work isolates at this level of eminence: only 1 of 114, the Tao Te Ching author,
and even in this case, as indicated, a plausible network connection can be
conjectured.
India is omitted because dating is often obscure and information on net-
work ties is missing. Figures 5.1 through 5.5 list figures by century only rather
than by generation. Even here, there are apparently only 2 horizontal isolates,
and those among the secondary figures, lacking corresponding rivals in their
century (Aryadeva 200s c.e., Raghunatha Shiromani, 1400s c.e.). The first
two important Upanishadic philosophers appeared together and debated each
other; the founders of the three great organized lineages of ascetics, Gautama
Buddha, Mahavira, and Makkali Gosala, emerged simultaneously in a network
of debates; later Buddhist and Hindu philosophers are generally quite tightly
matched. Vertical linkages from one important figure to another, however, are
much sparser in India than elsewhere. Although such ties are fairly dense on
the Buddhist side, and at certain key periods among the Hindu philosophers
(as in the key Mimamsa and Advaita Vedanta thinkers around Shankara), a
considerable portion of the Hindu philosophers are not known to connect to
significant networks, or any networks at all.
For secondary philosophers we have a total of 313 names from six world
networks; 14 of these are horizontal isolates, 18 or 19 network isolates. The
isolates from rival contemporary creativity include a number from the early
generations when philosophical traditions were just building up; this includes
some of the early figures in China (Tseng Tzu, Yang Chu, similarly situated to
the more important Confucius and Mo Ti), and Islam (Hasan al-Basri, Abu
Hanifa), as well as philosophers isolated in the afterwash of a network which
had disintegrated (Ibn Taymiyah, Ibn Khaldun in the later period of Islamic
philosophy; Alan of Lille in the one-generation interregnum between the two
great networks at medieval Paris, Cusanus in the mid-1400s). Network isolates
are more likely to appear on the periphery in crowded periods, often from
deviant backgrounds: the wandering knight Raymond Lull among the univer-
sity theologians at Paris; the mystical shoemaker Boehme in a small town
in Silesia; Vico at Naples at a time when philosophy was dominated by free-
thinking networks in France and England while Italy was under a conserva-
tive Catholicism. Still there are horizontal coincidences in both creativity and
contents; Vico’s Scienza Nuova of 1725 is not so far away in materials and
theme from Montesquieu’s far more successful L’Esprit des Lois, written
1731–1748. The network-isolated Utilitarian-Deist theologian Paley is over-
matched by his contemporary Bentham, who centers one of the most important
intergenerational networks. Such isolates tend to pay the structural price of
being outcompeted for attention in the long run by better-connected thinkers.
If we collate the two charts of isolates, horizontal and vertical, we find
888 •^ Appendix 1