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A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts: comparing

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Article  in  International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing · January 2017

DOI: 10.1504/IJSHC.2017.10005737

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230 Int. J. Social and Humanistic Computing, Vol. 2, Nos. 3/4, 2017

A corpus-based computational analysis of

philosophical texts: comparing analytic and
continental philosophy

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein* and

Mohamed M. Mostafa
Gulf University for Science and Technology,
P.O. Box 7207,
32093 Hawalli, Kuwait
Email: Botz.t@gust.edu.kw
Email: mostafa@usa.com
*Corresponding author

Abstract: This is the first modern quantitative study of philosophical texts

using corpus linguistics. We compared two sets of texts consisting of ten texts
of analytic philosophy and ten texts of continental philosophy by using the
Burrows delta consensus tree, principal components analysis, as well as
multidimensional scaling (MDS) and cluster analysis. We used a
supplementary corpus of ten analytical texts pertaining to film studies. The
analysis shows that analytic and continental texts are clearly distinct in stylistic
terms though there are divisions within the continental corpus. The results lead
to the conclusion that philosophical thought is dependent on language. The
introduction of an analytic philosophy of film corpus shows that the focus on a
certain topic fractures the linguistic coherence of analytic philosophy. Our
focus on two major philosophical schools makes it possible to generalise
findings to other philosophical schools.

Keywords: continental-analytic divide; philosophy and language;

philosophical style; corpus analysis; data mining; consensus trees.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Botz-Bornstein, T. and

Mostafa, M.M. (2017) ‘A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical
texts: comparing analytic and continental philosophy’, Int. J. Social and
Humanistic Computing, Vol. 2, Nos. 3/4, pp.230–246.

Biographical notes: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein studied philosophy in Paris. He

received his PhD from Oxford University and Habilitation from the EHESS in
Paris. He authored 11 books, edited six books and published over 100 academic
articles. He has been researching and teaching in Finland and in Japan, and
worked for the Center of Cognition of Hangzhou University (China) as well as
at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of
Philosophy at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait.

Mohamed M. Mostafa holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. He

has also earned his MS in Applied Statistics from the University of Northern
Colorado, USA, MSc in Functional Neuroimaging from Brunel University,
UK, MSc in Social Science Data Analysis from Essex University, UK, MA in
Translation Studies from the University of Portsmouth, UK, MBA and BSc at
Port Said/Suez Canal University, Egypt. He was employed at universities in the
USA, Portugal, Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, France, Jordan, United Arab Emirates,
Bahrain and Kuwait. His current research interests include data mining,

Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 231

social networks analysis, artificial intelligence applications in marketing,

neuromarketing/consumer neuroscience, art in advertising, social marketing
and business efficiency. He has published over 80 research papers in several
leading academic peer reviewed journals. He has also presented numerous
papers at professional conferences worldwide.

1 Introduction

Corpus linguistics derives a set of abstract rules from a text and its use is current in the
social sciences. Although corpus linguistics has occasionally been applied to literary
studies, it has never been applied to philosophical texts. The present study attempts to
analyse stylistic differences between texts of continental philosophy and analytic
philosophy. The difference between both philosophies has been much discussed in terms
of history, content, techniques, and style, but, because of the complexity of the matter, no
fully satisfactory answer could be provided. Without pretending to have found the final
answer, this article tries to shed an additional light on the distinction between the two
philosophical currents using sophisticated quantitative techniques.
Corpus linguistics extracts and analyses meaningful data from general and specialised
corpora. In other words, it establishes the most frequent associations between texts by
applying measures such as the choice of words, sentence structure, syntax, word order,
average sentence length, word length, word repetitions, linguistic complexity, speech
patterns, frequency of function words, individual habits of collocation (the use of certain
words tends to entail the use of other, predictable words), and verb structure. Many
criteria are derived from literary stylometry, which is a linguistic analysis of written texts
able to lump highly correlated variables together. Stylometry has traditionally been used
for the establishment of authorial identity. It is interesting to note in this context that the
basics of stylometry were set out by a philosopher, the Polish Plato-specialist Wincenty
Lutosławski, who used this method in his Principes de stylométrie (1890) to build a
chronology of Plato’s dialogues. At present, stylometry is mostly used for internet
sources whose authorship needs to be established.
In our analysis we used the Burrows Delta consensus tree, a widely used authorship
attribution method which “computes a dissimilarity score between the test item and all
reference samples and attributes” (Rybicki et al., 2014). We also used the principal
components analysis, which detects underlying structures in the data and indicates
directions where the data are most spread out. Other techniques used to achieve the study
objectives include multidimensional scaling (MDS) and cluster analysis.
The difference between continental and analytic philosophy can appear obvious when
looking from afar but can become blurred as the topic is approached more closely. In the
early 20th century, British and Austrian philosophers developed a radical approach to
philosophy based on mathematics and the new techniques of symbolic logic initiated by
Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Today, analytic philosophy is the main philosophical
style practiced in Britain, the USA, as well as in many other countries. Continental
philosophy remains the ‘old’ way of philosophising and is historically linked to
continental Europe. Problems arise with regard to the geographical distinction: by now,
several generations of ‘continental’ philosophers have been working in the USA and
elsewhere and have made important contributions. Also, much of the initial impetus of
232 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

analytic philosophy came from philosophers rooted in Europe. A further problem is that
neither current is very coherent. Continental philosophy appears very much like a
patchwork of newer and older traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics,
existentialism, critical theory, feminist theory, race theories, post-structuralism,
deconstructionism, and postmodernism. In a similar vein, analytic philosophy is
composed of sub-currents and mixed with disciplines like cognitive science and
mathematics. Any comparison of both traditions is problematic because the
analytic/continental gap widens or tightens depending on which texts have been selected
for comparison. Comparisons are often unfair as opponents pick the worst examples of
the other tradition in order to make their own tradition appear superior. In terms of
content, none of the two traditions has core topics, but fields of expertise overlap:
analytic philosophy even has its own film studies though a topic like film would have
been more naturally linked to continental philosophy. There is only one substantial
difference between the two: analytic philosophers prefer to study the ‘mind’ when it
comes to questions about mental events, whereas continental philosophers prefer to study
the ‘self’.1
It is equally difficult to spell out differences with regard to thinking techniques. It is
popular to link analytic philosophy to logic and continental philosophy to models of
reasoning that are incompatible with logic, which is inaccurate, too. While early analytic
philosophy was inspired by symbolic logic, today little formal logic appears in analytical
texts. It is also true that most of continental philosophers believe that understanding
operates rather through historical and hermeneutic mediation and not through logical
analysis. Heidegger, the most important modern continental philosopher, held that
phenomena should be studied prior to any logical interpretation simply because being
precedes knowledge. However, such convictions have never led to the creation of a
‘continental technique’. Apart from that, historical and hermeneutic mediation is not
entirely incompatible with logic.
Often analytic philosophy is believed to scrutinise arguments more carefully;
however, it is impossible to say that Heidegger did not invest much care into the analysis
of problems and arguments. ‘Analysis’ is even one of the cornerstones of his philosophy
if we think of Daseinsanalyse (analysis of being-there). Again, the difference does not
permit the crystallisation of different techniques. Other observations are invalid because
of hasty generalisations. Føllesdal (1997, p.12) states that continental philosophers like
Heidegger and Derrida make predominant use of rhetoric. While this might be true for
those philosophers, it cannot be generalised for the entire body of continental philosophy.
Sometimes the difference is established by pitting an analytical ‘naturalist’ way of seeing
against a continental, ‘humanist’ way. However, though a part of analytic philosophy has
indeed tended towards naturalism, overall, the role of naturalism in analytic philosophy is
more minor than is often assumed.
The ‘history’ point might represent the most pertinent difference. Compared with
continental philosophy, most – though not all – analytic philosophy is a historical.
Interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, does exist in both, though the disciplines chosen by
each are different. Analytic philosophy maintains close ties with mathematics, biology,
physics, law, computer science, and economics, and looser ties with psychology and
linguistics. The ‘partner disciplines’ of continental philosophy are most typically located
in the humanities. Discussions of literature appear in continental philosophy and are
almost absent in the analytic tradition. Analytic philosophy avoids psychoanalytical and
sociological elements, and since the 1970s, cognition-based models have increasingly
 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 233

been favoured over linguistic-based models. Continental philosophy is clearly more

eclectic.
The difference cannot be established in terms of two different schools. There is little
difference in substance, but there are different styles or different ‘ways’ of doing
philosophy. Coherence and incoherence are determined neither by particular
philosophical questions nor by methods. Formal logic, for example, is not predominantly
used as a technique; but it has had a strong influence on analytic philosophy’s style.
Similarly, the link with the hard sciences has fostered qualities such as precision and
clarity, which concerns style and does not represent a method. Equally, in continental
philosophy, the abstract poetry and creative word play with concepts must be identified
as a style rather than as a technique. Ross (1998), Levy (2003), Priest (2003) and
Williams (1996) support the idea that the difference is mainly a matter of style.

2 Literature review

Since it is difficult to list every work that has dealt with the topic of our study, the present
literature review will be limited to the most important writings. Thoughts on the
difference between analytic and continental philosophy have sporadically emerged since
the 1960s, but have become much more frequent and substantial since the early 1990s.
Pragmatists were among the first who took up the topic. The reason is that pragmatism’s
own position is not entirely clear in that respect: it can be seen as a third way independent
of both traditions or as a fusion of both. Rorty’s article from 1999, ‘A pragmatist view of
contemporary analytic philosophy’ represents an early reflection on the topic. Most
studies appearing in the 1990s are not explicitly comparative; still they offer implicit
comparisons by defining their own tradition through reflections against the other. An
early example is Dummett’s Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993). Dummett refers to
‘continental’ only once but says that he wishes to close ‘the absurd gulf’ (p.xi). Attempts
to define the particularity of each tradition are contained in ‘What is…?’ books and
articles on continental and analytic philosophy. von Wright ‘Analytic Philosophy’ (1993)
and Glock’s edited volume The Rise of Analytic Philosophy (1997b) are typical
examples. The latter contains an explicitly comparative chapter by Føllesdal entitled
‘Analytic philosophy: what is it and why should one engage in it?’. In 1996, Monk
published ‘What is analytical philosophy’, and in 1998 appeared Biletzki’s and Matar’s
edited volume The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes, in which two authors
also contribute comparative chapters: Biletzki with ‘Wittgenstein: analytic philosopher?’
and Friedlander with ‘Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein: much ado about nothing’. In the
same year, Mezei and Smith’s The Four Phases of Philosophy (1998) attempted to apply
Brentano’s scientific-philosophical method not only to analytic but also to continental
philosophy, stating that its more recent phase (consisting of Rorty, Levinas and Derrida)
has brought about a scientific decline. In 2008, appeared Glock’s What is Analytic
Philosophy? and in 2013, Raatikainen’s article ‘What was analytic philosophy?’.
It is impossible to list all ‘companions to continental philosophy’, but it is safe to
assume that all of them offer some reflections on the difference with analytic philosophy
at least in the introduction. Early essays attempting this task are Rosen’s ‘Continental
philosophy from Hegel’ (1998) and Critchley’s ‘What is continental philosophy?’ (1998).
Since then, several book length studies have dealt with this topic, such as Cutrofello’s
234 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (2005), West’s Continental

Philosophy: An Introduction (2010), Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy
(2006), and McCumber’s Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought
(2011).
Some studies are clearly comparative containing more than implicit comparisons.
They have been written by both analytic and continental philosophers. The earliest one
comes from Cooper who presented a paper called ‘Analytical and continental philosophy’
at the Aristotelian Society in 1994. Several explicitly comparative books appear in the
2000s. Prado’s edited volume A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental
Philosophy (2003a) traces the history of the analytic-continental divide. Prado believes
that at the heart of the opposition are different methodologies and he described
continental philosophy as ‘synthetic’ as opposed to analytic [Prado, (2003b), p.10]. The
2000s brought forth several book length studies comparing individual philosophers from
both traditions: for example, Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and
Heidegger (2000), and Lawn’s Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic
Philosophy of Language (2004). Some comparisons (like those in Prado’s book) are
inspired by ‘real’ encounters: the Russell-Bergson encounter, the Carnap-Heidegger
encounter, the Derrida-Searle encounter…
A decade ago, ‘metaphilosophy’ has picked up the topic. In 2003, Levy published the
article ‘Analytic and continental philosophy: explaining the differences’ in
Metaphilosophy. Levy describes analytic philosophy as a ‘problem-solving activity’ and
continental philosophy as closer to the humanistic traditions and to literature and art. The
pragmatist output on the analytic-continental divide keeps growing, too. In 2004,
Eggington and Sandbothe published the edited volume The Pragmatic Turn in
Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought. An
Introduction to Metaphilosophy by Overgaard et al. (2013) contains a chapter entitled
‘Analytic and continental philosophy’. In 2011, appeared the arguably most important
book on the divide, Chase and Reynolds’ Analytic versus Continental: Arguments on the
Methods and Value of Philosophy. It was preceded by an edited volume by the same
authors called Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides (2010).
Chapters 13 and 14 of Analytic versus Continental examine the different attitudes to
issues of style and clarity as well as the place of philosophy in relation to the sciences and
the arts. A comparative study has also been published in 2012 by Zabala focusing on
Ernst Tugendhat. In the 1990s, Rorty, von Wright, Føllesdal, and also Tugendhat could
be seen as prominent communicators between both traditions. It therefore makes sense to
introduce Tugendhat into the discussion. Further, one needs to mention Leiter’s blog
‘Philosophical Gourmet Report’ (2006–2008), which has sparked vivid and often quoted
discussions on the topic.
Some writings offer to overcome the divide. Simons’ ‘Whose fault? The origins and
evitability of the analytic-continental rift’ (2001) sketches the arbitrariness of the divide
and Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide by Bell et al. (2015) searches contemporary
philosophy for ‘synthetic’ tendencies transcending the divide. A powerful attempt at
reunification is made by Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness (2004) where the analytical
philosopher works in the tradition of Nietzsche’s genealogy.
 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 235

3 Methodology

In our quantitative analysis of philosophical styles we proceeded as follows. First we

undertook a comparison of two sets of texts consisting of ten texts of analytic philosophy
and ten texts of continental philosophy. The analytic corpus included 7,564,059 words,
while the continental corpus included 13,378,105 words. The texts selection was
supposed to reflect the broad and eclectic character of both philosophies. For example,
the analytic group contains a book on early analytic philosophy, a book on logic, and a
book on analytic philosophy of religion. The purpose of this mix was to investigate where
the analysis will classify such texts differently. On the other hand, the selection had to be
restrained: we wanted to avoid ‘classics’ but rather focus on contemporary authors. Of
the twenty texts, all but four have appeared after 2000; only three are from the 1990s and
one is from 1984. We also introduced three edited volumes into the corpus while all the
others were written by single authors. All texts had to be originally written in English,
which made the choice of continental texts a little unusual. It was not possible to use texts
by eminent philosophers like Derrida or Heidegger, but the samples had to be limited to
English speaking continental philosophers. Further, the chapters of continentally minded
philosophers were excluded in one edited volume on the philosophy of film.
Tables 1 and 2 show the 20 texts comprising the corpora of continental and analytic
philosophy.
Table 1 Analytic philosophy corpus

1 Avrum Stroll Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Columbia

2 A.P. Martinich and D. Sosa
3 H.A. Harris and Ch.J. Insole
4 Peter Hylton
5 Scott Soames
6 Douglas Patterson
7 J. Floyd and S. Shieh (Eds.)
8 Tom Sorell and G.A.J. Rogers
9 Dale Jacquette
10 W.V. Quine
University Press, 2000)
A Companion to Analytic Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell,
2001)
Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of
Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion
(Ashgate, 2013)
Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic
Philosophy (Clarendon, 1993)
Analytic Philosophy in America and Other Historical
and Contemporary Essays (Princeton University Press,
2014)
Alfred Tarski, Philosophy of Language and Logic
(Palgrave, 2012)
Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in
Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Oxford University
Press, 2001)
Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy (Oxford
University Press, 2005)
Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Existence and
Nonexistence (De Gruyter, 1996)
From Stimulus to Science (Harvard University Press,
1995)
236 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

Table 2 Continental philosophy corpus

Ilse Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on
(Eds.) Negative Theology (Fordham University Press, 2000)
Stephen H. Daniel Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy
(Northwestern University Press, 2005)
Colin Davis After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory
(Routledge, 2004)
Paul Fairfield Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted: Dialogues
with Existentialism, Pragmatism, Critical Theory, and
Postmodernism (Continuum, 2011)
Ferit Güven Madness and Death in Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2005)
Irene E. Harvey Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of
Deconstruction (SUNY Press, 2002)
Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in
(Eds.) Philosophy (Routledge, 1999)
Simon Skempton Alienation After Derrida (Bloomsbury, 2010)
Norman K. Swazo Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian
Reflections (SUNY Press, 2002)
John B. Thompson Critical Hermeneutics:A Study in the Thought of Paul
Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge University
Press, 1984)

Table 3 Analytic philosophy of film corpus

1 David Bordwell
2 David Bordwell
3 Noël Carroll
4 Stanley Cavell
5 Berys Gaut
6 I.C. Jarvie
7 Stephen Mulhall
8 Rupert Read and
Jerry Goodenough (Eds.)
9 Irving Singer
10 Thomas E. Wartenberg
The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern
Movies (University of California Press, 2001)
Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the
Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press, 1987)
Engaging the Moving Image (Yale University Press, 2005)
The World Viewed: Reflections of the Ontology of Film
(Harvard University Press, 1971)
A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge University Press,
2010)
Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics
(New York: Taylor and Francis Routledge, 1987)
On Film (Routledge, 2001)
Film as Philosophy. Essays in Cinema After Wittgenstein
and Cavell [Essays by N. Bauer, S. Glendinning and S.
Critchley excluded from the analysis] (Palgrave, 2005)
Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film (The MIT Press,
2008)
Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (Routledge, 2007)

The second step of the research consisted in using a supplementary corpus of ten
analytical texts on film studies, and to compare this corpus with the earlier corpora of
continental and analytic philosophy. The purpose of this last step was to find out whether
analytic philosophy, once it approaches – via a ‘cognitivist turn’ – a topic that is
relatively untypical for its tradition and more firmly rooted in continental philosophy,
 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 237

changes its style and becomes more ‘continental’. Table 3 shows the ten texts of film
corpus.

4 Results

4.1 Concordances
A concordance is usually used to represent in an accurate and explicit way the different
language patterns used in a specific context. The major aim of concordance is to “place
each word back in its original context, so that the details of its use and behavior can be
properly examined” [Barnbrook, (1996), p.65]. Figure 1 represents an example of the
word ‘language’ as used by the analytical philosophers, while Figure 2 shows similar
examples for the same terms as used by continental philosophers. As can be seen from
this figure, the word searched is displayed in a different colour in the middle, while the
context in which it is used is displayed left and right of it. Thus, such method saves a lot
of time going back and forth across the corpus to determine the relevant context of a
particular term. The ‘node’ or the search word is not read horizontally but rather
vertically. In this way the contextualised meaning of a specific word can be determined
by looking at the words to the left and to the right of the node. This provides a great
insight into “(1) the syntactic contexts in which the node occurs, (2) the semantic
properties of the node’s syntactic companions, and (3) the membership of the node in
classes of semantically similar words” (Atkins et al., 2003).

Figure 1 Concordance for the word ‘language’ as used by the analytical school (see online
version for colours)

Concordance analysis detects not only word combinations but also the place a specific
word occurs in a text. This allows us to detect whether a certain term has a tendency to
occur at the beginning or at the end. Such an analysis is usually done through
concordance plot. Figure 3 shows a concordance plot of the terms ‘culture’, ‘method’ and
‘language’ as used by the analytical and continental philosophers. Because concordances
are normalised, each bar represents an occurrence of a word/term in a text. For example,
238 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

the term ‘culture’ as used by analytical philosophers in this figure seems not to be evenly
distributed as there is high concentration around the middle and no occurrences towards
the end. Thus “a concordance plot may be a useful tool to show not only how often a
search term appears in a corpus of data, but also where and in what distribution”
(Anthony, 2004).

Figure 2 Concordance for the word ‘language’ as used by the continental school (see online
version for colours)

Figure 3 Concordance plot for the terms ‘culture’, ‘method’ and ‘language’, respectively as
used by the (a) analytic philosophers and (b) continental school (see online version
for colours)

(a)

(b)
 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 239

The concordance analysis shows that the word ‘culture’ appears 5.3 times more often in
Continental texts than in analytic texts. ‘Method’ and ‘language’, on the other hand,
appear 1.6 times more often in analytic texts. This means that there are clear differences
in philosophical content.

4.2 Multidimensional scaling and principal component analysis

MDS was used to investigate the relationships in the corpora. Borg and Groenen (1997)
argue that MDS is a statistical method developed to detect in a visual way the complex
patterns in high-dimensional datasets. By arranging points in space according to
similarities between different objects, MDS displays as two or three-dimensional
geometrical pictures the structure of distance-type data (Cha et al., 2009). Thus, similar
sub-corpora are placed near each other on the map, while dissimilar sub-corpora are
placed far away from each other. The alternating least squares approach to scaling
(ALSCAL) algorithm is usually used by researchers to compute the optimal Euclidean
distances between objects (Zsoka et al., 2013). Figure 4 shows the resulting MDS for our
corpora. From this figure, we see that the northeast corner includes the texts written by
analytical philosophers about cinema. For example, the southeast corner includes texts
written by the same philosophers about other topics, while the southwest corner includes
texts written by continental school philosophers. Similar results are shown in the
principal component analysis shown in Figure 5.
In the principal components analysis, the three continental books by Swazo, Güven
and Thompson are on the far right side of the picture, and thus furthest removed from the
analytic texts, while all other continental texts stay closer to the analytic ones. The
reasons for this will be elaborated on in the conclusion.

Figure 4 MDS for the corpora used in the study (see online version for colours)
philosophy
Multidimensional Scaling
0.6

Hylton
Thompson
Jacquette
0.4

Blackwell
Quine
Soames Companion
Floyd and Shieh
0.2

Fairfield
Tarski Stroll
Gaut
Guven
Daniel Dooley Harris
0.0

Swazo Harvey Carroll

and Insole
Derrida Bulhof and ten Kate Jarvie
Sorell and Rogers
Davis Wartenberg
-0.2

Cavell
Goodenough
Bordwell_Making Meaning
-0.4

Mulhall
-0.6

Bordwell_Hollywood
Singer
-0.8

-1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5

100 MFW Culled @ 10-100%

240 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

Figure 5 Principal component analysis for the corpora used in the study (see online version
for colours)
philosophy
Principal Components Analysis

Hylton
Jacquette Thompson
5

Blackwell Companion
Soames
Gaut
FloydQuine
and Shieh
Stroll Tarski
Fairfield
PC2 (14.4%)

and Insole Dooley

HarrisCarroll Guven
0

Jarvie Daniel
Wartenberg
Sorell and Rogers Bulhof andHarvey Swazo
Cavell ten Kate
Davis Derrida
Goodenough
Bordwell_Making Meaning
-5

Mulhall

Bordwell_Hollywood

Singer
-10

-5 0 5 10
PC1 (17.3%)
100 MFW Culled @ 10-100%
Correlation matrix

After the introduction of the third corpus, in the MDS diagram, the members of the three
corpora form distinct clusters, with the exception of Cavell, Gaut and Carroll, which
mingle with the analytic group. However, the philosophy of film group, though separate
from the others, is situated in the middle between continental and analytic.
In the principal components analysis (Figure 5), all groups occupy their own territory
after the introduction of the third corpus. Overall, the analytic philosophy of film mingles
with neither analytic nor continental but stays on its own. Exceptions are Gaut and Jarvie,
which are in the analytic group. Also Cavell remains very close to the analytic group.

4.3 Cluster analysis and consensus tree analyses

We used the Ward’s method to cluster our corpora. This method produces set clusters
based on the proximity of sub-corpora. Figure 6 shows a dendogram of how the clusters
are formed. From this graph it is clear that, apart from some interference, most of the
works that belong either to the analytical or to the continental schools are clustered
together.
Finally, we conducted a delta-normalised bootstrapped cluster analysis (Hoover,
2004) to build a consensus tree of texts in the corpora. Figure 7 shows a bootstrap
consensus tree. This tree was constructed using similarity between most-frequent-word
frequencies (MFW) in each sub-corpus. Bootstrap method has proved to alleviate
problems attributed to the original delta-normalised method (Smith and Aldridge, 2011;
Burrows, 2002). Following the seminal work of Rybicki and Heydel (2013), MFW were
varied between 100–1,000. Culling was set at 100% (only words appearing in both the
analytic and the continental sub-corpora were used). From this figure, we see that texts
that belong to a specific school are clustered together on the same branch of the tree.
 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 241

Figure 6 Cluster analysis for the corpora used in the study (see online version for colours)
philosophy
Cluster Analysis

Thompson
Jacquette
Swazo
Guven
Derrida
Dooley
Daniel
Bulhof and ten Kate
Davis
Mulhall
Goodenough
Fairfield
Harvey
Bordwell_Making Meaning
Bordwell_Hollywood
Singer
Floyd and Shieh
Blackwell Companion
Stroll
Hylton
Tarski
Soames
Quine
Gaut
Carroll
Sorell and Rogers
Harris and Insole
Jarvie
Cavell
Wartenberg

3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0

100 MFW Culled @ 10-100%

Classic Delta distance

Like in the principal components analysis, there are divisions within the continental
corpus on the Bootstrap Consensus tree. Thompson’ Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in
the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas, Swazo’s Crisis Theory and World
Order: Heideggerian Reflections, and Güven’s Madness and Death in Philosophy stick
together and stay closer to the analytic group than Colin Davis’ After Poststructuralism,
Stephen Daniel’s Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, Richard Kearney
and Mark Dooley’s Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, and Ilse
Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative
Theology. The latter four books are on the extreme left end of the continental area, far
away from the analytic group, which is situated on the right. It is also remarkable that the
two books on religion (Bulhof and ten Kate’s Flight of the Gods and Harris and Insole’s
Faith and Philosophical Analysis) are situated close to each other though they belong to
different corpora. This differs very much from the results on the MDS diagram, where
those two books did not occupy an exceptional position but appeared on the left side
together with the other analytical books (though at the bottom of the field where almost
all continental books are located). In the principal components analysis, the two books
stayed on the left but at the top.
242 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

Figure 7 Bootstrap consensus tree for the corpora used in the study (see online version
for colours)
philosophy
Bootstrap Consensus Tree

te
Ka
Da denough

ten
nd
Mulhall
y

fa
le l
oaonie

lho
oo
Bu is
D e uv
DD

v
Bo

Har ve

G
G
rdw

r riden
Bord el l Sw
well az
Mak Holl

a
o

y
ing yw
Mea oo
ningd
Singer
son
omp
Jahcquette
T
FHylton
ompanionh ll Quair field
Blackwell C nd ShieStro le Taine
da so rs
s

Floy So
er

In ki
Wartenberg
C
Jaarvell
og

d am
an
Graroultl
dR

vi e

es
r ris
an

Ca

a
H
ll
re
So

100-100 MFW Culled @ 10-100%

Classic Delta distance Consensus 0.5

The three continental books by Swazo, Güven and Thompson that were in the principal
components analysis on the far right side of the picture, occupy parallel positions in the
cluster analysis. However, in the bootstrap consensus tree, those three books are on the
far right side of the picture and thus closest to the analytic group.
After the introduction of the third corpus of analytic philosophy of film, on the
bootstrap diagram, Harris and Insole as well as Sorrel and Rogers can no longer be found
inside the continental group but are now well integrated in the analytic group. Exceptions
are Thompson (Critical Hermeneutics) and Fairfield (Philosophical Hermeneutics
Reinterpreted), which move close to or into the analytic group though they remain still
relatively close to the continental group. In the bootstrap diagram (Figure 4) there are five
books of analytic philosophy of film that are clearly integrated in the group of analytic
philosophy: Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections of the Ontology of Film,
Berys Gaut’s A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Noël Carroll’s Engaging the Moving Image,
Thomas Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, and I.C. Jarvie’s
Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics. On the other hand, Stephen
Mulhall’s On Film as well as the selected analytic essays from Read and Goodenough’s
Film as Philosophy can be located inside the continental group between Colin Davis and
Irene Harvey’s Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction. Bordwell’s
two books as well as Irving Singer’s Cinematic Mythmaking are on this Bootstrap
 A corpus-based computational analysis of philosophical texts 243

diagram situated between the analytic and the continental group. Mulhall enters, once
again, the continental field in the Principal Components Analysis (Figure 5) but so does
also Jacquette’s Meinongian Logic, which had also stayed relatively close to the
continental group in both the Bootstrap diagram and the cluster analysis in research
Step 1.
After the introduction of the third corpus, on the cluster analysis, continental and
analytic philosophy remains distinct, but the philosophy of film group has been divided
into two parts. Mulhall, Goodenough, both Bordwell books and Singer stay very close to
or are even inside the continental group; while Gaut, Carroll, Jarvie, Cavell and
Wartenberg are situated inside the analytic group.

5 Discussion and conclusions

In this study we compared two sets of texts consisting of ten texts of analytic philosophy
and ten texts of continental philosophy by using the Burrows delta consensus tree,
principal components analysis, as well as MDS and cluster analysis. By adopting a data
mining approach to analyse philosophical texts we extended the existing debate regarding
continental and analytical philosophy in two ways. Firstly, we focused on two major
philosophical schools, which make it possible to generalise findings to other
philosophical schools. Secondly, we use a relatively new data mining methodology to
check the robustness of our findings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time
this technique is used to investigate both continental and analytical schools. The research
provides an essential contribution to the body of quantitative analysis research.
The fact that all analyses place analytic and continental texts at two different ends is
remarkable given that neither current is very coherent and that especially Continental
philosophy is a patchwork of traditions. In stylistic terms there is thus a clear coherence.
However, there are some interesting divisions. The introduction of the third group
provoked the change of some constellations between individual texts. The research has
shown that what passes as ‘analytic philosophy of film’ fits stylistically into the analytic
spectrum in some respects, but has also strong affinities with continental philosophy.
Though the cluster analysis would show analytic philosophy of film as being divided into
a continental and an analytic camp, the three other tests yield the result that analytic
philosophy of film follows a style on its own. It remains incompatible with both analytic
and continental. The continental and an analytic text on the philosophy of religion moved
closely together. Another interesting observation is that the analytic book on religion
moved even into the stylistic spectrum of continental philosophy. The exceptional status
of certain books in the bootstrap consensus tree as well as in the cluster analysis can only
be explained by reference to the contents of the books. The conclusion is that the change
of thematic focus effectuates a shift of style. One book deals with a religious topic (faith)
and another one with the history of philosophy, which is untypical for analytic
philosophy. Stylistically, those books are thus more comparable with the books of
Fairfield and Davis that deal with existentialism, hermeneutics and poststructuralism.
The research inspires further thoughts on the question to what extent language
influences thought and vice versa. It is impossible to discuss this important topic here, but
the research clearly shows that philosophical thought is dependent on language and that
the philosophical style changes in parallel with the content that is dealt with in the text.
244 T. Botz-Bornstein and M.M. Mostafa

This was true for the analytic book on religion as well as for the analytic book on the
history of philosophy. The introduction of an analytic philosophy of film corpus has
shown that the focus on a certain topic (film) fractures the stylistic coherence of analytic
philosophy of film as analytic philosophy. By and large, this philosophy develops a style
of its own, and parts of it even move into the continental field.

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Notes
1 It should be noted also that cognitive science does have a continental branch, which obviously
is interested in the mind, see Gallagher (1997).

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