2.27 Heidegger and Husserl

Category: History of Philosophy

Keywords: heidegger, husserl, sartre, phenomenological, brentano, hartmann, phenomenology, transcendent, research, transcendental, realm, ego, constituted, intentionality, kierkegaard

Number of Articles: 404
Percentage of Total: 1.3%
Rank: 28th

Weighted Number of Articles: 273.1
Percentage of Total: 0.8%
Rank: 59th

Mean Publication Year: 1964
Weighted Mean Publication Year: 1963.6
Median Publication Year: 1963
Modal Publication Year: 1941

Topic with Most Overlap: Idealism (0.0442)
Topic this Overlaps Most With: Self-Consciousness (0.0171)
Topic with Least Overlap: Formal Epistemology (0.00037)
Topic this Overlaps Least With: Formal Epistemology (2e-04)

A scatterplot showing which proportion of articles each year are in the Heidegger and Husserltopic. The x-axis shows the year, the y-axis measures the proportion of articles each year in this topic. There is one dot per year. The highest value is in 1941 when 4.5% of articles were in this topic. The lowest value is in 1884 when 0.0% of articles were in this topic. The full table that provides the data for this graph is available in Table A.27 in Appendix A.

Figure 2.68: Heidegger and Husserl.

A set of twelve scatterplots showing the proportion of articles in each journal in each year that are in the Heidegger and Husserltopic. There is one scatterplot for each of the twelve journals that are the focus of this book. In each scatterplot, the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is the proportion of articles in that year in that journal in this topic. Here are the average values for each of the twelve scatterplots - these tell you on average how much of the journal is dedicated to this topic. Mind - 0.2%. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society - 0.3%. Ethics - 0.3%. Philosophical Review - 0.4%. Analysis - 0.1%. Philosophy and Public Affairs - 0.0%. Journal of Philosophy - 0.9%. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research - 5.6%. Philosophy of Science - 0.3%. Noûs - 0.3%. The Philosophical Quarterly - 0.2%. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science - 0.1%. The topic reaches its zenith in year 1941 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 4.4% of the articles. And it hits a minimum in year 1884 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 0.0% of the articles.

Figure 2.69: Heidegger and Husserl articles in each journal.

Table 2.61: Characteristic articles of the Heidegger and Husserl topic.
Table 2.62: Highly cited articles in the Heidegger and Husserl topic.

Comments

In earlier iterations of this project I ran through a few different journals. And one of the effects of doing this was that I’d occasionally see topics that weren’t really that big in philosophy in general but were a big deal in that journal. And some of them were very distinctive to the interests of one or another journal editor. This iteration of the project mostly didn’t have this; very few topics are held up by a single journal.

This topic is an exception. The graph for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research obviously looks very different to the graphs for the rest of the journals. But I don’t think this means that we’re seeing something unrepresentative here. Rather, what we’re seeing is something like a blind spot or deliberate oversight) in the other eleven journals, which is counterbalanced by Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. This does mean that when PPR changes its focus in the 1980s, this topic seems to fall away very quickly. That’s misleading though, if one cares about all of philosophy. What’s really true is that the topic moves away from these twelve journals, and this becomes a respect in which the twelve journals are less than fully representative of philosophy.

When there is a difference this striking between journals, or between times, I like to go back and check the underlying data to see whether it is just a weird consequence of the way the model was built. In this case it is easy enough to see that there is a striking difference beteween PPR and the other eleven journals. Here are the number of times the word Husserl appears in each journal each year.

A graph showing how often the word Husserl appears in each journal in each year. It appears a lot in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and almost never in the other eleven journals.

Figure 2.70: Number of times Husserl is mentioned in each journal each year.

And here is the same graph for Heidegger. Note that in some recent years, 2002 and 2012, the word Heidegger does not appear in these twelve journals.

A graph showing how often the word Heidegger appears in each journal in each year. It appears a lot in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and almost never in the other eleven journals.

Figure 2.71: Number of times Heidegger is mentioned in each journal each year.

I’m calling this topic a history topic because most of the papers feel historical; they are looking back at work done in the glory days of phenomenology. But those 1940s papers that make up a chunk of the topics weren’t intended as being papers in history of philosophy; they were just doing philosophy. This is a systematic challenge with a study this long. If I extended the study even further—say by including seventeenth- to nineteenth-century books—there would be even more dramatic versions of this effect. Topic modeling can’t typically tell works by an author apart from works about that author, so any historical figure will be grouped in with the history of work on that author.