In this essay, I quantitatively analyze the significance of scholarship in economic philosophy since the 1960s. In order to do so, I examine, through the number of publications and citations, the evolution of the main trends in economic philosophy over a fifty years period. This paper will develop a better conception of how the pathways of major debates, in particular rhetoric of economics (RoE) versus realism in economics (RiE), helped economic philosophy achieve its present status in economics. Viewed through this lens, it is clear that the main trends in the recent history of the discipline have emerged out of the concerns of non-mainstream economists since the 1980s.