Abstract

What is the difference between a researcher in philosophy and a philosopher? There are two kinds of answer that we can give to this question. We can say that the difference lies in a sort of internal quality; or, as the authors of this paper do, we can argue that a philosopher would not be a philosopher without the intervention of an ensemble of social actors such as universities, departments, funding, colleagues, editors, journals, media, and so on. In the first section, referring to actor-network theory (ANT), the authors define the philosopher as a Leviathan, i.e. a macro-actor that became macro- not thanks to his/her essence, but because he/she succeeded in translating the interests of other actors. In the second section, it is introduced the notion of digital traces, and the homology between ANT and the image of the social reality we can obtain from a process of extraction, treatment, and (visual) restitution of digital traces. In particular, the authors stress the potential of a digital traces-based scientometric for studying actor-networks related to the academic world, but also its limit. In the third section, the specific case of the actor-networks related to philosopher Paul Ricoeur is considered. First, on the basis of a scientometric analysis of the digital traces contained in the bibliographic database Scopus, and secondly by extending the exploration to digital traces available on the Web via web mapping. In the conclusion, the authors affirm that the merit of their digital hermeneutics consists in bringing forward a «world of the text» which is probably less romantic, but certainly more authentic that the «world of the text» to which Ricoeur has often referred to.