Measuring the Isolation of Research Topics in Philosophy

Various authors have recently argued that certain parts of academic philosophy are highly isolated from other fields of academic research. The central aim of this paper is to go beyond philosophical arguments, and empirically test whether this is indeed the case. More specifically, we investigate whether domains of Core Philosophy, like metaphysics and epistemology, are more isolated than Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Issues. To do this, we collected 2,369 WoS indexed papers divided into 17 Philpapers topics from these three kinds of philosophy, and used 11 indicators to measure their isolation. The results show that both Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Issues are less isolated than Core Philosophy. In addition, general topics in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Issues tend to be more isolated than applied topics. These results suggest that the isolation of philosophy could be alleviated by shifting the priority from Core Philosophy to applied Philosophy of Science and Value Issues