Dear all,
our next speakers in the Philosophy of Science Colloquium organized by the Institute Vienna Circle are Paolo Tripodi and Guido Bonino (University of Turin), who will give a talk on April 3, 4.45-6.15 pm.
All are welcome!
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Philosophy of Science Colloquium TALK: Paolo Tripodi & Guido Bonino (University of Turin)
Academic Success in America: Analytic Philosophy and the Decline of Wittgenstein
Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.
Date: 03/04/2025
Time: 16h45
Venue: New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, HS 3A
Abstract:
There is a rather widespread consensus, among historians of philosophy, concerning the decline of Wittgenstein amid recent analytic philosophy. However, the exact import of such a decline, its chronological development, as well as its causes and several other features, are difficult to ascertain with the traditional methods of the history of philosophy. In this talk we apply a distant reading approach, and a variety of other quantitative methods, to provide a more reliable and accurate account of Wittgenstein's decline. We focus on a corpus consisting of the metadata of US PhD dissertations in philosophy from 1981 to 2010 (although other kinds of data are also taken into consideration), and we try to relate the topic of the dissertation to the success of the candidate in his/her subsequent academic career. The results of this analysis, corroborated by other evidence, allow us to put forth the more reliable and accurate account just hinted at, and at the same time to suggest – as a contribution to external history of philosophy – a plausible mechanism at the basis of the decline itself, notably a process driven by those who controlled the recruitment policies in the philosophy departments.
