As this is Brian’s blog it is only fitting that I start off with an item on rankings in Philosophy. I’d like to introduce the topic by way of what used to be called a ‘parlour game’ although I have to confess that I have never knowingly set foot in a parlour. Cast your mind back to 1982, if you were born then (I was an undergraduate) the year Duran Duran released Rio. Taking together citations from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index, who were the four most cited philosophers working in the US that year, among those then employed in the “top ten US departments” according to one set of pre-Leiter rankings?
You might need ten guesses to get number 1. Numbers 2 and 3 are easier. If you get number 4 in twenty-five goes I’m impressed. Actually, take a hundred, and you still won’t get it, I suspect, unless you resort to underhand tactics like looking at lists of philosophers. And if we take only citations in Arts and Humanities this person rises to number 1. And here is another clue. Non-philosophers might do better in this quiz than philosophers. I’ll post the answers – and my reasons for raising this – in a day or two.
I think it's a deceased prof from M.I.T.
