Data analysis of the most frequent topics of philosophy dissertations in Brazil.

What is it about?

This paper employs structural topic modeling (STM) to describe the academic philosophy landscape in Brazil. Based on a public national database, a corpus consisting of 12,515 abstracts of monographs defended in philosophy graduate programs between 1991 and 2021 was compiled. The final STM model identified 74 meaningful research topics, clustered into 7 thematic categories. This study discusses the prevalence of the most significant topics and categories, their trends across three decades, and their (positive or negative) association with the supervisor's gender. Results show the first empirical evidence that Brazilian philosophical research exhibits a greater focus on philosophers than on specific themes or problems. Moreover, by visualizing the variations in topic prevalence over time, it was possible to track the rise or decline of the major interest categories and topics. Finally, results also show which topics are more influenced or less influenced by gender.

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Photo by Rey Seven on Unsplash

Photo by Rey Seven on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper gives a clear perspective on how philosophy is practice in Brazil. For instance, it shows that among the 10 topics with the highest average prevalence, philosophers from the Western canon such as Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx were identified as the most studied, alongside contemporary philosophers like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Foucault, and members of the Frankfurt School. Moreover, the typical profile of philosophy monographs in Brazil appears to involve research on specific philosophers and their philosophical system, a structure influenced significantly by the impact of French structuralists in the recent history of Brazilian philosophy graduate programs. Nonetheless, the past decade has seen a noteworthy shift toward heightened interest in themes associated with Social and Political Philosophy, the dominant category since 1991.

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