This article puts into conversation Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism and a particular expression of “African animism,” drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana. Nietzsche’s perspectivism extends interpretation beyond the human species into natural processes. Like perspectivism, African animism troubles the binaries—body/soul, nature/culture—that permeate anthropocentric thinking. Human-nonhuman relations are refigured as socio-ecological relations: the earth may be regarded as life-generating ancestors; baobab trees may approach humans as kin. These two images of the world intersect, but they do not mesh together. Nietzsche adopts (...) perspectivism as active intersections between dynamic processes, within an open universe that has not been predesigned for humans. Animism tends toward a world of personalized relationships that would reach harmony if we would only lighten our ecological footprint. I draw upon such resonances to advance a new ethic of experiential environmentalism that treats ecological threats as lived risks and shared experiences with a lively and communicating “environment.”. (shrink)

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)

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)

t. 1. Serdt︠s︡e otdai︠u︡ deti︠a︡m. Rozhdenie grazhdanina.--t. 2. Pavlyshskai︠a︡ sredni︠a︡i︠a︡ shkola.

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)