The man is a machine

I appreciate these comments, by the way, this is good for tightening up the text in the paper to specify what we are doing. Thank you!

Yes, I agree.

I agree we can't judge accuracy, hence we don't use it as a benchmark. We're looking for convergence in the Collins dataset and merely used inter-rater reliability to see if the two came to similar classifications.

Sure, they probably used the same texts, but I don't see this as a problem.

It probably could have helped increase the accuracy, but I am skeptical it had anything close to the edge lists from the book given we had to manually reconstruct them ourselves.

This work aims to move beyond the traditional boundaries of philosophy of science and science of science, proposing here an emerging "science of philosophy".

Preprint here:
Moser, C. J., Ortega, A., & Marghetis, T. (2025). The network science of philosophy.
osf.io/ep3ub_v1

What are the distinguishing factors of vital and static periods of philosophy? Vital communities are marked by the emergence of highly central figures who compress conversational space. These thinkers reorient the structure of debate, reinventing periods through synthesis, integration, reformation.

Vital and static communities do not differ in overall levels of disagreement, neither in static structure over time.

What sets vital communities apart is not amount of disagreement, but its organization. In vital periods, disagreement is restructured into productive and generative conversation.

We also ask how productive philosophical communities emerge? We find that while vital and static eras start with similar structure, vitality is marked by centralizing debate drawing diverse communities into a shared core of discussion.

We distinguish between "vital" periods, marked by exploration, synthesis, and the emergence of new ideas, and "static" periods, which emphasize maintenance and repetition, finding that these are marked significantly by increased community integration in vital communities relative to static ones.

Examining philosophical networks compared to null models of similar structure, we find that networks of philosophical interaction have more centralizing figures, are more sparse and modular, and exhibit more hierarchy.

Using networks from Randall Collins' 'The Sociology of Philosophies', we examine differences between different philosophical systems through time and how they develop across history, examining networks of philosophical interaction from ancient India (800BCE) to modern North America (1980CE).