Dear all
You are warmly invited to the 6th and final session (in English) of this year’s “Filosofia Inter-Disciplinare” (FID) seminar. The session will be held in person (Sala Martinetti, via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122, Milan) & online:
Friday, 13 December 2024, 2pm–4pm (CET)
Guido Bonino & Paolo Tripodi (Turin)
TITLE: Academic Success in America: Analytic Philosophy and the Decline of Wittgenstein
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.
For accessibility information and to participate, please see/register here:
https://forms.gle/vUwADBM3tHVhZZvQ6
All are welcome.
Yours
Filippo Contesi & Elisa Paganini
FID ( https://sites.google.com/fisppa.it/prinonground/events/fid ) is hosted by the Philosophy Department “Piero Martinetti”, Università degli Studi di Milano, and generously supported by the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (PRIN2022 – 2022NTCHYF_003)