Mapping the History of the Philosophy of Religion

Mapping the History of the Philosophy of Religion with Machine Learning 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster University of Alabama Dept. of Religious Studies 1

• What is the philosophy of religion (Po. R)? • An academic approach to the study of religion with respect to philosophical questions • Example: Why does a good God allow evil? • Starting with questions that compliment sources • What was studied typically? • Contemporary history: 1970 onwards • What could be studied with respect to probability? Project Overview 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 2

Materials • Input data: research articles from three establishment anglophone journals 1. 2. 3. Journal of Religion International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion Religious Studies • Total: 1, 074 articles, 6 million words • Additional 13, 000 articles from adjacent fields – religious studies, philosophy – for comparison 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 3

Programming Infrastructure R: Statistical Language • Effective data handling and storage[1] • Critical for large amounts of texts • Collection of tools, including graphical facilities, for data analysis • An accessible introduction to text mining: Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach[2] 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster

Programming Techniques • Text mining: computationally processing documents • Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)[3] • Machine learning algorithm • Groups articles to demonstrate topics of historical significance • Additional programming techniques • Model LDA topics using interactive visualizations • Highlight key authors and terms within each topic 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 5

Primary Inquiries • Do analytic approaches within theistic schemes predominate the history of Po. R? • Analytic philosophy: begins with Bertrand Russell (left), G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein[4] • Theism: the project of developing “a clear coherent account of the nature of God” and “cogent arguments for the existence of such a God”[5] • How can philosophers adopt global-critical methods to broaden the scope of their field? [6] 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 6

LDA Topic Model Each bubble represents a distinct topic in the history of Po. R Bubbles close to each other (i. e. 3 and 7) demonstrate inter-topic similarity 7

Identifying Analytic Theism[7] Topics Note: 50 percent of total tokens (words) are located within these four topics 8

Articles and Selected Topics Two-fifths of articles “correlate” strongly (�� > 0. 5) with (at least) one topic in analytic phil. /theism (see sample below) Topic “correlation” calculated by probabilistic distribution: �� (d=1 … M) Note: this estimation does not account for articles that “correlate” moderately (�� > 0. 4), though they can constitute up to 10 percent 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 9

Top Authors and Selected Topics Three-fifths of top authors (n pubs. > 3) write primarily on (at least) one topic in analytic phil. /theism (see sample below) Primary topic calculated by probabilistic distribution: �� (d=1 … M) Note: this estimation does account for co-authored articles 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 10

Conclusions • Analytic theism has been the orthodox approach in Po. R since 1970 • Topics in analytic phil. /theism linked to • Half of overall words • Two-fifths of total articles • Three-fifths of top authors • What has been studied typically, then? • Theistic arguments (like Plantinga’s, pictured left) and attributes, theodicy, religious language, &c. • Project’s future: Where should the field expand? • Use different sources, models, and statistics to propose plausible new avenues 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 11

Contact Information Jackson C. Foster jcfoster 6@crimson. ua. edu MSC 190880 1831 University Station Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 12

References All images are in the public domain. [1] “What Is R? ” https: //www. r-project. org/about. html. [2] Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. “Text Mining with R. ” Text Mining with R, March 7, 2020. https: //www. tidytextmining. com/index. html. [3] Blei, David, Andrew Ng, and Michael Jordan. “Latent Dirichlet Allocation. ” Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3 (2003): 993– 1022. https: //doi. org 10. 1162/jmlr. 2003. 3. 4 -5. 993. [4] Beaney, Michael. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. [5] Swinburne R. (2001) Philosophical Theism. In: Phillips D. Z. , Tessin T. (eds) Philosophy of Religion in the 21 st Century. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London [6] Loewen, Nathan. “Theses on a Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion: Part 1. ” Studying Religion in Culture, June 6, 2017. https: //religion. ua. edu/blog/2015/12/03/theses-on-a-global-critical-philosophy-of-religion-part-1/. [7] Eklund, D. The nature of faith in analytic theistic philosophy of religion. Int J Philos Relig 80, 85– 99 (2016). https: //doi. org/10. 1007/s 11153 -015 -9545 y For further reading on futures in Po. R, see Kanaris, Jim (ed. ). Reconfigurations of Philosophy of Religion: A Possible Future. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018. Wildman, Wesley J. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning Philosophy of Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. 3/8/2021 Jackson C. Foster 13