The paper aims at outlining some essential Neoplatonic traits in order to accomplish an ecological Metaphysics, by developing a dynamic and intensive notion of «Selfness» within three main fields of knowledge: Biology, Psychology, Cosmology. Starting from post-cybernetics systems’ theories, by deepening Bateson’s Ecology of Mind, in the end the research will restore the ancient One-Many aporia, showing its irrefutable value.

1. Le fe por la palabra -- 2. Topía y Utopía -- 3. Luz en la caverna.

This book offers an unprecedented quantitative portrait of analytic philosophy focusing on two seemingly marginal features of philosophical texts: citations and acknowledgements in academic publications. Originating from a little network of philosophers based in Oxford, Cambridge, and Vienna, analytic philosophy has become during the Twentieth century a thriving philosophical community with thousands of members worldwide. Leveraging the most advanced techniques from bibliometrics, citations and acknowledgments are used in this book to shed light on both the epistemology and the sociology of (...) this philosophical field, illuminating the intellectual trajectory of analytic philosophy as well as the social characteristics of the analytic community. Special attention is dedicated to the last forty years, providing insights into a phase of analytic philosophy which is still understudied by historians of philosophy. In the eight chapters of the book, readers will find not only numerous quantitative investigations and technical explanations, but also a robust theoretical framework and epistemological reflections on the strengths and limitations of quantitative methods for the study of philosophy. With its strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will engage a wide range of scholars, including historians of philosophy seeking new methodologies, analytic philosophers interested in a new look at their discipline, and scholars in digital humanities, bibliometrics, and quantitative studies of science, who will find many innovative techniques for investigating disciplinary fields. (shrink)

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication about (...) the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators. (shrink)

Eugenio Bulygin is a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy as they are known on the European continent - no accident, given the role of the civil law tradition in his home country, Argentina. Over the past half-century, Bulygin has engaged virtually all major legal philosophers in the English-speaking countries, including H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Bulygin's essays, several written together with his eminent colleague and close friend Carlos E. Alchourrón, reflect the genre familiar from (...) Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, and Georg Henrik von Wright's Norm and Action. Bulygin's wide-ranging interests include most of the topics found under the rubric of analytical jurisprudence - interpretation and judicial reasoning, validity and efficacy of law, legal positivism and the problem of normativity, completeness and consistency of the legal system, the nature of legal norms, and the role of deontic logic in the law. The reader will take delight in the often agreeably unorthodox character of Bulygin's views and in his hard-hitting arguments in defence of them. He challenges the received opinion on gaps in the law, on legal efficacy, on permissory norms, and on the criteria for legal validity. Bulygin's essays have been wellnigh inaccessible in the past, appearing in specialized journals, often in Spanish or German. They are now available for the first time in an English-language collection. (shrink)

Norms conferring public or private powers, i.e., the competence to issue other norms, play a very important rôle in law. But there is no agreement among legal philosophers about the nature of such norms. There are two main groups of theories, those that regard them as a kind of norms of conduct (either commands or permissions) and those that regard them as non-reducible to other types of norms. I try to show that reductionist theories are not quite acceptable; neither the (...) command-variety (Kelsen, Alf Ross inOn Law and Justice), nor the permission-variety (von Wright, Kanger, Lindahl) provide a satisfactory account of competence norms.Among the authors who maintain that competence norms are different from (and hence not reducible to) norms of conduct are Hart, Ross inDirectives and Norms, and Searle. Ross and Searle distinguish between regulative and constitutive rules as two radically different kinds of rules and classify competence norms among constitutive rules. This distinction runs parallel to von Wright's distinction between rules that are prescriptions and determinative rules. While the first regulate actions (by commanding, prohibiting, or permitting them), determinative rules define certain concepts. To view competence norms as (partial) definitions of certain legal concepts (like those of legislator, judge, etc.) seems to open interesting perspectives and to shed light on at least one aspect of these elusive norms. (shrink)

In the last decades, research in science mapping has delivered several powerful techniques, based on citation or textual analysis, for charting the intellectual organization of research fields. To map the social network underlying science and scholarship, by contrast, science mapping has mainly relied on one method, co-authorship analysis. This method, however, suffers from well-known limitations related to the practice of authorship. Moreover, it does not perform well on those fields where multi-authored publications are rare. In this study, a new method (...) for mapping the social structure of research fields is advanced, based on the analysis of the acknowledgments of academic publications. We first discuss the standard account of the function of acknowledgments in scholarly communication, then we introduce a new interpretative framework in which the acknowledgments are intended as positioning signals exchanged by researchers. Next, we provide the formal definition of the four acknowledgments-based networks that stand at the core of the method, and we test it on a humanities field, analytic philosophy. Results show that acknowledgement-based networks allow to reconstruct the fine-grained social structure of analytic philosophy from different perspectives. Furthermore, by comparing the citation-based maps of the field with the acknowledgments-based networks, it permits to shed light on the relationship between the intellectual and social layer of analytic philosophy. We conclude by presenting practical limitations of the method and by sketching some further research lines. (shrink)

Some important ideas in Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law can be traced back to Kantian tradition, which has been very influential in Kelsen's thought, particularly in his early period. Among them we find the distinction between two radically different worlds (the world of facts and the world of norms), the normativity of legal science and the idea of validity as a binding force, based on the famous doctrine of the basic norm. These tenets and, especially, the use of a normative (...) concept of validity prove to be incompatible with Kelsen's positivistic programme of a value‐free legal science. The science of law cannot state that legal norms are obligatory or binding without trespassing the limits of Kelsen's ideal of a legal science; on the other hand, it is possible to define the concept of a legal system without resorting to the basic norm. So, if Kelsen is to be regarded as a consequent positivist, the Kantian ingredients of his theory must be rejected and the descriptive concept of validity as membership must be substituted for the normative notion of validity as a binding force. (shrink)

In this work I argue that Descartes was not a trialist by showing that the main tenets of trialist interpretations of Descartes's theory of substance are either not supported by the text or are not sufficient for establishing the trialist interpretation.

Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to (...) create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally. (shrink)

BackgroundGenetic/genomic testing (GGT) are useful tools for improving health and preventing diseases. Still, since GGT deals with sensitive personal information that could significantly impact a patient’s life or that of their family, it becomes imperative to consider Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI). Thus, ELSI studies aim to identify and address concerns raised by genomic research that could affect individuals, their family, and society. However, there are quantitative and qualitative discrepancies in the literature to describe the elements that provide content (...) to the ELSI studies and such problems may result in patient misinformation and harmful choices.MethodsWe analyzed the major international documents published by international organizations to specify the parameters that define ELSI and the recognized criteria for GGT, which may prove useful for researchers, health professionals and policymakers. First, we defined the parameters of the ethical, legal and social fields in GGT to avoid ambiguities when using the acronym ELSI. Then, we selected nine documents from 44 relevant publications by international organizations related to genomic medicine.ResultsWe identified 29 ELSI sub-criteria concerning to GGT, which were organized and grouped within 10 minimum criteria: two from the ethical field, four from the legal field and four from the social field. An additional analysis of the number of appearances of these 29 sub-criteria in the analyzed documents allowed us to order them and to determine 7 priority criteria for starting to evaluate and propose national regulations for GGT.ConclusionsWe propose that the ELSI criteria identified herein could serve as a starting point to formulate national regulation on personalized genomic medicine, ensuring consistency with international bioethical requirements. (shrink)

Para el autor de este artículo, el rechazo kantiano de la identificación de su concepto de a priori con la noción leibniciana de lo innato solo puede comprenderse de manera clara y precisa, si recurrimos a la concepción kantiana de la epigénesis como modelo epistemológico; es decir, si consideramos las facultades cognitivas como fuerzas formativas que se componen con otras fuerzas de la naturaleza para hacer posible la adquisición originaria de intuiciones y conceptos a priori.

Science maps are visual representations of the structure and dynamics of scholarly knowl­edge. They aim to show how fields, disciplines, journals, scientists, publications, and scientific terms relate to each other. Science mapping is the body of methods and techniques that have been developed for generating science maps. This entry is an introduction to science maps and science mapping. It focuses on the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues of science mapping, rather than on the mathematical formulation of science mapping techniques. After (...) a brief history of science mapping, we describe the general procedure for building a science map, presenting the data sources and the methods to select, clean, and pre-process the data. Next, we examine in detail how the most common types of science maps, namely the citation-based and the term-based, are generated. Both are based on networks: the former on the network of publications connected by citations, the latter on the network of terms co-occurring in publications. We review the rationale behind these mapping approaches, as well as the techniques and methods to build the maps. We also present less-common types of science maps, including co-authorship networks, interlocking editorship networks, maps based on patents’ data, and geographic maps of science. Moreover, we consider how time can be represented in science maps to investigate the dynamics of science. We also discuss some epistemological and sociological topics that can help in the interpretation, contextualization, and assessment of science maps. Then, we present some possible applications of science maps in science policy. In the conclusion, we point out why science mapping may be interesting for all the branches of meta-science, from knowl­edge organization to epistemology. (shrink)

In the long history of the interpretations of Hume's theses on the self and personal identity, it is by now widely accepted that the conclusions reached in the first book of the Treatise must be considered in light of what the philosopher adds on these themes in the second and third books. Furthermore, there is no longer much support for the reading, which saw a contradiction here, given that while in the Book 1 he denies the reality of the self (...) or of personal identity, he then accepts that reality when he turns to his discussion of the passions. In presenting a more comprehensive reading of the theses of Hume on the self in the Treatise as a whole, it is essential not to lose sight of what Hume himself declared in Book 1, that "we must distinguish betwixt personal identity, as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves". But having recognized the necessity of integrating the theses on the self of Book 1 with those advanced in the latter two books, there are still divergent opinions on what meaning should be assigned to this integration. The relationship between what Hume writes on the self in Books 2 and 3 and the discussion of that topic in Book 1 has been seen, variously, as a mere continuation, as a new development in a continuous interpretation, or, rather, as a completely new posing of the question, with its own new solution. (shrink)

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers a vast survey (...) and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship. (shrink)

The greatest rhetorical display (έπιδείξις) of Plato's Protagoras is apparently not Protagoras's famous myth cum démonstration1 about the teachability of excellence (αρετή),2 but rather the dia logue as a whole. The Protagoras exposes key différences between the methods and presuppositions of Socrates and those of the Sophists - thus defending Socrates against the charge of being a Sophist himself - and in so doing clarifies the conditions and princi ples of ethical argumentation.3 The display of the Protagoras oc curs on (...) two levels. In the drama, Socrates puts the Sophists on exhibit for the benefit of Hippocrates, an Athenian boy who as pires to a sophistic éducation. In reading the dialogue, however, we become spectators to Plato's display. The pervading irony is that Piato uses the Protagoras to critieize the techniques of display and debate - and to contrast them with dialogue. But the Socratic/ Platonic display in the Protagoras is literally a showing forth, a manifestation of what a Sophist is and does, whereas a sophistical display is a showing off, that is not intrinsically related to his beliefs and aims. In order to see thèse thèmes at work in the Protagoras , however, it must first be examined from a rhetorical point of view. (shrink)

We examine the "Theaetetus" in the light of its juxtaposition of philosophical, mathematical and sophistical approaches to knowledge, which we show to be a prominent feature of the drama. We suggest that clarifying the nature of philosophy supersedes the question of knowledge as the main ambition of the "Theaetetus". Socrates shows Theaetetus that philosophy is not a demonstrative science, like geometry, but it is also not mere word-play, like sophistry. The nature of philosophy is revealed in Socrates' activity of examination (...) and his refusal to deny his ignorance about knowledge. (shrink)

The problem is addressed of establishing the satisfiability of prenex formulas involving a single universal quantifier, in diversified axiomatic set theories. A rather general decision method for solving this problem is illustrated through the treatment of membership theories of increasing strength, ending with a subtheory of Zermelo-Fraenkel which is already complete with respect to the ∀*∀ class of sentences. NP-hardness and NP-completeness results concerning the problems under study are achieved and a technique for restricting the universal quantifier is presented.

Eminente studioso del Rinascimento, Eugenio Garin non fu storico di carattere erudito o di vocazione strettamente filologica; al contrario interrogò i grandi autori rinascimentali muovendo da problemi teorici assai precisi. Il saggio si propone di individuare differenti periodi nella produzione scientifica di Eugenio Garin portando soprattutto alla luce i saggi degli anni '30 e degli anni '40, sorprendenti per le connotazioni di carattere spiccatamente religioso da cui sono percorsi: tanto più sorprendenti se si pensa all'immagine di Garin quale (...) autorevolissimo esponente della "cultura laica" del nostro paese impostasi negli anni '50 e durata, con poche variazioni, fino alla sua morte. L'opera consente di mettere a fuoco l'itinerario intellettuale di un personaggio come Garin; contribuisce a mostrare la complessità delle ricerche rinascimentali nella seconda metà del secolo scorso e getta luce su un capitolo essenziale della storia degli intellettuali italiani del XX secolo. (shrink)

La búsqueda que acomete Eugenio Trías en estas memorias intelectuales y vitales le lleva a rastrear su pasado, desde la infancia hasta los 33 años. En el libro van apareciendo diversos temas: el descubrimiento de la religión y de la filosofía; la fascinación por el cine; la pasión por la música: la iniciación en el complejo y cautivador mundo femenino; la figura del padre; los estudios en los jesuitas y en las universidades de Barcelona y Colonia; el breve paso (...) por el Opus Dei y después por el PSUC; la docencia universitaria; el trabajo en la editorial Salvat, el ambiente lúgubre y radiante del Barrio Chino, la gauche divine y la incipiente liberación sexual. En esta magníficas memorias el autor ofrece una sucesión de recuerdos que iluminan la iniciación a la vida y al pensamiento de un joven filósofo que escandalizó a los académicos y a los ortodoxos, y que es en la actualidad uno de los más ilustres pensadores del panorama español. (shrink)

In 1911 the Wilson cloud chamber opened new possibilities for physics pedagogy. The instrument, which visualized particles’ tracks as trails of condensed vapour, was adopted by physicists to pursue frontier research on the Compton effect, the positron and the transmutation of atomic nuclei. But as the present paper will show, Wilson's instrument did not just open up new research opportunities, but the possibility of developing a different kind of teaching. Equipped with a powerful visualization tool, some physicists–teachers employed Wilson's instrument (...) to introduce their students to a wide range of phenomena and concepts, ranging from the behaviour of clouds to Einstein's photon, the wave–particle duality and the understanding of the nucleus. This paper uses the notes, books and prototypes of these pioneering physicists–teachers to compose a pedagogical history of the Wilson cloud chamber, documenting an episode of immense ingenuity, creativity and scientific imagination. (shrink)

In Republic VI 508e-9b Plato has Socrates claim that the Good is the cause (αίτίαν) of truth and knowledge as well as the very being of the Forms. Consequently, as causes must be distinct from and superior to their effects, the Good is neither truth nor knowledge nor even being, but exceeds them all in beauty (509a), as well as in honour and power (509b). No other passage in Plato has had a more intoxicating effect on its readers. To take (...) just one example, James Adam was moved to quote St. Paul when he remarked about this passage that, 'it is highly characteristic of Plato's whole attitude that he finds the true keystone of the Universe — the ultimate fountain from which both Knowledge and Existence flow — in no cold and colourless ontological abstraction, like Being, but in that for which "all creation groans and labours". (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza los aspectos más destacados de la polémica entre Juan Carlos Bayón y Eugenio Bulygin acerca de las lagunas jurídicas, el principio de prohibición y el alcance de la discreción judicial. En esta disputa, Bulygin defiende cuatro tesis centrales, enunciadas en Normative Systems : una cuidadosa distinción entre normas y proposiciones normativas es esencial para resolver el problema de las lagunas jurídicas, la versión débil del principio de prohibición no sirve para mostrar que no existen lagunas, la (...) versión fuerte del principio de prohibición es verdadera solo cuando el sistema es completo, y en casos de lagunas jurídicas, los jueces tienen discreción para resolver estas situaciones. Sin embargo, Bayón señala que el problema no es la falta de distinción entre normas y proposiciones normativas sino el desacuerdo acerca de cuándo una solución jurídica es concluyente. La diferencia entre soluciones prima facie y concluyente es esencial porque en ciertas situaciones, el derecho no da una respuesta pero tampoco deja espacio para la discrecionalidad judicial. Según Bayón, en estos casos el principio de prohibición "todo lo que no está prohibido está permitido" juega un papel fundamental. Este trabajo muestra que los argumentos de Bayón son insuficientes para rechazar las tesis clásicas defendidas por Bulygin. In this paper I analyze the most relevant aspects of the controversy between Juan Carlos Bayón and Eugenio Bulygin about the existence of legal gaps, the so called "principle of prohibition" and the scope of judicial discretion. In this debate, Bulygin defends four classical theses advanced in his wellknown book, Normative Systems : a careful distinction between norms and norm propositions is actually needed in order to solve the problem of legal gaps, the analytical truth of the weak version of the principle of prohibition cannot guarantee the completeness of legal systems, the strong version of the principle of prohibition is true only if legal systems are complete, and judges have discretion in cases of legal gaps. However, Bayón claims that the problem is not the lack of distinction between norms and norm proposition but rather the identification of conclusive legal solutions. Conclusive legal solutions must be distinguished from the prima facie solutions provided by explicitly enacted norms. According to Bayón, the difference between conclusive and prima facie solutions is essential in legally irrelevant cases; in such cases the principle of prohibition plays an essential role because it entails the rejection of judicial discretion. In this paper I claim that the arguments advanced by Bayón fail to provide a sound ground for discarding the classical theses defended by Bulygin. (shrink)

Ciudad sobre ciudad compendia y resume a la perfección el proyecto filosófico de Eugenio Trías: la filosofía del límite. En anteriores libros Trías ha desarrollado separadamente lo que en este libro pretende articular de modo global. Lógica del limite desarrollaba una estética, La edad del espíritu, una filosofía de la religión y de la historia en función de lo que el autor denomina "la cita con lo sagrado, La razón fronteriza, se adentraba en el ámbito de la teoría del (...) conocimiento, Etica y condición humana, expone la naturaleza del ser del límite (el hombre) en su vertiente práctica y en su desarrollo cívico político. Ahora se trata de articular estos cuatro barrios que componen la ciudadela limítrofe, para construir la ciudad ideal, recuperando el proyecto platónico en su vertiente más innovadora... Sobre esos cuatro barrios se proyectan y desarrollan los conceptos fundamentales de la obra del autor: el ser del limite, la razón fronteriza y el suplemento simbólico. Trías desarrolla la ordenación de la ciudad y el despliegue de los barrios que la componen. Con ello consigue dar perfecta coherencia al proyecto de desarrollar la filosofía del límite y de ver las relaciones e interrelaciones que se dan entre esos diferentes barrios o ámbitos del pensamiento. Para desarrollar este proyecto Trías señala que la filosofía antes de ser un producto de la inteligencia, constituye una emoción. Por tanto este desarrollo vendrá marcado por tres emociones filosóficas fundamentales: el asombro, el vértigo y el amor-pasión. Tres elementos esenciales para comprender la noción del hombre como ser del límite, como anhelo de lo estético y de lo religioso en su afán de superar mediante lo simbólico las limitaciones impuestas a la razón por su carácter fronterizo. (shrink)

Plato's Sophist is complex. Its themes are many and ambiguous. The early grammarians gave it the subtitle1tEp1. 'tau ov'to~ ('on being') and assigned it to Plato's logical investigations. The Neoplatonists prized it for a theory of ontological categories they preferred to Aristotle's. Modern scholars sometimes court paradox and refer to the Sophist as Plato's dialogue on not-being (because the question ofthe possibility of not-being occupies much of the dialogue). Whitehead took the Sophist to be primarily about ouvo.~t~ ('power') and found (...) in it many of the central ideas of process theology.2 Heidegger thought it articulated the 'average concept of being in general'.3 In Cornford's view the Sophist is mainly about truth and falsehood. Ackrill, Frede and most analytic philosophers think it is about predication.4 Stanley Rosen treats it as a metaphysico-aesthetic dialogue: in his view it is about the relation of images to originals.5 As far as the title of the dialogue goes, however, opinion is almost universal. Do not be misled: 'the definition of the sophist' observed Archer-Hind 'is simply a piece of pungent satire'6 and he added that 'we may be sure that (Plato] cared little about defining the sophist, but very much about the metaphysical questions to which the process of definition was to give rise'.7 The most spectacular case of agreement with this judgment can be found in Cornford, who omits to translate the sections on the definition of the sophist because, as he says 'the modern reader ... might be wearied'.8. (shrink)

We present a general approach to quantified modal logics that can simulate most other approaches. The language is based on operators indexed by terms which allow to express de re modalities and to control the interaction of modalities with the first-order machinery and with non-rigid designators. The semantics is based on a primitive counterpart relation holding between n-tuples of objects inhabiting possible worlds. This allows an object to be represented by one, many, or no object in an accessible world. Moreover (...) by taking as primitive a relation between n-tuples we avoid some shortcoming of standard individual counterparts. Finally, we use cut-free labelled sequent calculi to give a proof-theoretic characterisation of the quantified extensions of each first-order definable propositional modal logic. In this way we show how to complete many axiomatically incomplete quantified modal logics. (shrink)

This paper reports a psychological study of human categorization that looked at the procedures used by expert scientists when dealing with puzzling items. Five professional botanists were asked to specify a category from a set of positive and negative instances. The target category in the study was defined by a feature that was unusual, hence situations of uncertainty and puzzlement were generated. Subjects were asked to think aloud while solving the tasks, and their verbal reports were analyzed. A number of (...) problem solving strategies were identified, and subsequently integrated in a model of knowledge‐guided inductive categorization. Our model proposes that expert knowledge influences the subjects' reasoning in more complex ways than suggested by earlier investigations of scientific reasoning. As in previous studies, domain knowledge influenced our subjects' hypothesis generation and testing; but, additionally, it played a central role when subjects revised their hypotheses. (shrink)

Deliberation is the intellectual activity of rational agents in their capacity as rational agents, and good deliberation is the mark of those who have practical wisdom. That is Aristotle's general view,2 one we may safely attribute to Plato as well. Some philosophers, however, have tried to specifiy Plato's view in ways that accentuate the differences between him and Aristotle. They align Plato's views about deliberation and virtue closely with views the fifth-century sophists, and suppose that Plato borrows from the sophists (...) certain suppositions that Aristotle would reject. In the Protagoras, for example, when Protagoras asserts that he teaches virtue, he claims to teach it as the expertise. (shrink)

We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time, which areas of philosophy are more interested in neuroscience, which areas of neuroscience are more interested in philosophy, and how the trading zone between the two fields is configured. We also discuss two hypotheses: the (...) supposed occurrence of a neuro-revolution in philosophy and the role of psychology as the disciplinary link between neuroscience and philosophy. Both the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and the visibility of philosophy in neuroscience have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020, albeit the latter remains an order of magnitude lower than the former. Neuroscience is particularly visible in philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of science, but not in ‘core’ areas of analytic philosophy. Philosophy is particularly visible in cognitive and systems neuroscience and neuropsychiatry, but not in biomedical neuroscience. As for the trading zone between philosophy and neuroscience, our data show that it works differently in philosophy and in neuroscience. While some philosophy journals are active loci of bidirectional communication, neuroscience journals are divided between journals ‘importing’ philosophy in neuroscience and journals ‘exporting’ neuroscience to philosophy. Lastly, data do not support the hypothesis that a widespread neuro-revolution has transformed philosophy radically, but support the hypothesis that psychology functions as a mediating disciplinary link between philosophy and neuroscience. (shrink)