Graphing the history of philosophy

Consider Wolfi Landstreicher. I happen to know his following comes from his regular self-publication of a photocopied individualist-anarchist zine. Wolfi is a great guy and I like to have drink with him every time he hitch hikes into town from the Southern Oregon town where he lives on SSI. However, I think professors of philosophy would be aghast that he gets as many edges on the graph as many "serious" philosophers. Shows how much they know. I will certainly tell him of his coup the next time I see him.

A scan of the graph shows the whole as what-you'd-expect. It's a mix of "serious" professional opinion and the idiosyncratic opinions of amateurs and gadflies. The influence of a philosopher shouldn't be just a matter of how "sexy" they might be, I assume there's a matter of how serious work they've done - being amateur gadfly myself, I'm only guessing here of course.

It's especially instructive that the complicated graph-analysis tools that are brought to bear here seem to fail entirely at avoiding the best "garbage-in, garbage-out" principle.

When I was in seminary, one of the guest lecturers told us of how he was in Rome, doing his dissertation, and he needed to consult a work by Scotus. He went to one of the Vatican libraries and requested the relevant book. He struck up a conversation with the librarian, saying "You must not have a lot of copies of Scotus' work." The librarian disagreed, saying "Oh no. We have more manuscripts of Duns Scotus than we do of St. Thomas."

Except for a brief period during the Council of Trent, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas were almost forgotten from the time shortly after his death until Pope Leo XIII revived his reputation. Graphs like this do not reflect the change in influence over time.

This is very much a biased history, from what seems like a single interpretation's perspective.

So -- it's propaganda.