The Social Space of Analytic Philosophy

In this chapter, the acknowledgments that appeared in 2,075 articles published between 2005 and 2019 in the “Top Five” analytic philosophy journals are analyzed with both qualitative and quantitative techniques. After framing the acknowledgments as zones of a sui generis communication between authors and readers, which enable analytic philosophers to place themselves in the social space of analytic philosophy, the first part of the chapter focuses on the stylistics of the acknowledgments. Unwritten norms and conventions that shape the acknowledgments as a literary genre are reconstructed and explained in the light of the theory of acknowledgments as positioning signals (Chap.  2 ). Then, in the second part of the chapter, a quantitative approach is used to measure different social dimensions of the acknowledgees population. In this way, the social space of recent analytic philosophy is charted.