New Interactive Visualization of Philosophy
Designer Deniz Cem Önduygu has built a new interactive visualization of philosophy.
Readers may recall an earlier project of Önduygu’s, which was an interactive timeline of philosophical ideas, with sentences expressing those ideas as the nodes. One difference between that and the new project, is that in the new one, philosophers themselves are the nodes.
The new visualization is a “force directed graph”. Önduygu explains: “I have not directly positioned the philosophers where they are—the positions are dynamically calculated by an algorithm using the connections (edges) between philosophers (nodes).”
Here’s what the whole thing looks like, zoomed out:
He notes that “reasonable clusterings automatically arise with this force-directed layout, thanks to the connection data I’ve curated and the adjustments.” Philosophers with shared central interests (e.g., philosophy of mind) end up clustered together:
The graph is filterable by branches of philosophy, by more specific tags, by specific philosophers, by era, and by agreement or disagreement among the philosophers. There are also short descriptions for each philosopher that appear when you click on them, as well as relevant links to the sentence-based visualization.
The result is less a visualization, Önduygu says, and more “a dynamic system capable of generating thousands of visualizations with different contents, contexts, and functions.”
The various features of the system are explained by Önduygu here.
Önduygu, noting the existence of other visualizations of philosophy, says:
What I like about mine is that it is based on an intensely curated, richer database—not in terms of the number of philosophers, but in terms of the layers of information: separate and weighted connections for agreements and disagreements, and branches and tags, all coming from my 10-year research for the original sentence-based visualization.
You can have fun exploring it here.
Ladyman is more central, it seems, than Socrates
This is interesting, though its title “History of Philosophy Summarized and Visualized” seems quite problematic. There are many areas and traditions of philosophy that are not included. It is at best a “History of (aspects of) Western Philosophy Summarized and Visualized).
Thank you. I know that’s a problem for now but it’s a work-in-progress and I intend to include other traditions too. It was just a short project name I came up with when I started in 2014.
It might be useful, though, to be a bit more accurate in how you characterize and title the project.
As an aside (maybe), why are Paul and Patricia Churchland treated as one unit when nobody else is (de Beauvoir and Sartre are treated as separate entries, for example)?
Sure Patricia and Paul share overlapping views on the nature of mental states but their views are no closer than the views of other philosophers in the same “camp” and Patricia branched out quite a bit into the neuroscience of ethics (among other topics) in ways that Paul didn’t. Honestly, I can’t help but see this as a messed up thing to do (unless of course they were contacted and preferred to be lumped together).
Hi. I know it’s an exception but I wanted to add them and it was hard to distinguish their ideas in some of the secondary literature I used (on eliminative materialism, etc.), so I thought “Maybe I can start like this, it’s better to have them than not”. In their The New Yorker profile, Paul says “To what extent has Pat shaped my conceptual framework and hence my perceptions of the world, and to what extent have I done that for her? I think the answer is, an enormous extent. But I don’t know how to unwind it.” That was also encouraging. (I explained this in the update blog post when I added them.)
It’s a work-in-progress, and I’ll probably separate them in the future. I did the same with the Stoics. It’s evolving all the time. That’s the only way I can do it.
In a New Yorker Profile, they claim to be “two heads” but some kind of philosophical unity: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/profiles/2007/02/12/two-heads
How were these philosophers selected and categorized? Lewis is not categorized as a philosopher of language, and Stalnaker is not listed at all. Both are clearly among the top five most influential philosophers of language of the last hundred years.
It’s explained on the About page. It’s all based on my readings, thus an ever-growing work-in-progress. I have a huge list of philosophers-to-add (incl. Stalnaker), and I acknowledge at every opportunity that the ideas-connections-branches-etc. of the included philosophers aren’t exhaustive. Just give me some more years.
The branch categories come from the ideas (sentences) I was able to add so far in the main sentence-based system. So this just means that I haven’t yet added Lewis’s ideas on language. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, maybe I’ll do it this weekend.
I see, thank you for the explanation. Perhaps it would be helpful if Justin were to include a link to the ‘About’ page in the main text of this post; I only initially saw the ‘Update’ page which was linked above.
Cute graph but needs to retitle philosophies of a Western Europe.
lol … the man does something really cool and out of pure passion and love – it’s not his day job – and we get Mr. Gradgrind nonsense about nneeee why isn’t this sentence about this random philosopher here?
Come on, people. Give the man his due. Deniz – amazing work!*
*why isn’t there a node representing Professor Langweilig, who is of course the preeminent defender of a Stalnakeresque teleosemantics in the Schwabian dialect?
Some ways to make this a great tool for individuals or groups to keep reading notes would be:
It would be even more exciting to discover isomorphisms between two or more such graphs when each graph is constructed independently by an individual/group.
(NB. this is somewhat along the lines of https://obsidian.md/ but tailored for philosophical inquiry.)