Browsable History of Philosophy
denizcemonduygu.com
denizcemonduygu.com
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
0. https://aeon.co/ideas/arabic-translators-did-far-more-than-j...
1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/#Avai...
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-metaphysic...
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-greek/
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=LbqF8z2bq3sC&pg=PA493&dq=a...
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-influence/
A less experimental and more usable UI would make this a great site.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
* Knowledge of the universe does not affect our behavior.
* We should pity the perpetrator of injustice, not the victim of injustice.
* No one really knowingly does wrong.
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.
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.)
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.
(Regarding her own way of doing ethics, as opposed to meta-ethics, 14 years later, this is one of her speeches: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/AnscombeChastity.php).
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?
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.
But yes, it can serve some pedagogical purposes, I'm sure.
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!
(Also the domain in my opinion.)
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.