visualization
The Structure of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Over Time, Visualized
Created in 1995, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) has grown to become not just an expansive and trusted collection of expertly-written entries on philosophical subjects, but a model for improving the internet. Now Adam Edwards, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has created an interactive visualization of th..
The “Information is Beautiful” Awards and Philosophy
The Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards aim to recognize “excellence and beauty in data visualizations, infographics, interactives & information art” in various categories. (more…)
Empirical Support for a Method of Teaching Critical Thinking
A few years ago, a meta-analysis of studies about whether colleges do a good job of teaching critical thinking revealed “no differences in the critical-thinking skills of students in different majors.” (more…)
A Reputational Survey of Philosophy Programs Plotted Against Program Placement Data
To what extent does getting one’s PhD in philosophy from a program that does well in a reputational survey increase one’s chances of finding a permanent academic position? (more…)
Visualizing the Structure of Philosophy from the 1950s to Today
Maximilian Noichl has designed a beautiful visualization of philosophy from the 1950s to today.
Digital Maps of Spinoza’s Ethics
John Bagby, a PhD student in philosophy at Boston College, has created multiple visualizations of the argumentative structure of Spinoza’s Ethics and put them online for the philosophical community. (more…)
The Parochialism of Mainstream History of Philosophy
Our histories of philosophy are astonishingly parochial. Across two and half millennia and a whole planet, there are basically only 9 historical figures you can write about without running the risk of marginalizing yourself as a young philosopher. (more…)
A Semantic-Network Approach to the History of Philosophy (guest post by Mark Alfano) (UPDATED)
What can we learn from constructing semantic networks of familiar works in the history of philosophy? A fair amount, according to Mark Alfano, a philosopher at Delft University of Technology and Australian Catholic University, as he explains in the following guest post*—such as which concepts tend to get more attention from readers than might seem appropriate give..
The Art of Philosophy (guest post by Susanna Berger)
The following us a guest post* by Susanna Berger, assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California.
It is an excerpt adapted from her fascinating book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2017).
A Whole Course About Combating Bullshit
The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. So-called higher education often rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture has elevated bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit, then take advantage of our lowered g..
2016 Philosophy News in Review, Part 3
Here’s part three of our look back at the news, issues, and events that occupied the attention of the philosophy profession in 2016 (part one, part two). (more…)
The Tractatus As Subway Map
Last year I posted about visualizations of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. There’s now a new one. David Stern (University of Iowa) writes:
I asked the students in my Wittgenstein seminar if they could come up with a better way of visualizing the structure of the Tractatus, and one of them proposed looking it as a subway map, rather than a tree, which turned out to be ..
Cognitive Bias Codex (updated)
Philosophers have long been interested in how we make sense of the world and how thinking goes wrong. Since some of the most interesting work on these topics in recent decades has been done in social psychology on cognitive biases (even acknowledging this), philosophers should at least be acquainted with some of that research—as some already are. (more…)
The Where, What, and When of Philosophy Jobs
Mark Alfano (Delft), one of today’s more data-driven moral philosophers, has taken information from PhilJobs regarding the location and types of advertised jobs and placed it on a map at Tableau Public. Here’s where the jobs are: (more…)
Appearance and Reality, Take 2 (guest post by Brian Bruya)
Yesterday’s post, “A Detailed Critique of the Philosophical Gourmet Report,” contained excerpts from “Appearance and Reality in The Philosophical Gourmet Report: Why the Discrepancy Matters to the Profession of Philosophy,” an article in Metaphilosophy by Brian Bruya (Eastern Michigan) in which various criticism of the PGR were summarized. As noted in an update to t..
The Tricky Truth about Tractatus Trees (updated)
Earlier in the week I put up a website that allows one to click through the tree-like structure of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the Heap of Links (in the right sidebar). I believe the visualization is by Pierre Bellon, a web engineer who has “old-school philosophy” as a hobby.
In response, David Stern (Iowa), sent in this helpful message:
T..
Plot Philosophy’s Subfields
Yesterday’s post about interdisciplinary work in philosophy got me curious about how philosophers understand their work in relation to other disciplines.
One question we can ask of academics is: “what do they take themselves to be studying?” Of course, there are various ways of answering this question. One way of doing so is trying to determine where on a spectru..
Kant + Data = Beautiful Utility? (updated)
Minerva is “a web tool for supporting philosophical historiography research.” It’s the master’s thesis project of Valerio Pellegrini, and was designed by him in conjunction with “a team of philosophical historians from the University of Milan” and the Density Design Research Lab. It was initially designed for examining the work of Immanuel Kant, but the idea is to e..
Philosophy as a Way of Life
Stoicism, of course, may not appeal to or work for everyone. It is a rather demanding philosophy of life, where your moral character is pretty much stipulated to be the only truly worthy thing to cultivate in life (though health, education, and even wealth are considered to be “preferred indifferents”). Then again, it does have a lot of points of contact with other ..
Mapping Philosophical Arguments
The students sit in pairs at a computer terminal, and after reading Cullen’s synopsis of a particular argument, they try to map it. The room fills up with whispered suggestions, lines tested and rejected, double negatives made positive. Most of the boxes into which they enter text are red or green. The green ones contain evidence supporting the above premise; the re..
Minorities in Philosophy: Data Visualized
Data from 860 philosophers who identified themselves on the UPDirectory (previously) as belonging to minority demographic groups has been analyzed and depicted in various graphs and diagrams by Andrew Higgins, a recent graduate of University of Illinois, specializing in metaphysics and digital humanities, and currently working at Heartland Community College.
The..
Colorful Fallacies Chart
The website Information Is Beautiful has put together a colorful chart of over 50 fallacies, sorted into six different categories. Created by David McCandless, it’s also available to purchase as a poster in multiple languages. Online versions are available in Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish.
UPDATE: Some of the entri..
2014 Philosophical Gourmet Report Released
The 2014 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) has been released. The PGR is a reputational survey of a selection of PhD-granting philosophy departments based on questionnaires completed by around 230 philosophers. The release of the PGR was slightly delayed this time around, owing to considerable controversy about its editor-in-chief, Brian Leiter, its ..
Graphing the History of Philosophical Influences
To cut a long story very short I’ve extracted the information in the “influenced by” section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network which I’ve then visualised.
The result is this incredible graph:
Its creator, Simon Raper, explains how he did it, and how you can do it, in an accompanying blog post.
Brendan Griffen ran with this ..