list of the most cited philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) to Bluesky. By coincidence, Eric Schwitzgebel was at that time compiling his own analysis of the most cited contemporary philosophers in the SEP. His analysis was brilliant, detailed, and rigorous. Mine was none of these things. Anyway, operating on the principle that the best way not to be outdone is to do something so pointless no-one else would bother doing it, I went back to the drawing board (jupyter notebook) and decided to rank these philosophers, not by citation, but by vibes.
The idea is quite simple: some philosophers have good vibes. With some philosophers, you are just happy to see their name appear in an article. Accepting this, we can ask, which philosophers have the best vibes? Can we have an ordinal ranking of the vibes of contemporary philosophers as determined by their appearance in Stanford Encycopedia of philosophy?
I made an automated vibe-checker for the philosophers. Using a corpus I downloaded from the Stanford Encyclopedia earlier this year, the vibe-checker extracts sentences in which a philosopher’s name is mentioned, then uses an off-the-shelf sentiment analyzer from huggingface.com to classify those sentences as either ‘positive’ (good vibes) or ‘negative’ (bad vibes). As this is very scientific, it gives scores for each of these ratings and in this spirit of this very science, I added the positive scores and subtracted the negative ones to get a vibe rating for each philosopher.
In the process, at least one hundred philosophers names disappeared from my list. I don’t know why this happened and I don’t care to know. It almost certainly involves the regular expressions I used to compile my list. I will upload my code once I get access back to my github account.
As for the results… well, it turns out that Hartry Field has the best vibes of any contemporary philosopher. By a wide margin. I don’t make the rules, I just do the data science. The vibes are less sexist than our citation practices, Iris Marion Young comes third. Robert Stalnaker has better vibes than Michael Dummett and Ruth Millikan has better vibes than Jerry Fodor. Saul Kripke has negative vibes. Arthur Prior has the worst vibes.
You may think this is all rather stupid, but if the literature on automation bias is correct, it’s probably even stupider than that.
- field 614.0982611775398
- fine 336.70277148485184
- young 315.35227143764496
- rawls 231.91707468032837
- smith 230.81482023000717
- lewis 200.49158316850662
- taylor 188.91999167203903
- cohen 172.89880120754242
- miller 171.1479259133339
- goldman 108.25963085889816
- priest 104.85910701751709
- wright 103.05177944898605
- davies 99.96242928504944
- frankfurt 98.71088713407516
- strawson 93.9043459892273
- williams 91.24192148447037
- armstrong 90.66355013847351
- benthem 90.64775544404984
- adams 90.02299654483795
- cooper 89.14543014764786
- nussbaum 89.00839078426361
- friedman 84.24218708276749
- tarski 72.57822716236115
- foucault 71.52109181880951
- griffiths 65.38107359409332
- shapiro 61.965298533439636
- zalta 59.25469136238098
- pettit 58.68110549449921
- kitcher 58.592814207077026
- stalnaker 57.33914715051651
- evans 57.223205506801605
- peacocke 56.964464366436005
- chalmers 55.78176313638687
- jackson 54.36775064468384
- kim 53.88400322198868
- parsons 53.12986218929291
- hull 52.23252326250076
- goodman 50.76519215106964
- korsgaard 49.851452708244324
- burgess 49.34033018350601
- barnes 47.568376541137695
- longino 45.581149220466614
- habermas 44.360403299331665
- rorty 42.82926070690155
- johnston 42.125772297382355
- lowe 41.912597715854645
- church 41.79501086473465
- anderson 39.24114805459976
- hintikka 38.88026028871536
- sartre 38.72553139925003
- stanley 38.039898693561554
- blackburn 37.85333985090256
- stich 37.155364990234375
- millikan 36.81285709142685
- sterelny 36.51321238279343
- dworkin 34.57710027694702
- mancosu 34.32691580057144
- kuhn 34.03896850347519
- mcdowell 34.000457763671875
- guyer 33.75150007009506
- feferman 33.453391909599304
- macintyre 32.20972841978073
- annas 31.897765338420868
- rosen 31.0681614279747
- audi 30.9143385887146
- sosa 29.73508483171463
- plantinga 28.870016157627106
- lycan 28.71994388103485
- waldron 28.67236018180847
- earman 27.96702218055725
- haslanger 27.416334092617035
- velleman 25.76090008020401
- bennett 25.6956108212471
- fraassen 25.392526268959045
- schaffer 25.34219402074814
- smart 24.98331767320633
- salmon 24.752286434173584
- alston 23.92374360561371
- mclaughlin 23.55936348438263
- shoemaker 23.38240957260132
- beiser 23.09119015932083
- glymour 23.086091697216034
- skyrms 22.891724586486816
- irwin 22.47684806585312
- feinberg 22.147677779197693
- kretzmann 22.016636908054352
- gibbard 21.895205080509186
- ayer 21.882084548473358
- brandom 21.855193376541138
- horwich 21.852029263973236
- dummett 21.844636023044586
- woodward 21.651115775108337
- hawthorne 21.350422203540802
- horgan 20.94420313835144
- simons 19.614969313144684
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- carruthers 19.322746515274048
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- dancy 18.94303297996521
- suppes 18.934043407440186
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- harman 18.05517488718033
- buchanan 17.830840706825256
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- rescher 16.528245449066162
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