At The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel updates his “rough measure of current influence in … ‘mainstream Anglophone philosophy’.” The method is to count the number of distinct Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles in which the philosopher is cited.
When he ran the number five years ago, I defined the Putnam as a unit of influence: By definition, 1 Putnam of influence means being cited in as many articles as Hilary Putnam.1
The news: My influence has increased from 77 to 89 milliPutnams.2
- Putnam is not even the most cited author on Schwitzgebel’s list. But Putnam was influential in many areas of philosophy, making him a good benchmark.
- An earlier version of this post had 100 milliPutnams. However, that was counting a couple of citations to papers in a volume I co-edited. I susequently realized that those don’t count in Schwitzgebel’s scheme.