Divide et Impera: Modeling the Relationship between Canonical and Noncanonical Authors in the Early Modern Natural Philosophy Network

Abstract

This article aims to study the relationship between today's canonical and noncanonical authors in the domain of early modern natural philosophy through the lens of social network analysis. By studying a massive corpus of letters (Electronic Enlightenment project), we examine the structural relationship between several of today's canonical authors in natural philosophy and noncanonical women philosophers operating in the same network. We demonstrate the structure of this network and its effects on noncanonical authors. By modeling the case of women philosophers, we show that our model can be used to identify further noncanonical authors who had similar profiles.Quantitative hermeneutics is the art of understanding conventions-forms, genres, styles, practices-better than their society ever did. (F. Moretti, Patterns and Interpretation, Stanford Literary Lab, pamphlet 15 [2017])

The Networked Origins of Cartesian Philosophy and Science

“…EMLO is a union catalog of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century letters covering all Europe. category but the outcome of contingent decisions with which historians have prioritized certain authors over others-although Sangiacomo and Beers (2020) have drawn attention to more 'internal' reasons. Thus, I consider my data set to be a representative sample of the Republic of Letters for the purpose of this study.…”

Each book its own Babel

“…For instance, Andrea Sangiacomo and Daan Beers used network analysis for studying the state of the Republic of Letters represented as epistolary networks. (Sangiacomo and Beers 2020). Eugenio Petrovich investigated the history of analytic philosophy via bibliometrics, meta-data analysis and word counts of vetted corpora of analytical philosophical articles (Petrovich 2018;Buonomo and Petrovich 2018).…”

“…Early modern authors did not have a citation practice that is comparable to our modern practices and authors were often reluctant (for various reasons) to name sources and even opponents. One potential way to go about this would be to look at other 'citation-like' databases that provide relational information about pairs of authors, such as letter databases (Kronick 2001;Sangiacomo and Beers 2020). However, although social association might be an indicator of semantic influence, as we saw in the previous chapter, it does not necessarily have to be.…”