by Eric Schwitzgebel
Spoiler Alert: Not much!
I estimate that 97% of citations in the most prestigious English-language philosophy journals are to works originally written in English. In other words, the entire history of philosophy not written in English (Plato, Confucius, Ibn Rushd, Descartes, Wang Yangming, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc., on into the 21st century) is referenced in only 3% of the citations in leading Anglophone philosophy journals.
Let me walk you through the process by which I came to these numbers, then give you some breakdowns.
I examined the latest available issue of twelve highly regarded Anglophone philosophy journals (the top 12 from Brian Leiter’s 2013 poll results). [Note 1] From each issue, I analyzed only the main research articles in that issue (not reviews, discussion notes, comments, symposia, etc.). This generated a target list of 93 articles — hopefully enough to constitute a fair representation of citation practices.
I then downloaded the reference section of each of those 93 articles, or for articles with footnotes instead of a reference section, I hand-coded the footnotes. I included only actual references to specific works. For example, the word “Kantian” would not qualify as a reference to Kant unless a specific work of Kant’s is cited. For each cited work I noted its original publication year and original publication language. [Note 2]
This generated a list of 3566 total citations to examine.
Of the 3566 citations included in my analysis, only 90 (3%) were citations of works not originally written in English. Sixty-eight of the 93 analyzed articles (73%) cited no works that had not originally been written in English. Eleven (12%) cited exactly one non-English work, either in its original language or in English translation. Fourteen (15%) cited at least two works originally published in a language other than English. The only source languages other than English were ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian. No African, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, or Spanish-language works were cited in this sample.
Sometime after World War Two, English became the common language of most scholarship intended for an international audience, even when the writer’s native language is not English. English-language articles citing only recent sources might therefore be expected to cite almost exclusively English-language sources. With this idea in mind, I divided the data into four time periods: ancient through 1849, 1850-1945, 1946-1999, and 2000-present.
The breakdown:
Obviously, there’s a huge skew toward more recent work — but even in the 1850-1945 category two-thirds of the citations in this sample are to works originally written in English.
In my own writing, I also cite mostly English-language works. It’s the tradition I operate in, and although I have some reading practice in French, Spanish, German, and classical Chinese, untranslated works are always a struggle. I don’t intend to be too judgmental or blaming. But it does seem likely that the Anglophone philosophical tradition would benefit from more engagement with works not originally written in English.
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Note 1: The journals were: Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Nous, Mind, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosopher’s Imprint, Analysis, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy & Public Affairs. This list has surface plausibility as a list of the best-regarded journals in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. Philosophers Imprint publishes rarely and sporadically, so I just used all of 2016 up to Sep 7.
Note 2: In some cases only the date of a recent edition was listed. In these cases I estimated publication year based on my knowledge of the history of philosophy. In some cases, only the English-language title was given — and again I estimated the original language based on my knowledge of the history of philosophy. It is possible that I misclassified a few works in this way. However, for the estimate to rise to 3.5%, I would have to have misclassified 35 non-English works as English, which I believe is unlikely. (By the way, for these purposes, Web of Science is full of relevant mistakes. This more labor-intensive approach yields much cleaner results.)
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Related Posts:
SEP Citation Analysis Continued: Jewish, Non-Anglophone, Queer, and Disabled Philosophers (Aug 14, 2014)
The Ghettoization of Nietzsche (Aug 23, 2012)
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8 responses to “How Often Do Mainstream Anglophone Philosophers Cite Non-Anglophone Sources?”
Dear Eric,
I’m worried that what you’ve proven here is that journals that don’t publish in the history of philosophy haven’t tended to publish much history of philosophy. Philosophical Review accepts (a very few) history papers as does Phil Imprint, but several of the other journals in your corpus such as Philosophical Studies explicitly bar submission of original research on history of philosophy topics, which I would presume would include the history of Chinese Philosophy, etc. as well as the history of western philosophy.
So, given the scope of the journals you list, would the results you find really be surprising? Or worrying? (I am in part a historian of medieval philosophy and so of course I would find it worrying to have very few citations in top journals to people like Averroes, Aquinas, Avicenna, John Duns Scotus, William Ockham and the like, but my opinion on the matter appears to be distinctly in the minority!)
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Right, but!
(1.) There were a few papers in the history of philosophy among the 93. Even these mostly cited English-language secondary literature or dealt with the history of English-language philosophy.
(2.) I’m not sure when “history” begins, but there were certainly some important post-war philosophers who wrote in languages other than English, such as Foucault and the later Wittgenstein — not to mention interesting work by other recent philosophers not writing in English, which is rarely taken up.
(3.) I’d like to see non-historically-focused work do a better job of situating itself in the broader European tradition and if possible to some extent also outside the European tradition. For example, in my recent paper on radical skepticism forthcoming in Nous I reference Boltzmann, Descartes, Diogenes, Hadot, Montaigne, Pascal, Sextus, and Wittgenstein. (I’m surprised not to see Zhuangzi in there, actually, since he’s probably my favorite skeptic, but that’s how it turned out.) This is not a historical paper, but it engages at least in passing with a variety of historical work.
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Interesting post! I checked through the first twenty papers listed on my Academia. edu page (some over twenty years old, some recent), and it seems that I average 2.6 citations per paper to works not originally published in English. I don’t do much ‘straight’ history of philosophy, the mighty dead being generally cited to make a contemporary point. Here ‘s a list of the non-Anglophone authors cited and their works:
Aquinas: Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles.
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics.
Bible: Matthew, (Greek) 2 Samuel (Hebrew)
Cicero: De Officiis, De Natura Deorum, Ad Atticum, Ad Familiares
Descartes, Meditations
Erasmus: Diatribe seu collatio de libero arbitrio
Frege: Grundelagen
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit,
Luther: De Servo Arbitrio/ On the Bondage of the Will
Kant: CPR
Machiavelli: the Prince
Marx: 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Neurath: Two volumes of his Collected Papers
Nietzsche: Daybreak, WP, BGE, Zarathrustra, Antichrist, Genealogy.
Plato: Euthyphro
Procopius: Secret History
Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, WWR
Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
Tarski; Warheitsbegriff
Waismann: Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle
Wittgenstein, TLP, PI.
Venues: Phil Quarterly, JAP, Logique et Analyse, AJP, Sophia, ETMP, PSS, plus various collections, mostly on meta-ethics.
So query: Am I unusual in this? I once read a review of a collection reprinting my paper ‘Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem’ in which the reviewer complained that I had confused him by bringing in Nietzsche when I was supposed to be talking about the error theory. Why discuss Nietzsche in one intellectual breath together with Blackburn, Wright and Dworkin’s on Mackie? (My point was that there are objections to interpreting Nietzsche as an error theorist which are parallel to objections to the error theory as such. Both are equally bad.) I have to admit that I regarded the reviewer as a bit of a simpleton, but maybe my literary behavior was so outré as to provide him with some excuse. I was not playing the game according to the usual monoglot rules.
Admission: My French is bad, my Latin is very bad and my German next to non-existent and I don’t speak Italian. So I read all these texts in translation. But I take it Eric is not making the (entirely sensible) point that we all ought to learn more languages (we should) but the related point that we ought to know and cite works in languages other than our own even if we have to read them in English. Perhaps this is related to a tendency to temporal as well as linguistic parochialism which is also to be deplored at least wrt philosophy that is not heavily reliant on recent science (as the best philosophy sometimes is). Several of the papers that I have recently refereed take some philosophical doctrine to be axiomatic simply because it is widely assumed in in the current literature even though a modest acquaintance with the history of Anglophone let alone non-Anglophone philosophy would have shown it to be highly controversial. (And I am not talking about the kind of supposed platitude that has been shown to be true by the recent discoveries of some respectable science. I’m talking about what Bill Lycan calls ‘philosophy junk’) So the scarcity of citations to non-English works, though problematic in itself is perhaps a symptom of something worse: a modern-minded parochialism that renders us unable to learn from a past of which we are ignorant. And maybe too a degree of specialization that leaves us unable to learn from subjects other than philosophy.
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I’m with you, Charles. I like to try to situate my work a bit more broadly than just the recent Anglophone tradition, though I am hardly exhaustive or systematic about it. I think that’s good, obviously!
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This is very interesting, and revealing. However, I worry about Shane Wilkins’s point as well. The initial selection of journals leaves out every major specialist journal in philosophy of science and history of philosophy of science (not to say that Phil Review, Nous, and PPR don’t publish articles in these subjects, just that they are not specialist journals in these areas). If you looked at, for instance, the three Studies in HPS journals, I suspect you’d find very different results. Shameless plug: I guarantee you would if you looked at the HOPOS journal.
Still, it’s a revealing result! I wonder a bit about how much of this is due to bad citation practices. For instance, people in metaphysics who refer to the principle of identity of indiscernibles, but don’t cite Leibniz, because they think it’s “common knowledge”. Or who write papers on physicalism but don’t cite Carnap or Neurath, for the same reason.
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“I’m worried that what you’ve proven here is that journals that don’t publish in the history of philosophy haven’t tended to publish much history of philosophy.”
I’m not sure to get it right. Are you here assuming that work not originally written in English belongs to history of philosophy? It would rather seem to me that much of it addresses substantial issues, and is relevant to contemporary discussion. It would be more plausible to claim that, given the “weight” of English in analytic philosophy, and the difficulty to “connect” analytic and non-analytic philosophy (“making sense of Derrida” sounds like quite a challenge), it is to be expected that most citations in the analytic tradition are to English-written works in the analytic tradition. However, there are some works relevant to the analytic tradition that are not originally written in English, and it appears that even they are not widely cited in the English-speaking academia.
Perhaps a wider evaluation, including more journals and covering a larger time span, would help getting more accurate data on this, but it is to be feared that Eric’s focused examination is already pretty accurate.
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The article and all the debate above seems to overlook another issue: regardless of philosophical approach or tradition, regardless of whether they work in philosophy or history of philosophy (an anglophone distinction), how often do anglophone philosophers research what their colleagues in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, Japan, China, and so on have written on their subject? How often do they check if research pertinent to their subjects has already been carried in any of the languages spoken in such places? Do they ever think they might have good reason to do so?
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This probably reflects a broader cultural phenomenon: There are also just a very few books, if one at all, on the NY Times bestselling book list which were not originally written in English.
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