Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

A Zoomable Graph of [a] History of Philosophy


Recommended Posts

http://www.designandanalytics.com/philosophers-gephi/#top <—(This has to be seen to be appreciated.)

From what I've been able to gather so far, this graph (originally?) hooks into wikipedia and extracts the data into an interactive chart.

According to Brendan Griffen, the linkage connects easily from Socrates—>Plato—>Aristotle, but only shows the heredity, not the weight of the influence to earlier philosophers. As Mr. Griffen puts it on this link:

Whether we like to think about it or not — Socrates’ contribution to our body of understanding of the world is embodied in the way we speak and interact on a daily basis. Sure there is some dilution, but Socrates’ philosophies are for better or for worse, buried deep within you somewhere . This isn’t just true for Socrates either – it is true for everyone who has ever existed.

Perhaps not for everyone who has ever existed, but at least as far as the philosophical influences go, they are passed down by both philosophers and laymen alike.

From the feedback to his project, a surprising realization to Mr. Brendan was the number of folks interested in this sort of stuff.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would agree.

I doubt it can be automated, to pull the information directly from Wikipedia, without putting in place other protocols that would iron out that particular wrinkle. Far better that it would have just extracted the direct student/teacher relationships.

The feedback that others are interested, I can only assess as mixed as this point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This representation is a mess, there is no apparent reasoning to the organization. No sense of time is provided. No sense of location is present. For an effective representation, it needs to be smarter. I'd think student/teacher sort of links are better, but even then, that doesn't capture how ideas change.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ideas change via induction. AI, to the best of my knowledge, programming is deductive based. Programmers and programming languages are limited to sophisticated if/then algorithms based on the premises of the programmers. Even with O'ist advances seeking to grasp inductive principles to be used deductively, there does not appear a clear exit from this loop at this time.

Edited by dream_weaver
Blue added.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ideas change via induction. AI, to the best of my knowledge, programming is deductive based. Programmers and programming languages are limited to sophisticated if/then algorithms based on the premises of the programmers. Even with O'ist advances seeking to grasp inductive principles to be used deductively, there does not appear a clear exit from this loop at this time.

Another example of this is those programs that attempt to mimic human writing using the frequencies with which words appear together in a body of writing.

I once wrote a program that scanned a specific website and linked each word to the word that occurred after it the most frequently on that website. The writing it produced looked somewhat sensible in the sense that each word was followed by a word that could reasonably come after it, and sometimes this continued for several words, but the overall effect was often to produce gibberish.

This chart appears to be the rough equivalent of that program for the history of philosophy.

Edited by William O
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...