4.2 Split Topics
Normally at this point I would include a long discussion of the methodology that produced graphs like this. But the methodology is so complicated that I put it in a whole separate chapter. But there is one point I need to clarify before discussing the individual topics.
Several topics didn’t easily fit into one or other category. For several of them, I just had to choose the least bad category to put it in. But for some, it turned out to be possible to split the topic into two subtopics, and categorize the subtopics. I somewhat arbitrarily imposed a limit on myself of doing this ten times, so the following ten topics got broken into two subtopics each.
| Original Topic | First Subtopic | Second Subtopic |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary Language | OLP Ethics | OLP Mind |
| Freedom and Free Will | Political Freedom | Free Will |
| Crime and Punishment | Forgiveness | Law |
| Sets and Grue | Grue | Sets |
| Origins and Purposes | Teleology | Origin Essentialism |
| Arguments | Conceivability Arguments | Arguments |
| Medical Ethics and Freud | Medical Ethics | Freud |
| Frankfurt Cases | Frankfurt Cases | Fiction |
| Races and DNA | DNA | Race |
| Norms | Language Norms | Moral Norms |
So we end up with one hundred topics and subtopics to classify; the eighty original topics that weren’t split, and the twenty subtopics just generated. How I split them up is a bit of a saga, and I’ll run through it in the next chapter.
In what remains of this chapter, I’ll go one by one through eight of the twelve topics. For each topic, I’ll look at its trends, and how those are generated by its constituent topics, and by the twelve journals. I’m leaving out four categories from this discussion.
- Idealism is a single topic, and I’ve already discussed it.
- Aesthetics and philosophy of religion are just a pair of topics, and there isn’t much to say that isn’t in the discussion of their constituent parts.
- I’m doing a deeper look at epistemology in a later chapter, so there’s no need for another discussion here.