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Analytic/Continental divide in the journals: a comment on Schwitzgebel’s latest study

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has posted another of his interesting empirical studies, this time of references to major "Continental" figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida in four leading Anglophone journals:  Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous.   This chart is a useful representation of what he found:

Schwitzgebel study

See Schwitzbgebel's post for similar charts about Heidegger and other Continental figures.  A few thoughts below the fold.


1.  Of the four journals studied, only Philosophical Review regularly publishes papers on historical figures.  So while Frege is quite tightly bound to many contemporary philosophical discussions (e.g., in philosophy of language, math and logic), it's unsurprising that Nietzsche is not.    Even by the standards of Anglophone philosophy, Mind and to a lesser extent Journal of Philosophy are very narrow, although Mind has recently indicated an intention to broaden its coverage.   Figures like Nietzsche loom a bit larger in value theory, which is covered in all these journals, but is not a central (or even major) focus of any of them. 

2.   It is striking how well Nietzsche does compared to Frege outside of the four "top" journals.

3.  It would have been interesting to see how Hegel fares by these metrics.  The "Pittsburgh Hegel" (not to be confused with the actual Hegel!) has given the inscrutable sage of Jena and Berlin more traction in language/mind/metaphysics/epistemology than he would have had a generation or two ago.

Readers are welcome to post thoughts on this data here, although Professor Schwitzgebel also has comments open at his site.

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4 responses to “Analytic/Continental divide in the journals: a comment on Schwitzgebel’s latest study”

  1. Dean C. Rowan

    Compare Google's ngram viewer chart for nietzsche,frege,heidegger,wittgenstein (case-insensitive), 1900-2019: https://bit.ly/3NQeK17

    This comes with plenty of caveats. First, the ngram viewer reports the percentage of the specified ngrams (here all unigrams: nietzsche, frege, etc.) of all unigrams within the corpus for the specified time period. Essentially, a unigram corresponds roughly to what we call a word. If we viewed results for friedrich nietzsche (case-insensitive), we'd get a percentage calculated from a numerator (number of occurrences of the bigram friedrich nietzsche) and a denominator (number of bigrams in the corpus). Another issue is the corpus itself, which consists primarily of books from major research university collections scanned by Google. Hence, like JSTOR the content here is mostly, but not exclusively, academic. Unlike JSTOR, however, we don't really know what comprises the corpus. It's possible that Google's scanning has declined in recent years. Finally, the chart has been smoothed by taking a moving average of three years on each side of the specified year. You can view the raw numbers by changing the smoothing value to 0.

    Clearly, Nietzsche "wins." Wittgenstein and Heidegger duke it out for a few decades until around 1989, when the latter prevails.

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  2. Gordon Barnes

    The gap between the elite journals and all the other journals, with respect to the ratio of Frege references to Nietzsche references, seems to correlate, at least roughly, with the growth of the discipline in the twentieth century. From the 40s to the 60s, there is a significant increase in both the number of philosophers and this disparity between the journals, and from the 60s to today there is a very large increase in both. So here is a hypothesis. As the number of people in the profession grows, and the profession begins to get overcrowded, competition for elite positions gets more intense. Increasingly, the field divides into a top tier, and everyone else. In order to secure a place in that top tier, you need to impress the people in that tier. So if the people in that tier think that Frege is the bomb, and that Nietzsche is garbage, then you will write about Frege, not Nietzsche. Since those same people edit the elite journals, they will approve your choice, and publish your papers on Frege, not the ones on Nietzsche. Thus, your preference for Frege is selected, and other people begin to follow suit. That’s one possibility.

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  3. Gordon Barnes

    More succinctly, when the supply of applicants for elite positions far exceeds the demand for those positions, then the people who choose the recipients of the elite positions will exert a much greater influence on those who aspire to those positions. The result will be that those in and around elite positions will come to resemble those in elite positions more thoroughly. Those who don’t will be relegated to the lower tiers.

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  4. Matt

    As my friend and grad school colleague Paul Franco pointed out on twitter, it's surely relevant that the biggest spike in references to Frege come soon after the translations of the _Foundations of Arithmetic_ by JL Austin (1950) and the _Translations from the Philosophical Writings Gottlob Frege_ by Geach and Black in 1952. Obviously, there was some interest before those translations were published (Wittgenstein talks about Frege in his lectures before then, and it's clear that people who are connected with Wittgenstein are interested in Frege, and he's discussed by Carnap and others, etc.) but it was apparently difficult to get some of Frege's work at all, and it wasn't available widely in English before the early 50s, so a spike after that point isn't super surprising.

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