The research team working on the "Exiled Empricists" project consists of seven researchers, five of which are funded by Horizon-ERC: four postdoctoral researchers (Gregor Bös, Claudia Cristalli, Fons Dewulf, and Eugenio Petrovich), two Ph.D. candidates (Nina IJdens and Ties van Gemert), and the PI (Sander verhaegh). The project is divided into two main subprojects. The first subject aims to produce a reliable map of the American philosophical community and a detailed description of the changes in U.S. philosophy before and after the intellectual migration, the second aims to explain these changes through an investigation of the primary literature and a large set of little explored academic archives of a wide range of major and minor players in American Philosophy.
The researchers involved in the first subproject (Petrovich and Bös) have developed a new method—called mention analysis (more on this below)—that allows the project to track the development of American philosophy over time. They built a SQL database including over forty thousand philosophers and more than twenty thousand full-text journal articles published between 1890 and 1970. This database has helped the team to investigate philosophical discourse in different periods and journals. But the database has also been made publicly available (
http://edhiphy.org(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) to help historians and philosophers (i) search articles mentioning specific (combinations of) philosophers, (ii) to produce statistics about the most-mentioned philosophers in particular periods and journals, (iii) to create co-mention networks (visualizations of the frequencies with which philosophers are mentioned in the same articles), and (iv) analyze the state of a debate in a particular period or journal.
The researchers involved in the second subproject (Cristalli, IJdens, and Verhaegh) have studied the philosophical and scientific literature of the 1920s and 1930s and spent several periods in the United to collect and study archival data. This data has been used to reconstruct various developments that paved the way for the reception of logical positivism a decade later, such as American philosophical responses to relativity theory, American debates about meaning and measurement, the emergence of the notion of scientific philosophy in American philosophy. Moreover, the team reconstructed some of the first encounters between European and American scientific philosophers in 1930s (most notably Susanne Langer, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. Quine) in order to trace the Americans first responses to the logical positivist movement. Finally, the team organized four international conferences. One of these brought together historians of American philosophy, phenomenology, critical theory, and logical empiricism to develop a broader, unifying perspective on the impact of the intellectual migration. A book featuring the contributions of fifteen of these historians is forthcoming at De Gruyter.
