[PHILOS-L] Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Paradigmi: “Style in Philosophy: Qualitative and Quantitative Studies”
Paolo Babbiotti
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This call aims to bring together two distinct areas of research: the study of style in philosophy and the application of quantitative methods to the history of philosophy. The notion of style—a central theme in literary studies—can also be fruitfully applied to philosophy, not only to explore the literary style of philosophical texts but also to highlight their distinctive philosophical style.
Quantitative methods and tools have recently been applied to the history of philosophy, with the goal of discovering patterns and trends that are difficult to detect using traditional historiographical approaches (see, for instance, P. de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts, 2013, (ed.) Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas, 2023; A. Betti et al., “Modelling the History of Ideas”, 2014, and “History of Philosophy in Ones and Zeros”, 2019).
We welcome contributions that illuminate the fruitful interaction between these two lines of inquiry, offering both qualitative and quantitative analyses of style in philosophy, as well as methodological reflections on these themes.
Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of possible topics. We are particularly interested in qualitative and quantitative analyses focused on individual authors, works, or philosophical movements:
- The relationship between authors and audiences in philosophical writing
- Style and metaphilosophy
- Styles of philosophy and their social contexts
- Literary style vs. philosophical style
- Analyses of philosophical style: representative case studies
- Scientific style and humanistic style in philosophy
- Quantitative analysis of literary/philosophical genres
- Grammatical and semantic analyses of philosophical style
- Citation analysis and scientometrics for the history of philosophy
- Distant reading in the history of philosophy
- Computational history of ideas
Submission Deadline: 15 December 2025
Full Paper Length: between 4000 and 6000 words
Publication Date: April 2026
Editors of the Special Issue: Paolo Babbiotti (University of Turin), Guido Bonino (University of Turin), and Paolo Tripodi (University of Turin)
Website of Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica: https://www.rivisteweb.it/issn/1120-3404
Submission: Please submit your full paper by email to:
paolo.b...@unito.it
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