Regarding the other commenters baring their teeth to attack the UI, how in the world is that in any way useful or productive?
Just yesterday we were upvoting Collison's top questions, one of which was that the book needs to be reinvented for learning. In fact it's still on the homepage with 971 points[1].
I'm not saying this particular presentation is correct or the answer, but I'm thrilled to see attempts being made and can't imagine why you would be hostile toward someone for (and thus discourage others from) making the attempt to try something new.
Edit: There's a similar hypocrisy behind the "doesn't work on X" observations in the other comments.
On the one hand, we talk about getting something launched and out there, and on the other we get on our high horse and complain that it isn't functional on every platform and screen size?
I feel strongly that this should be a supportive environment for new and interesting attempts (and thus uncertain and perhaps buggy ones).
I fully agree with your sentiment but in this case the UI renders it almost unusable making it very hard to evaluate the content.
I've tried Firefox and Edge on Windows 10 and Chrome on Android, and from other comments in the thread it doesn't look like a case of "not working on every platform and screen size".
This is great, but small usability requests (from a Macbook user):
1. Scroll should scroll, rather than zoom. It seems to me scrolling the list is a much more common action than needing to zoom (which doesn't seem to be very useful as the writing becomes unintelligible quickly). On a Macbook/touchscreen pinch can be used for zoom, some modifier key in other cases.
2. Filtering on topics should remove instead of greying out, similar to what clicking on a line does. With the greying out you need to zoom out and somehow (haven't yet figured out how) zoom back in? Or scroll endlessly.
I'm not sure how it's supposed to work on anything. It's unusable on Firefox. Why does the scroll wheel change font size? Why is the list slanted? Why is it a list at all given it's a web of connections?
Is this a fair criticism? Western philosophy is highly interconnected, and the design is apparently intended to focus on those interconnections. Some Western philosophers were influenced by Asian ideas (particularly Buddhism), but does it go the other way around? Were modern Asian philosophers influenced by or commenting on Western philosophers? I don't know nearly enough to say one way or the other, except to know that a number of modern Indian philosophers attended English universities.
Moreover, the data set for this is clearly not a fixed, immutable thing. It can and should be evolved (I immediately thought it needs a wiki-like editing ability), and connections to non-Western philosophers could be added there.
I'd also like to see the data popped out into another dimension, where broader concepts of metaphysics, epistomology, and morality can be linked to the philosophers that addressed them. (For example, look up "murder", and see links to the philosophers that have talked about it).
But honestly, complaining about how it's just "Western philosophy" is suspiciously close to content-free moralizing. I'm strongly leftist and "SJW", but this feels unfair to me.
They literally titled it "The History of Philosophy". That's like if I wrote a book about all the versions of MS Windows and called it "The History of Operating Systems", or a book about American food and called it "The History of Food". This isn't moralizing, it's pointing out a blatantly self-important title that's insulting to the rest of the world.
The word "philosophy" has usually meant "western philosophy" in academic use. Eastern thinkers aren't a major component of the western academic tradition. Therefore, the use of the word here is in line with conventional usage. You are welcome to get on your high horse about the conventional usage, but you might want to start with the thousands of universities that teach "Intro to Philosophy" without touching on Chuang Tzu or Buddhism.
Your counterexamples aren't particularly good, because it seems likely to me (arguing without proof) that the majority of written philosophy that survives to the present day is part of the western tradition. MS Windows is but a tiny minority of the world's operating systems, for example.
And I will repeat, there is nothing about this site that particularly limits it to western philosophers. It's a data model, and data can (and probably will) be added - in fact, open or semi-open access to the data set would be one of the best additions. Then you could add all the non-western philosophers you like, and the connections between them. I'd argue your criticism is more like complaining that the corner diner shouldn't say "good food" because it doesn't serve sushi, and sushi is good food too. Absolute inclusiveness is an unreasonable goal, because it's an impossible goal.
Your arguments, simplified, are 1) "we don't need to include other philosophy, because we only teach western philosophy", 2) "it seems kind of like all written philosophy is western, so your example is bunk", 3) "somebody can eventually add some other culture's philosophy to this page so we don't need to change it at all right now".
They should either change the title of the page, or include all other philosophy. But the current state is at the very least incredibly lazy and misleading, and at worst, insulting.
You should read Bluestrike's comments about the lack of Arabic philosophers, downthread. That's how you make a point of incompleteness, not just politically correct yelling.
In some ways, yes. And the issue certainly goes beyond just the mode immediate question of inclusion and the moral elements thereof.
Understanding the history of philosophy necessitates considering it in terms of dialogue between philosophers and their ideas. The term "western philosophy" gets used a sort of metagrouping precisely because it's so easy to do so, in part because of Plato's outsized influence over millennia of thought. His dialogues are a sort of common point through time; huge swaths of western philosophy are connected either directly or indirectly to him, even when the works in question aren't direct responses. Some philosophers, such as Plotinus, presuppose knowledge of Plato on a fundamental level; to understand his writing, one must have knowledge of Plato. There are off-hand references to Plato's ideas--beyond just the explicit ones--throughout the Enneads that turn out to be important later, and subject to misunderstandings if missed. The connection of ideas and philosophers is important, and give the impression of a monolithic whole in some ways. That shapes how survey courses in philosophy select their materials, and is often used as a sort of touchstone to help students along. The connection between western philosophy and others like East Asian or Indian philosophy isn't present, or at least not until much later.
On the other hand, Arabic and Islamic philosophers were engaged in an extensive Greek-Arabic Translation Movement to preserve, translate, and engage with Greek texts.[0] Through much of the Middle Ages, the original Greek texts were effectively unavailable: many were lost in the west, but the bigger problem was more in the dearth of Greek literacy. They had partial translations into Latin of some texts, and worked from indirect knowledge of various Greek ideas, but the problems of availability were significant and limiting.[1] Étienne Gilson summed it up as "Plato himself does not appear at all, but Platonism is everywhere."
By contrast, the translation movement starting with al-Kindī at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (there was also a major movement to translate Greek texts into Syric by Christians living in Syria prior to this as well), both preserved and translated significant numbers of Greek texts, not only preserved and translated the original materials[3] (Aristotle's Metaphysics most of all), the very act of translation helped spur the development of falsafa (Islamic philosophy) in general:
> ...On a technical level, the translations and scientific work conducted in these two centuries [ca. 750 to 950] generated a highly sophisticated scientific language and a massive amount of source material based on the classical tradition that would feed scientific research for the following centuries, not only in the Islamic world but beyond, in Greek and Latin Christendom and, within it, among the Jewish populations as well. On a social level, they created a cultural attitude--a fashion, one could say--that scientific work based on the Greek pattern was something socially valuable and prestigious; the massive amounts of money that were spent on translations and original Arabic works on scientific subjects during the first two centuries of the Abbasids are sufficient proof of this. The continuum of translation and science--the practice, the study, and the sponsoring of it--defined a large percentage of public culture in the first two Abbasid centuries and created a precedent that could never be ignored throughout the medieval period, in either the East or the West.[4]
Starting around the 12th century, both the Arabic translations and Islamic commentaries hit Europe. Commentaries on Aristotle by philosophers such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes) helped shape how Aristotle's texts were received. Avicenna, for example, had a profound impact on philosophy, medicine, and science; even as he disagreed with Avicenna in some areas, he adopted his ideas in others and cited others still (along with other Arabic sources) in multiple writings. This[5] is a pretty interesting overview of some of those connections.
In general, it's safe to say that Arabic philosophy was "transformative" in the West and had a significant role in laying the foundation for the Renaissance. Ignoring it, or--more charitably--not noticing it, is to ignore a key part of western philosophy in doing so. I sincerely doubt the oversight was made on purpose; I can even recognize the reasoning for it. But it's still a useful mistake to point out, even before considering questions of inclusion and representation. Which are also, 100% valid concerns that are debated in philosophy departments. I just didn't focus on them in my reply.
Given the manner in which the information is presented, I can also see the difficulties; it'd mean creating multiple, separate representations in some ways. That said, it's an interesting visualization even if I think there are inherent, significant problems in how it attempts to squash key ideas into single sentence summaries.
Yes, I noticed the lack of Arabic philosophers right away. That's a big oversight, because frankly, they're a big part of the medieval tradition of preserving and expanding on the Greeks, particularly Aristotle (it's modern ethnocentrism that thinks of the Arabs as wildly foreign relative to the Greeks). But again, there's no reason the data can't be expanded to be more extensive and inclusive.
I'm not sure I would call that "browsable," but it seems like there is a lot of great work that's gone into cataloging the philosophers, ideas, and connections.
A less experimental and more usable UI would make this a great site.
I (kinda) disagree. For me, the wiki style doesn't feel as browsable as it should. Not sure why.
I personally feel like I need some visual map of the connections between ideas. You're right that the attempt here falls short in many ways but I'm glad someone is giving it a shot.
Visual maps (mind-maps) don't scale well over 20-30 items because the model becomes hard to grasp and lots of scrolling is necessary. Such models are nice while they are small.
I'd love to see a cross between a wiki and a mind-map where parts of a larger mind-map are represented on individual pages of the wiki, with links between them. I'd use such a tool to organise my ideas / learning.
This is really neat in concept. However, I would be cautious about the substance here. I took a look at one philosopher that I know well---Socrates---and several of the entries seem very doubtful to me.
> We need to know how to conduct our lives and ourselves.
Sure, but doesn't everyone think that?
> Things like 'justice' do exist; not materially, but in some sort of essence.
This is getting metaphysical, something quite foreign to Socrates.
> There can be no cut and dried answers; answers themselves are open to question.
This reads to much in to the conversational aspect of the dialogues. Socrates is always pointing out that in many areas of life there are experts who know the correct answers and can be appealed to. In the moral realm, sadly, there seem to be no experts (though there are pretenders, hence lots of questions), but the point is that it would be great if there were experts here too!
> To the man who preserves his integrity no real, long-term harm can come.
"Integrity" sounds too personal or individual; this should be "the just man", or "the righteous man". And it does not need to "long-term" qualification.
That is four out of seven items. There rest of the list seems broadly ok, though it is a rather eccentric selection of Socrates views. Gotta start somewhere though, I guess.
One the other hand Socrates presents unusual problems of interpretation, so this may well not be a representative entry.
I'm familiar with Socrates too. I haven't clicked the link, I'm on limited data and worried the site would suck it up.
I'm curious about the other three items. Would you mind sharing them?
As for the last point, Socrates had this idea of "caring for one's soul". Not sure about the nature of the soul besides it being one's "true self". Notably he believed that it's better to be harmed than to harm someone because the latter hurts one's soul (not sure how this is supposed to work).
BTW I am interested in developing his ideas that no one willingly does wrong, and the related one that the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
I'm impressed, was pretty good, it's a bit biased and leaves out some important people (i.e. Duns Scotus, Sigmund Freud) as well as some modern philosophers but that was expected. The user-experience is not very good. I also think it's a trap to think philosophy as a linear-progress and this presentation kind of enhances that view. But anyway the content is good, the presentation could be improved
I thought it actually undermined the philosophy as linear-progress by focusing on the links, which show a chaotic cycle of idea development. The linearity of the names seems to come from going with time on that axis, but that's just an arbitrary device for the sake of organization rather than the driver of the interpretation of the content, in my view.
Yes good point, the connections are really good in that sense. The time-scale is a bit misleading at least for me. I don’t know how it could be improved, maybe each segment of connected philosophers could have their own time-scales. I’m not sure time is as relevant really, some questions are timeless as well as different answers to them..
I like that idea of using time in a way that scales better or chunks relevant sections together. There's definitely room for improvement in how time is exhibited in this interface.
I think the content is solid on average, but there are some challenges here with how/when to connect figures (really, this seems like an impossible task). For instance, Mackie's denial of moral facts is a disagreement with quite a lot of people (ditto for Hobbes' contention that we are just machines). I was similarly surprised to see that Ramsey's connection of justification to reliable belief formation had no connections to reliabilist epistemolgy in the late 20th century.
As far as the individual sentences, I didn't go through everything, but I thought the gloss of Sellars on the given was not on target. Also, did Anscombe really think that we needed new values for a secular culture? She was a devout Catholic, and frequently wrote from a Catholic perspective.
One of Anscombe's most influential papers, "Modern Moral Philosophy" (written in 1958), makes the following claims: "it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy [...] until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology", and "the concepts of [...] moral obligation and moral duty [...] and of what is [...] morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of "ought", ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it."
The earlier conception of ethics is what she calls "a law conception of ethics" later in the paper, and she ascribes that to Christianity. The idea is that terms like "ought" and "bound" and "obliged" all presuppose an idea of ethics-as-law, and she's suggesting that if we've abandoned Christianity then we should abandon ethical notions that presuppose it.
So I assume that's where the "new values for a secular culture" thing is coming from. I have to say that the impression I get from her paper isn't quite that, though; it feels more as if she is complaining that post-Christian ethics produces results she finds unacceptable, and would prefer that its practitioners stop (as she might see it) pretending that they're really doing ethics at all.
(I just had a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Anscombe. It mentions both readings, and suggests that the "straight" one is more common, but my impression is that the author of that article agrees with me about what Anscombe was really up to.)
Thanks. The immense confusion I felt while reading MMP a decade ago is all coming back to me!
I share your sense that she doesn't seem optimistic about the ability of secular philosophers to do ethics at all, though it's definitely open to debate, and I don't pretend to know whether she was endorsing virtue ethics.
This is a neat idea, and fun to play around with. But there are a few obvious pitfalls to be aware of:
1. Many philosophers are inconsistent with themselves. They change their mind. Wittgenstein wrote two books: the second comprehensively refuted the first. In other cases, thinkers write twelve or so books that are not internally consistent. It doesn't make sense, when you get down to things, to treat thinkers as the 'unit' of thought.
2. Most of the things important to most philosophers are not other philosophers (although that is usually very important too), e.g. the greatest influence on Hobbes was the English Civil War, on Nietzsche it was Wagner, on Rawls it was Protestant theology, on Dewey it was Darwin (and so on).
3. You miss a lot if you translate all of these thinkers into a single commensurable language. The different conceptual structures they use, and the linguistic context in which those conceptual structures find their force, are essential to understanding these thinkers. If you translate those particular languages into a single, universal one, you miss a lot.
4. There's also an issue about what is and is not philosophy. Whoever did this is prioritising formal analytic philosophy (especially epistemology). This is conspicuous in, for example, the case of Sartre. A lot of what Sartre wrote about was political/Marxist, but none of that is included. The list of twentieth century philosophers is extraordinarily unrepresentative, for this reason.
How can you include William Frankena, Peter Winch, and John Mackie, who no one outside of analytic philosophy will have heard of, or have been influenced by, and not epochal figures like Freud, Schmitt, Arendt, Hayek, Adorno or Fanon?
A five or so line summary of the concepts of any given philosopher will be necessarily incomplete. It's certainly not going to handle things like the evolution of their own ideas over time (and many philosophers contradict their own early work with later works).
On the other hand, as a rough guide to the structure of the history of philosophy, this is a very interesting approach. All philosophers are standing on the shoulders of giants. They are influenced by and comment on each other's ideas. Putting those concepts into an easy to follow link-based format is a terrific idea, and could be very useful to a lot of us who study philosophy.
There is a difference between something being incomplete, and being misleading. I think this would be a very bad starting point for the history of philosophy, unless you don't know any of the canon to begin with. It is entirely ahistorical, for the reasons I stated (point 2 and 3).
But yes, it can serve some pedagogical purposes, I'm sure.
I love this visualization idea! Maybe it's my computer, but the rendering is really slow. I'm using 32GB RAM and i5 processor with Windows Firefox. This is a bit unusual considering they are mostly all just text-based content.
I agree with some comments below on mouse zooming issues and navigation. While the visualization is very nice, there are some UX issues need to be fine tuned. Looking forward to the next version!
This can be greatly simplified since there are only 4 major philosophers: Plato/Kant and Aristotle/Rand who took the fundamental opposite positions of the Primacy of Consciousness versus the Primacy of Existence, respectively.
Kant secularized and removed the contradictions in Plato's theories whereas Rand completed Aristotle's revolution which began with the Law of Identity and which she applied to consciousness itself and solved the problem of universals and answered the skeptics.
Just yesterday we were upvoting Collison's top questions, one of which was that the book needs to be reinvented for learning. In fact it's still on the homepage with 971 points[1].
I'm not saying this particular presentation is correct or the answer, but I'm thrilled to see attempts being made and can't imagine why you would be hostile toward someone for (and thus discourage others from) making the attempt to try something new.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129
Edit: There's a similar hypocrisy behind the "doesn't work on X" observations in the other comments.
On the one hand, we talk about getting something launched and out there, and on the other we get on our high horse and complain that it isn't functional on every platform and screen size?
I feel strongly that this should be a supportive environment for new and interesting attempts (and thus uncertain and perhaps buggy ones).