The other day I was playing around with Google's
Ngram, which uses the books in Google Books to track the change in the use or popularity of different words or terms over time (basically how often a word or phrase appears in published works). Just out of curiosity I put in 'Plato' and 'Aristotle' to see how popular they have been over the years. The resulting graph was surprisingly interesting (you may have to click on the graph to see it).
Here Plato is in red and Aristotle is in blue. There are a few interesting things here. Before about 1790 Aristotle is hardly mentioned at all until his precipitous climb to popularity. I immediately wondered if this was an effect of the books they were using or if writers really didn't talk about Aristotle before the 1790's. Perhaps they referred to him by a different name, I know Thomas Aquinas simply called him "The Philosopher" (any insights from those readers who have more than a BS degree in Philosophy?). Maybe the English just didn't talk about him. But after about 1805 the two are almost inseparable, until about 1865 where Plato just seems to go off and have a party by himself, and Aristotle just tags along. They come back together around the end of WWI (this sounds like a bad soap opera), but then in 1960 Aristotle has his thing and Plato has never caught back up.
I also noticed that there was a striking drop in the popularity of both philosophers starting in about 1965 (with a strong revival 20 years later). I wondered if this effect could be seen in other philosophers. Behold the result:
Here I have included Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein. David Hume died in 1776 (and we became a free country, coincidence? I think not! Definitely some causation there...sorry philosophy joke), so he was talked about even before he died. Kant died in 1804, but interest in in his stuff only slowly picked up until his first big peak in the 1880's. Nietzsche died in 1900, and had his first big showing during WWI. Wittgenstein died in 1951, which is when he started to get talked about (Lesson for today: If you want people to talk about you just have to die.).
I noticed that the decline of the 1960's was present in all philosophers except Nietzsche who had his second big bump (Wittgenstein did not drop but his upward progress was slowed). So now the big question, is this just an effect of how Google gets and processes the data, or did people really stop talking about all those philosophers in the 1960's? And what drove the revival in the late 80's and throughout the 90's, and now why have they all dropped off, including Nietzsche? Also, it seems that the period between 1860 and 1920 was more Platonic but since 1960 we have been more focused on Aristotle (
Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, which is almost exactly when Aristotle and Plato diverge. Coincidence? Probably not. And that is not a joke.). What effect has that had on us? A whole host of interesting questions.
