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 LEMM (Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Mind and Metaphysics) is more isolated than Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Theory. To do this, we collected 2369 Web of Science indexed papers divided into 17 PhilPapers topics from these three subfields of philosophy, and used 10 indicators to measure their isolation. The results showed that the topics from LEMM were more isolated from other fields of science than the topics from Value Theory and Philosophy of Science. Within philosophy, however, the topics from LEMM generally seemed as well-connected as Philosophy of Science and Value Theory.