On the Margins of Philosophy

In this chapter, the research object of the book is introduced: the margins of the philosophical text. We show that the citations and the acknowledgments that appear on the margins of the main text, forming the so-called para-text, offer a novel perspective on philosophy. In the first part, we explain why these peculiar margins represent privileged points of access to the epistemological inter-text and social extra-text of the analytic text. Then, we argue that the potential of citations and acknowledgments is fully released only when they are studied en masse, adopting suitable quantitative techniques. Lastly, we specify that our investigation will focus on late analytic philosophy, i.e., analytic philosophy from the 1980s to the present day, and we provide an overview of the main contents of the book.