Can artificial intelligence predict the most important contemporary philosophers? updating and extending Collins’ ‘sociology of philosophies’

Abstract Randall Collins’ massive book ‘Sociology of Philosophies’ (1998) is, as the subtitle has it, a ‘global theory of intellectual change’. To explain why certain figures became influential thinkers, Collins puts forward the sociological principles that made their success possible. These include their positions in academic networks and teacher-pupil chains. His book ends in the middle of the 20th century because after that time, the ‘eminent’ (Collins’ term) philosophers have not yet been established. In this paper, we ask whether we can extend Collins’ analysis to the present day, and if we can predict future important philosophers, using bibliometrics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. To do this, we undertake a number of steps. First, we extend the lineages of teacher pupil chains into subsequent ‘branches’ of prominent philosophers from where Collins left off in the mid-20th century. Next, we establish some baselines by using bibliometrics for the most highly cited philosophers. Then we ask AI tools – here large-language models - to apply Collins’ main principles of intellectual change to the data about the most eminent philosophers in the lineages and to predict which of their pupils may become prominent in the future. This combination of methods allows us to extend Collins’ theory, point to the difference between his theory and existing bibliometric approaches, and identify some of limitations of an AI-driven approach. In the conclusion, we discuss additional factors that may have changed the landscape of how philosophy is pursued in the post-war period and how Collins’ theory can nevertheless open a number of promising future directions in using AI to understand intellectual change.