The Not-So-Silent Generation in Philosophy

The Silent Generation (born 1928-1945) is disproportionately represented among the most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Let's look at the numbers and think about why.

Background: This post is based on my analyses of citation rates in the Stanford Encyclopedia in 2010, 2014, 2019, and 2024. As a measure of prominence in (as I call it) "mainstream Anglophone philosophy", no measure has better face validity than SEP citation rates. For example, in my most recent analysis, the top five are David Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, and Saul Kripke -- a much more plausible top 5, if the aim is to capture influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy -- than top five lists from, say, Scopus, Google Scholar, or PhilPapers.

The Ten Most-Cited Philosophers, Generation by Generation

[update 12:49 pm: Some of the ranks below were incorrect due to a problem with the tie-counting algorithm I used today. This does not affect the analysis or August's original rankings. HT Daniel Nolan for the catch.]

"Greatest Generation" (born 1900-1927):

2. Quine, Willard van Orman (213)
3. Putnam, Hilary (190)
4. Rawls, John (168)
7. Davidson, Donald (151)
16. Strawson, Peter F. (116)
23. Dummett, Michael A. E. (110)
26. Armstrong, David M. (106)
26. Chisholm, Roderick M. (106)
34. Popper, Karl R. (94)
35. Goodman, Nelson (90)

The initial number before their name indicates their ranking in the most recent analysis, the number in parentheses indicates the number of main-page SEP entries in which they are cited.

"Silent Generation" (born 1928-1945)

1. Lewis, David K. (307)
5. Kripke, Saul A. (159)
8. Williams, Bernard (146)
10. Nagel, Thomas (137)
11. Nozick, Robert (135)
12. Jackson, Frank (130)
13. Searle, John R. (120)
14. Van Fraassen, Bas C. (117)
16. Harman, Gilbert H. (116)
18. Fodor, Jerry A. (115)

"Baby Boomers" (born 1946-1964)

6. Williamson, Timothy (152)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C. (140)
19. Fine, Kit (112)
24. Kitcher, Philip (109)
29. Sober, Elliott (101)
32. Hawthorne, John (97)
40. Anderson, Elizabeth S. (83)
45. Korsgaard, Christine M. (80)
51. Priest, Graham (79)
53. Burge, Tyler (77)

"Generation X" or "Millennial" (born 1965 and later) [list extended to 14 due to a tie]

14. Chalmers, David J. (117)
45. Schaffer, Jonathan (80)
78. Sider, Theodore (68)
129. Godfrey-Smith, Peter (53)
138. Stanley, Jason (51)
156. Enoch, David (48)
156. Prinz, Jesse J. (48)
165. Weatherson, Brian (47)
173. Levy, Neil (46)
203. Craver, Carl F. (42)
203. Kriegel, Uriah (42)
203. List, Christian (42)
203. Nolan, Daniel (42)
203. Thomasson, Amie L. (42)

(In most cases, I have exact birth year from publicly available sources such as Wikipedia, but in some cases I estimate based on year of Bachelor's degree, PhD, or first publication. I welcome corrections.)

As discussed in a previous post, one striking thing about this list is its lack of gender and cultural/racial diversity (see also these articles on lack of diversity in philosophy). But another striking feature is the prominence of the Silent Generation. Analyzed another way: Among the 25 most-cited authors, 6 are Greatest, 14 are Silent, 4 are Boomers, and 1 is Gen X. Among the top 100 (104 with ties), it's Greatest 25, Silent 47, Boomer 27, and Gen X 3. (Note also that Greatest is by far the longest generation, 28 years, compared to the Silent’s 18, the Boomer’s 19, and Gen X’s 16; arguably this should be figured into a generational influence divisor.)

Citation Patterns Over Time

A natural first thought is that the 2020s might just be peak-citation time for the Silent Generation. Maybe the work of the Greatest Generation is starting to fall back into the mists of history, and maybe the Boomers and Gen Xers haven't yet had their full impact on philosophical discourse.

However, this appears not to be the explanation.

As an initial analysis, I looked at what years (1900 through forthcoming) are most commonly cited in the SEP. The results:

[click to enlarge and clarify]

As the graph shows, citation year peaks around 2011-2013. Members of the Silent Generation were in their late 60s to mid-80s in those years. Some of them were definitely still publishing, but age 65-85 is not most philosophers' peak productive period. Consider the top ten Silents, for example. Lewis, Williams, and Nozick were already deceased by 2011. The most influential work of the remaining seven was published in the late 1960s to early 1990s.

Now I do think that raw publication-year data are potentially somewhat misleading. Stanford Encyclopedia entries tend, I suspect, to disproportionately cite recent work (5-10 years old) that has gained some attention, even if that work has not (yet) been very impactful, so as to stay up to date. (2011-2013 was more than ten years ago, but the entries tend to get substantial updates only every 5-10 years.) A better measure might be longitudinal trends in citation rank. My methods haven't been exactly the same year to year, but close enough.

All but five of the 202 most-cited philosophers in 2010 are among the 376 most cited in 2024, and the greatest decline in citation rank has been among the Silent Generation. We can see this by subtracting the natural logarithms of the ranks. (I use a negative log basis, because a decline from rank 11 to 20 is much more significant than a decline from rank 191 to 200). For the Greatest generation the average change is -0.13, for Silent it's -0.19, for Boom it's -0.09, and for Generation X there's an average rank gain of +0.21. There's a similar pattern if we compare the 2014 and 2019 analyses with 2024: The Gen Xers are rising in relative rank while all other generations are declining.

These numbers exclude people who are new to the rankings (or who fall completely off the rankings), and most of my ranking updates contain some new authors from each generation -- partly because I expand the length of the list every year but also partly because some people gain in citation rate even well past their death.

One approach to that analytic problem is to compare authors ranked at least 300 (304 with ties) in 2024 with the 2019 list of 295 authors: approximately comparable lists, five years separated. Twenty-seven authors were among the 2019 top 295 but not the 2024 top 304: 6 Greatest, 10 Silent, 9 Boomer, and 2 Gen X. Conversely, thirty-six authors not on the list in 2019 were among the top 304 in 2024: 0 Greatest, 9 Silent, 12 Boomer, and 15 Gen X.

As one might expect from the various analyses so far, the Silents are even more disproportionately represented in the 2010 rankings than in the 2024 rankings: Among the top 25 in 2010, 16 were Silent, compared to 7 Greatest, 2 Boomer, and 1 Gen X.

The analyses thus all tell a similar story: The high representation of Silent Generation philosophers in my list of the most-cited Stanford Encyclopedia authors cannot be that it is currently their peak citation time.

Further indirect support for this claim also comes from an old finding of mine, drawing on Philosophers Index abstracts, that philosophers tend to have their work discussed most when they are approximately age 55-70.

The Not-So-Silent Generation and the Baby Boom Philosophy Bust

So, what explains the Silent Generation's disproportionate representation among the most influential philosophers in the mainstream Anglophone tradition? I suggest that their influence is due to their objective importance. They achieved this importance through lucky timing and rising to a cultural occasion.

In the Anglophone world, especially the United States, the 1960s and 1970s were times of sharp university enrollment growth, as Silent Generation scholars were hired to teach the Boomers, as the college degree came to be seen as the standard path to social status and economic security, and as universities basked in the high prestige of science in this era (cultural pride in the space race, the success of the Manhattan Project, the polio vaccine, computers, antibiotics....). The academic job market was ridiculously easy by the standards of every subsequent decade, and professors from this era tell tales of how they landed jobs in the most prestigious universities sometimes with a single phone call.

The Silent Generation thus had a great demographic advantage: They were entering the profession in boom times. They engaged with their elders (Quine, Rawls, and Strawson, for example; Putnam and Davidson are edge cases due to Putnam's near-cutoff age and Davidson's late start), but even more, they engaged directly with one another, filling the journals with articles about the issues that interested them. Much of their seminal work was published in the 1970s while they were relatively young, and this work framed the debates of the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the early 2000s, and to a substantial extent (as my SEP analyses suggest) even today.

The Boomers entered the academic job market mostly in the doldrums of 1980s, when there were far fewer open positions at elite universities. They grew in the shade of the Not-So-Silents, who were then mid-career and in no mood to yield the floor. Their work was largely shaped in reaction to leading Silents, such as Lewis, Kripke, Williams, Nagel, Searle, Van Fraassen, and Fodor. (I suspect this was especially so in the so-called "core" areas of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics, somewhat less so in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and history of philosophy.) There was just less of an opportunity for Boomers to shape the dialogue.

To some extent, a similar story holds for Generation X: The older Gen Xers (like myself) entered academia as the (Not-So-)Silents were senior professors in their sixties -- young enough to still be active, old enough to have the most senior positions in academia, in that sweet-spot between ages 55 and 70 when philosophers tend to receive the most prestige and attention. It is perhaps a little early to tell how badly shaded out the Gen X philosophers have been. Still, I'm inclined to think it's clear that we have been at least somewhat shaded out. We Gen Xers are now on average about age fifty, and so far probably only Chalmers has had the kind of impact on the field that the leading Greatest and Silent generation philosophers generally had by age fifty. (As noted above, in the 2024 SEP rankings, only three Gen Xers rank among the top 100: Chalmers at #14, Schaffer at #45, and Sider at #78.)

A Golden Age of Philosophical Naturalism?

All this said, I don't think demographics is the whole story. The Silents also had an occasion to rise to: the articulation of a thoroughly secular philosophical worldview. There have of course been atheists and scientific naturalists in every generation of philosophers in modern history, but in all previous historical contexts, these "naturalist" philosophers were to some extent on the defensive. The Silent generation was the first generation that took atheism and scientific materialism for granted. (Of course not everyone was a naturalist, but in mainstream Anglophone academic philosophy circles, critics of atheism and scientific materialism were very much on the defensive.) This created a context in which that generation could begin to explore in detail, and in dialogue with one another, in a supportive but also competitive context of shared secular assumptions, scientifically inspired approaches to the mind, language, meaning, and value. Arguably, it was a Golden Age of philosophical naturalism, laying the foundations on which all subsequent naturalist approaches have been built.

This is my theory, then, of the Not-So-Silent Generation in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. They had a huge demographic advantage in being hired just as university enrollments were booming, and a major philosophical task fell in their laps through cultural timing: the task laying the foundations of a thoroughly secular, scientific philosophy. They rose to this task and thus became not just a demographically dominant but a philosophically important generation, which will collectively be remembered (perhaps through a few emblematic names).

Is there a broad philosophical task of similar magnitude facing the now-rising generation of philosophers? I'm not sure. (As Hegel said, the owl of Minera flies only at dusk: We understand our cultural moment only in retrospect, as it is fading into history.) But maybe Artificial Intelligence and breakthroughs in the capacity to control human and non-human physiology will radically transform the world, enabling new types of life on the planet (conscious machines? post- or trans-humans?). If so, then maybe Millennial and Zoomer philosophers will have their own world-historical task to rise to: that of helping us understand the philosophical implications of the radical transformations such technologies enable.

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Related:

"Discussion Arcs" (Apr 27, 2010)

"At What Age Do Philosophers Do Their Most Influential Work?" (May 12, 2010)

"The Base Rate of Kant" (Jan 26, 2012)

"Age Effects on SEP Citation, Plus the Baby Boom Philosophy Bust and The Winnowing of Greats" (Sep 27, 2019)

"Where Have All The Fodors Gone? Or: The Golden Age of Philosophical Naturalism" (Nov 18, 2021)