Structure of recent philosophy (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Structure of recent philosophy (2017)

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105 pointslainon26 comments

I think for a field like philosophy, which is composed of a bunch of relative silos (some within broader silos like the divide between analytic and continental philosophy as well as others like pragmatism and many sets of non-Euro/Anglo regional philosophy traditions), snowball-sampling isn't really appropriate to gather the "structure of recent philosophy". However, it is a cool look at _parts_ of the current analytic philosophy landscape, and I'm with the other commenters that the aesthetics are on point.

>While the most prolific authors can not always be understood to have shaped the field in a deep fashion, they anchor the clusters in more recent debates, and give me an opportunity to mention more women in the graphic.

What a strange non-sequitur.

The clusters look strange to me as well - I don’t see any expected names aside from Plato and Aristotle for classics.

The choice of embedding a first-person narrative into the poster is also quite strange.

>The clusters look strange to me as well - I don’t see any expected names aside from Plato and Aristotle for classics.

What names did you expect? A lot of them look part for the course.

> embedding a first-person narrative

Not exactly a narrative (as in, story telling), but rather a methodology section (ok, with "I" instead of the conventional "we" or passive).

(Note that the embedded text does not exactly correspond to the attached text, btw.)

I found the projection and clustering informative. I thought continental philosophy was quite far out, and good riddance. That north-western corner seems to cover most of hermeneutics. (Mathematical topics are even further out, such as set theory and recursion.)

What expected names were missing? Popper, Quine, Rawls, Nozick, Parfit, all there.

I can’t speak to any of the philosophical content, but the design and layout of poster itself is absolutely beautiful, in my opinion.

It has the feel of a 16th-century world map with a modern twist.

Where is Popper? He should be in philosophy of science, but why is the cluster for "reactions to popper" not closer to philosophy of science?

Curious. I think his main works were published before 1950.

You could also use include him in epistemology and/or reactions to Marxism (or even Freudianism), if that gets to be a category.

His "Open Society" is arguably his epistemology applied to political philosophy (just as falsifiabilism is his epistemology applied to philosophy of science).

Can someone explain me what sort of philosophical research is undertaken in areas such as "math", "set theory", "quantum physics" or "spacetime", or "recursion theory". Wouldn't a person researching that be a mathematician/physicist?

Philosophers tend to be interested in the "foundational" questions about math and other sciences. In the case of math, in practice this means that good philosophy departments will often teach courses on first order logic and set theory, and philosophers such as Frege and Russell made major contributions in these areas. But they may also get more interested than mathematicians would in the questions about about the nature of logic - the nature of truth, propositions, the viability of alternative or non-classical logics, and so on. And then for example various modal logics can be helpful for thinking about possibility, epistemology, ethics, and so on.

Historically there is also a lot of overlap as well. Formal logic was invented by Aristotle. Leibniz and Descartes are equally large figures in mathematics and in philosophy.

I don't know the English translations, but Frege's "Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik" are a fascinating piece if one would like to know how modern philosophy of mathematics started and which questions one might ask about mathematics from a philosophical point of view. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundations_of_Arithmeti...)

Quantum theory has generated/revitalised the exploration of various philosophical concepts such as scientific realism, locality, emergence, and counterfactual definiteness. I'm not a philosopher so I won't pretend to understand all these, but I've worked in groups that have had philosophers present work on these things. A couple of names off the top of my head for people in this area would be Tim Maudlin[0] and Jeremy Butterfield[1]. There's a comprehensive-looking SEP article on the subject as well[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Maudlin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/

Going along with the other two helpful comments, take for example math that C. F. Gauss deemed to be the "Queen of Sciences", i.e the basis of it all. Math as we know it comes to us through counting with numbers. What are numbers? We find that mathematicans rely on set theory as a foundation of numbers. What are sets? They use set theory to study numbers either through Zermolo-Farenkel set theory or the Neumann-Bernays-Godel set theory. You see what we are getting into -- we cannot depend on just one set theory foundation to explain numbers conclusively. We see two strands of set theory that stay separate. Philosophy poses questions beyond what mathemticians get into: Will there be numbers if the whole universe is just empty space with no "things" in it including human minds? Are numbers so fundamental that they have to exist?

Well, when a philosopher considers physics, s/he is less a physicist than a meta-physicist -- literally considering that which is goes beyond physics and its premises. Take Lawrence Sklar[1] for example. (Obviously, this sort of thing can go off the rails rather readily, and frequently does, but it can in other cases, I think, be somewhat useful.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Sklar

Other people have given more detailed answers, but those tend to be less accessible. Sometimes, questions are far more interesting and accessible, so as an introduction, ponder the following: why is mathematics so effective at describing the real world?

Perhaps its effectiveness means that reality is itself mathematical? Or perhapd it means that math is actually physical? Or perhaps neither?

Hopefully you can see that exploring such a question is neither a mathematical or a scientific endeavour, but it is firmly in the philosophical realm where it should be.

But does this kind of pondering lead to any deeper insights, and are this kind of questions proposed by philosophers or by physicists and mathematicians themselves?

About this particular question i know Wigner's article, and i saw Feynman, Tegmark, Arkani-Hamed, and lecturers in my univercity talking. But they all were physicists, and all of them seem to be rather sceptical about the philosophy's contribution to such questions (especially Feynman).

Was this question noticed by philosophers earlier than it was noticed by physicists? Do you know about any books or talks about philosophy that would help physicists to better appreciate the contribution of philosophy?

> But does this kind of pondering lead to any deeper insights

Depends what you mean by "this kind". If you mean nonempirical, nonmathematical exploration, then absolutely. Relativity and Bell's theorem both started as thought experiments concerned with metaphysical properties, which then led to real experiments.

> are this kind of questions proposed by philosophers or by physicists and mathematicians themselves?

Hard to quantify, mainly because it's not clear how seriously scientists actually take philosophical works, so the sample is biased (and there's evidence they're largely disdainful of it).

Philosophers definitely read the works of scientists though, and they provide important analyses of their underlying assumptions. When scientists themselves also engage on this level, we see significant advances in foundations of theories, like many worlds, Bohmian mechanics, quantum information theory, and so on.

> and there's evidence they're largely disdainful of it

Maybe it's an immune reaction.

Scientists need to ask and answer to philosophical questions, to know where to search, but they also need to be ready to easily dismiss their philosophical theories to not spend too much time searching in a region with no solutions.

So this necessity of assigning low value to their own philosophical theories, may be causing them to assign low value to the whole field.

I think maybe because with math we can insulate the problem from all the excess of variables that we find in the real word.

It is easier to reason. But has some crazy stuff too. Something I think has a strong relation philosophy, in a way that is beyond the scope of a comment, but just to note, is very interesting[1] :

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

There is the proof , with the simplest math, I will not say x grade math because I don't like that habit; but simple.

The fact that _ 0.999... = 1 _ is maybe undervalued.

Infinity is paradoxal even on Math , thats was kind of supposed to be more exact.

So if it is misterious even for Math, imagine for the philosophy about the infinity of the universe. Just wished to note too:

When I say it is simple, only simple after someone told you how to do so.

To calculate the energy from the mass of an Atom is easy math, now that Einstein told you how to do so.

To calculate the diameter of earth, is "6th grade math" ( Eeeeek ! ) after Erastotenes told how to do it.

So, someone like say, Pythagoras or something?

a mathematician/physicist and philosopher aren't mutually exclusive

American pragmatism (Richard Rorty) got snuffed.

> Note the position of the point on the x/y axis is meaningless - only the proximity matters. Only the relation of the point to each other can be interpreted.

I don't understand the algorithm used to interpret the relations, but judging by Marxism between positioned between Math Logic, Philosophy of Biology, Theory of Science and Recursion Theory, I doubt its usefulness.

Same. I don't really get it. The explanation is far too elliptical.

UMAP[1] and t-SNE[2] are two very similar and popular ways to map a set of points in a high dimensional space to a low-dimensional (usually 2D or 3D) space by assuming all the points are close to some smooth curved surface (a manifold[3]). These are unsupervised non-linear dimensional reduction techniques; if you're familar with linear dimensional reduction techniques like PCA[4] you can think of UMAP and t-SNE as curved generalizations of that. t-SNE is widely known to be hard to interpret and unstable with respect to arbitrary hyper-parameters[5] and I would assume UMAP suffers similar problems. It's also extremely difficult to define "similarity" between documents and authors. Techniques like LSA[6] and word embeddings[7] exist but are still an open area of research. Based on similar concerns as yours, I doubt any of these issues were seriously addressed when this visualization was developed.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis

[5]: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis

[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding

Although Marxism is related to the theory of science (though not so much G.A. Cohen, who I'm not very sure why he's so "contemporary", he's not) it is positioned strangely, especially on the exact opposite side of the diagram where it seems it belongs, with continental philosophy. Also odd to see Habermas in theory of democracy so far away... and complete lack of mention of heavily cited figures in critical philosophy (Adorno, Marcuse...)

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