Dominants, Subdominants, and Recedents: A Formal Analysis of Transformations in the Canonical Representation of 19th Century German Philosophy

The history of philosophy was a persistent interest in 19th century Germany. Ulrich Schneider lists 148 original works in the history of philosophy by 114 authors published from 1810 through 1899. The scale of this historiographic tradition makes it suitable for analysis through digital humanities techniques (“distant reading,” formal analysis, and innovative visualizations). This paper uses that body of publications to show how the canon of the history of German philosophy in the 19th century was formed and how it evolved. In order to uncover patterns in the attention devoted to particular 19th century philosophers, the authors undertook a formal analysis of 77 tables of contents from German textbooks in the history of philosophy. They used the results of their analysis to classify philosophers into three groups with metaphorical labels drawn from ecology: dominant, subdominant, and recedent. In addition to confirming the dominance of the “Big Four” (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel), the analysis provides a more nuanced picture of the period under consideration. For example, during the 1830s and 1840s, opinions about the significance of certain philosophers became highly polarized. In some textbooks Johann Friedrich Herbart was completely ignored, while in others his ideas were explored in more pages than those of Hegel. Kant’s writings attracted increasing attention after 1860. His share of pages increased as the number devoted to most other philosophers was dwindling. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel lose nearly half of their pages and fall closer to the subdominant category that included Herbart, Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer. Original visualization techniques provide a graphical representation of the changes in the canon of 19th century German philosophy.