Using data from the PhilPapers Surveys, Quentin Ruyant, a post-doc at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has created a map showing the correlation of positions held by philosophers on different philosophical topics.

Ruyant writes:

Initially I was reading Bourget and Chalmers’ paper on the survey and was puzzled that the highest correlations between positions seemed to form two correlated camps. I sketched a graph to confirm that and it became the first version of the diagram. Later on I changed the methodology so as to include all positions in the survey: I decided to include the first to third correlations of each, irrelevant of their weight. This gave rise to this new version, (and as it turns out, there isn’t really two camps with this methodology but several islands).

Here’s the map:

A line between two positions indicates which is the most correlated with the other among philosophers; dashed lines represent the second- and third-most correlated.

Ruyant recently earned his PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain and the University of Rennes 1. He works in philosophy of science and is working on scientific representation and modalities. You can follow him on Twitter here.

(Thanks to Andrew Fyfe for the pointer.)