A Data Visualization of Modern Philosophy, 1950–2018

in Philosophy | October 29th, 2018

Those of us who think of our­selves as phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­asts remain free to read and think about what­ev­er we like, no mat­ter how obscure, mar­gin­al, or out-of-fash­ion the ideas. But the acad­e­my presents a dif­fer­ent pic­ture, one fraught with polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ing, fund­ing issues, and fret­ting about tenure. Does pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion do phi­los­o­phy a dis­ser­vice by cod­i­fy­ing the kinds of prob­lems we should be think­ing and writ­ing about? Or do we need pro­fes­sion­al phi­los­o­phy for exact­ly this rea­son? It depends on who you ask.

One argu­ment against the acad­e­my con­sists in point­ing out that many, if not most, of history’s influ­en­tial philoso­phers have been ama­teurs in one sense or anoth­er: grind­ing away at day jobs, for exam­ple, like Baruch Spin­oza, or liv­ing on fam­i­ly mon­ey, like Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, two rad­i­cal philo­soph­i­cal out­siders whose Ethics and Trac­ta­tus, respec­tive­ly, have been turned into data visu­al­iza­tions by Max­i­m­il­ian Noichl. It’s inter­est­ing to spec­u­late about how these thinkers, both so visu­al­ly-inclined, would respond to the treat­ment.

Noichl’s lat­est project, now in its third and, so far, final iter­a­tion, involves trac­ing “The Struc­ture of Recent Phi­los­o­phy from the 1950s to this day.” Clear­ly implied, but unstat­ed in his descrip­tion is that these maps chart only the spe­cial­ized inter­ests of aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy, but the omis­sion high­lights the fact that con­tem­po­rary philo­soph­i­cal work out­side the acad­e­my receives no recog­ni­tion in the lit­er­a­ture and, there­fore, hard­ly qual­i­fies as phi­los­o­phy at all under cur­rent stric­tures.

To con­struct the map at the top (click here to see the full info­graph­ic, then click it again for a high res­o­lu­tion ver­sion), Noichl aggre­gat­ed over 50,000 arti­cles “from var­i­ous phi­los­o­phy jour­nals.” The jour­nals all come from Clar­i­vate Ana­lyt­ics Web of Sci­ence col­lec­tion, which skews the selec­tion. Noichl began with a “snow-ball-sam­pling (a few thou­sand papers),” then extend­ed his sam­ple by “repeat­ed­ly look­ing at the most cit­ed pub­li­ca­tions.” The result­ing papers were then “spa­tial­ly dis­trib­uted accord­ing to their cita­tion-pat­terns.”

Every point on the graph­ic rep­re­sents one arti­cle. Noichl used two dif­fer­ent algo­rithms to sort and group the data, and his explana­to­ry text on the orig­i­nal graph­ic at his site explains the tech­ni­cal details. The clus­ters are “a bit het­ero­genic in their nature,” he writes.

While some are the­mat­ic, oth­ers are deter­mined strong­ly by spe­cif­ic per­sons or eras, which seems in itself to be an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion about the struc­ture of the lit­er­a­ture….. [T]here is… a remark­able cleft between the­o­ry of sci­ence and epis­te­mol­o­gy. And the ways var­i­ous his­tor­i­cal clus­ters group them­selves around moral phi­los­o­phy sug­gests an inter­nal rela­tion. We can also observe that con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy seems to split into two halves…

The exer­cise presents us with a sum­ma­ry image of some of the field’s most per­sis­tent con­cerns for the past 60 years or so. I can imag­ine his­to­ri­ans of philosophy—and maybe crit­ics of aca­d­e­m­ic philosophy—making excel­lent use of this col­or­ful­ly orga­nized data. Noichl vague­ly men­tions a pos­si­ble use of the map as a “real­i­ty check for some debates.” The ques­tion of what it con­tributes to philo­soph­i­cal think­ing remains open. And we might ask whether big data does phi­los­o­phy a dis­ser­vice by algo­rith­mi­cal­ly repro­duc­ing cer­tain exist­ing con­di­tions, rather than crit­i­cal­ly inter­ro­gat­ing them as philoso­phers have always done.

Yet it’s clear that data visu­al­iza­tions are now stan­dard tools for teach­ing and learn­ing any num­ber of sub­jects, and in many cas­es, they offer help­ful short­hand, as does anoth­er of Noichl’s inter­ac­tive graph­ics, “Rela­tion­ships Between Philoso­phers, 600 B.C.-160 B.C.,” a “delight­ful depic­tion,” writes Justin Wein­berg at Dai­ly Nous, “of the inter­re­la­tion of the ideas of ancient philoso­phers over time.” See Noichl’s site for the three ver­sions of “The Struc­ture of Recent Phi­los­o­phy” and oth­er phi­los­o­phy data visu­al­iza­tions.

And at the links below, see how oth­ers have used data visu­al­iza­tion tools to orga­nize the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy in dif­fer­ent ways.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Philosopher’s Web,” an Inter­ac­tive Data Visu­al­iza­tion Shows the Web of Influ­ences Con­nect­ing Ancient & Mod­ern Philoso­phers

The Entire Dis­ci­pline of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized with Map­ping Soft­ware: See All of the Com­plex Net­works

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized in an Inter­ac­tive Time­line

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

Niet­zsche Lays Out His Phi­los­o­phy of Edu­ca­tion and a Still-Time­ly Cri­tique of the Mod­ern Uni­ver­si­ty (1872)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Philosophers Name the Best Philosophy Books: From Stoicism and Existentialism, to Metaphysics & Ethics for Artificial Intelligence

in Philosophy | October 17th, 2018

As an Eng­lish major under­grad in the 90s, I had a keen side inter­est in read­ing phi­los­o­phy of all kinds. But I had lit­tle sense of what I should be read­ing. I browsed the library shelves, pick­ing out what caught my atten­tion. Not a bad way to make unusu­al dis­cov­er­ies, but if you want to get a focused, not to men­tion cur­rent, view of a par­tic­u­lar field, you need to have a knowl­edge­able guide.

Back in those days, the inter­net was, as they say, in its infan­cy. How much bet­ter I would have fared if some­thing like Five Books had exist­ed! The site’s gen­er­al idea, as it trum­pets on its home­page, is to rec­om­mend “the best books on every­thing.” Argue amongst your­selves about whether any one resource can deliv­er on that promise, but let’s keep our focus on the excel­lent space of their Phi­los­o­phy sec­tion, curat­ed by free­lance philoso­pher-at-large Nigel War­bur­ton.

You may know Dr. War­bur­ton from his many for­ays in pub­lic phi­los­o­phy. Whether it’s the Phi­los­o­phy Bites pod­cast, or its spin-offs Free Speech Bites and Ethics Bites, or his work on the BBC’s ani­mat­ed his­to­ry of ideas series, or any one of his books, he has a rare knack for bring­ing the obscure and often dif­fi­cult con­cepts of aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy to light with both con­ver­sa­tion­al good humor and intel­lec­tu­al rig­or. Most of that work takes place in dia­logue, the orig­i­nal form of clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy.

The Five Books forum is no excep­tion. In the lat­est post, War­bur­ton inter­views Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield’s Kei­th Frank­ish on the five best books on Phi­los­o­phy of Mind. What is “Phi­los­o­phy of Mind”? Read Frankish’s answer to that ques­tion here. What are his five picks? See below:

  1. A Mate­ri­al­ist The­o­ry of the Mind, by D.M. Arm­strong
  2. Con­scious­ness Explained, by Daniel C. Den­nett
  3. Vari­eties of Mean­ing: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lec­tures, by Ruth Gar­rett Milikan
  4. The Archi­tec­ture of the Mind, by Peter Car­ruthers
  5. Super­siz­ing the Mind: Embod­i­ment, Action, and Cog­ni­tive Exten­sion, by Andy Clark

What about the best books on Ethics for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence? It’s a far more press­ing ques­tion than it was when Arthur C. Clarke pub­lished 2001: A Space Odyssey, which hap­pens to be one of the books on Oxford aca­d­e­m­ic Paula Boddington’s list. In his inter­view with Bod­ding­ton, War­bur­ton asks for, and receives, a clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the phrase “ethics for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” In her choice of books, Bod­ding­ton rec­om­mends those below. You may not find some of them shelved in phi­los­o­phy sec­tions, but when it comes to our sci-fi present, it seems, we may need to expand our cat­e­gories of thought.

  1. Hearti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Embrac­ing Our Human­i­ty to Max­i­mize Machines, by John Havens
  2. The Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­i­ty, by Mur­ray Shana­han
  3. Weapons of Math Destruc­tion: How Big Data Increas­es Inequal­i­ty and Threat­ens Democ­ra­cy, by Cathy O’Neil
  4. Moral Machines: Teach­ing Robots Right from Wrong, by Wen­dell Wal­lach and Col­in Allen
  5. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

There are dozens more enlight­en­ing inter­views and lists of five best books—on Niet­zsche, Marx, and Hegel, on Exis­ten­tial­ism, Sto­icism, Con­scious­ness, Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy…. Too many to direct­ly quote here. There are lists from War­bur­ton him­self, on the best phi­los­o­phy books from 2017, and best intro­duc­tions to phi­los­o­phy. The whole expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle like vis­it­ing, vir­tu­al­ly, a cou­ple dozen or so high­ly-regard­ed philoso­phers in every field, lis­ten­ing in on an infor­ma­tive chat, and get­ting a book­list from every one. You’ve still got to find and buy the books your­self (and read and talk about them), but this kind of guid­ance from liv­ing philoso­phers cur­rent­ly work­ing in the field has nev­er before been so wide­ly and freely avail­able out­side of acad­e­mia.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

170+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

28 Impor­tant Philoso­phers List the Books That Influ­enced Them Most Dur­ing Their Col­lege Days

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Noam Chomsky Talks About How Kids Acquire Language and Ideas in an Animated Video by Michel Gondry

in Film, Philosophy | October 12th, 2018

These days Noam Chom­sky is prob­a­bly most famous for his con­sis­tent, out­spo­ken crit­i­cism of U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy. Yet before the War on Ter­ror and the War on Drugs, Chom­sky became inter­na­tion­al­ly famous for propos­ing a nov­el solu­tion to an age-old ques­tion: what does a baby know?

Pla­to argued that infants retain mem­o­ries of past lives and thus come into this world with a grasp of lan­guage. John Locke coun­tered that a baby’s mind is a blank slate onto which the world etch­es its impres­sion. After years of research, Chom­sky pro­posed that new­borns have a hard-wired abil­i­ty to under­stand gram­mar. Lan­guage acqui­si­tion is as ele­men­tal to being human as, say, dam build­ing is to a beaver. It’s just what we’re pro­grammed to do. Chomsky’s the­o­ries rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way we under­stand lin­guis­tics and the mind.

A lit­tle while ago, film direc­tor and music video auteur Michel Gondry inter­viewed Chom­sky and then turned the whole thing into an extend­ed ani­mat­ed doc­u­men­tary called Is the Man Who Is Tall Hap­py?.

Above is a clip from the film. In his thick French accent, Gondry asks if there is a cor­re­la­tion between lan­guage acqui­si­tion and ear­ly mem­o­ries. For any­one who’s watched Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind, you know that mem­o­ry is one of the director’s major obses­sions. Over Gondry’s rough-hewn draw­ings, Chom­sky expounds: “Chil­dren know quite a lot of a lan­guage, much more than you would expect, before they can exhib­it that knowl­edge.” He goes on to talk about new tech­niques for teach­ing deaf-blind chil­dren and how a day-old infant inter­prets the world.

As the father of a tod­dler who is at the cusp of learn­ing to form thoughts in words, I found the clip to be fas­ci­nat­ing. Now, if only Chom­sky can explain why my son has tak­en to shout­ing the word “bacon” over and over and over again.

To gain a deep­er under­stand­ing of Chom­sky’s thoughts on lin­guis­tics, see our pre­vi­ous post:  The Ideas of Noam Chom­sky: An Intro­duc­tion to His The­o­ries on Lan­guage & Knowl­edge (1977)

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March 2015.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Direc­tor Michel Gondry Makes a Charm­ing Film on His iPhone, Prov­ing That We Could Be Mak­ing Movies, Not Tak­ing Self­ies

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radio­head & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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A New Academic Hoax–Complete with Fake Articles Published in Academic Journals–Ventures to Show the “Corruption” of Cultural Studies

in Current Affairs, Education, Philosophy, Politics | October 11th, 2018

We should be sus­pi­cious when researchers assume their con­clu­sion; when the results of an aca­d­e­m­ic study mere­ly con­firm the author’s pre-exist­ing bias­es. Humans are wired to seek con­fir­ma­tion, a cog­ni­tive deficit so deeply engrained that it can be exploit­ed among laypeo­ple and spe­cial­ists alike. Art his­to­ri­ans have been fooled by forg­eries, his­to­ri­ans by fake man­u­scripts, and pale­on­tol­o­gists by pho­ny fos­sils. Physi­cist Steven Wein­berg ref­er­enced such high-lev­el hoax­es in a 1996 essay in The New York Review of Books, and he placed that year’s aca­d­e­m­ic scandal—known as the “Sokal Hoax”—among them.

The gist of the Sokal affair runs as fol­lows: NYU math­e­mat­i­cal physi­cist Alan Sokal sus­pect­ed that post-struc­tural­ist-influ­enced cul­tur­al stud­ies was jar­gon-laden, obfus­cat­ing BS, and he set out to prove it by author­ing his own “post­mod­ernist” text, an arti­cle full of mis­used ter­mi­nol­o­gy from quan­tum physics. He sent it off to the jour­nal Social Text, who pub­lished it in their Spring/Summer issue. Sokal then revealed in anoth­er jour­nal, Lin­gua Fran­ca, that the arti­cle had been a fraud, “lib­er­al­ly salt­ed with non­sense,” and had only been accept­ed because “(a) it sound­ed good and (b) it flat­tered the editor’s ide­o­log­i­cal pre­con­cep­tions.”

Sokal’s hoax, it was round­ly claimed, demon­strat­ed that cer­tain fash­ion­able quar­ters of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties had dete­ri­o­rat­ed into bab­ble, sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing more than rigid ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments and a gen­er­al dis­re­gard for the actu­al mean­ings of words and con­cepts. Wein­berg wasn’t so sure. At most, per­haps, it showed the edi­to­r­i­al fail­ings of Social Text. And while human­ists may abuse sci­en­tif­ic ideas, Wein­berg points out that sci­en­tists of the stature of Wern­er Heisen­berg have also been prone to slip­shod, qua­si-mys­ti­cal think­ing.

But the Sokal hoax did expose to the wider pub­lic a ten­den­cy among a coterie of aca­d­e­mics to indulge in mys­ti­fy­ing lan­guage, includ­ing the mis­use of jar­gon from oth­er fields of study, usu­al­ly in imi­ta­tion of French the­o­rists like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kris­te­va, or Jacques Derrida—whom, it must be said, all wrote in a very dif­fer­ent intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture (one that expects, Michel Fou­cault once admit­ted, at least “ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble”). For a good many peo­ple in the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, this wasn’t much of a rev­e­la­tion. (Sokal has since pub­lished a more thor­ough­ly crit­i­cal book with the apt title Beyond the Hoax.)

Part of the prob­lem with his hoax as a seri­ous cri­tique is that it began with its con­clu­sion. Cul­tur­al stud­ies are rife with crap argu­ments, ide­ol­o­gy, and incom­pre­hen­si­ble non­sense, Sokal believed. And so, when his paper was accept­ed, he sim­ply rest­ed his case, mak­ing no effort to engage char­i­ta­bly with good schol­ar­ship while he ridiculed the bad. Which brings us to the cur­rent state of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, and to a con­tem­po­rary, Sokal-like attack on them by a trio of writ­ers who rest their case on a slight­ly broad­er base of evidence—20 fraud­u­lent arti­cles sent out to var­i­ous niche cul­tur­al stud­ies jour­nals over a year: four pub­lished (since retract­ed), three accept­ed but not pub­lished, sev­en under review, and six reject­ed.

The authors—academic philoso­pher Peter Boghoss­ian and writ­ers Helen Pluck­rose and James A. Lindsay—revealed the hoax this week in an arti­cle pub­lished at the Pluck­rose-edit­ed Areo mag­a­zine. One needn’t read past the title to under­stand the authors’ take on cul­tur­al stud­ies in gen­er­al: “Aca­d­e­m­ic Griev­ance Stud­ies and the Cor­rup­tion of Schol­ar­ship.” While all three hoax­ers iden­ti­fy as left-lean­ing lib­er­als, the broad-brush char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of whole fields as “griev­ance stud­ies” reveals a prej­u­di­cial degree of con­tempt that seems unwar­rant­ed. In the arti­cle, they reveal their moti­va­tions and meth­ods, out­line the suc­cess­es of the project, and post the com­ments of the arti­cles’ ref­er­ees, along with a video of them­selves hav­ing a good laugh at the whole thing.

This last bit is unnec­es­sary and obnox­ious, but does the new hoax—“Sokal Squared” as it’s been called—genuinely under­mine the cred­i­bil­i­ty of cul­tur­al stud­ies as a whole? Is it “’hilar­i­ous and delight­ful,’” asks Alexan­der C. Kaf­ka at The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, or “an ugly exam­ple of dis­hon­esty and bad faith?” Har­vard polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Yascha Mounk tact­ful­ly finds in it a seri­ous case for con­cern: “Some aca­d­e­m­ic emperors—the ones who sup­pos­ed­ly have the most to say about these cru­cial top­ics [dis­crim­i­na­tion, racism, sexism]—have no clothes.”

This is a point worth pur­su­ing, and cer­tain recent scan­dals should give every­one pause to con­sid­er how bul­ly­ing and group­think man­i­fest on the aca­d­e­m­ic left at the high­est lev­el of pres­tige. But the great major­i­ty of aca­d­e­mics are not “emper­ors” and have very lit­tle social or eco­nom­ic pow­er. And Mounk is care­ful not to over­state the case. He points out how the hoax has unfor­tu­nate­ly giv­en wel­come “ammu­ni­tion” to right-wing con­ser­v­a­tive axe-grinders:

Many con­ser­v­a­tives who are deeply hos­tile to the sci­ence of cli­mate change, and who dis­miss out of hand the stud­ies that attest to deep injus­tices in our soci­ety, are using Sokal Squared to smear all aca­d­e­mics as biased cul­ture war­riors. The Fed­er­al­ist, a right-wing news and com­men­tary site, went so far as to spread the appar­ent ide­o­log­i­cal bias of a few jour­nals in one par­tic­u­lar cor­ner of acad­e­mia to most pro­fes­sors, the main­stream media, and Democ­rats on the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

The Fed­er­al­ist spe­cial­izes in irre­spon­si­ble con­spir­a­cy-mon­ger­ing, the kind of thing that sells ads and wins elec­tions but doesn’t belong in aca­d­e­m­ic debate. The ques­tion Mounk doesn’t ask is whether the hoax­ers’ own atti­tudes encour­age and share in such hos­til­i­ty, an issue raised by sev­er­al of their crit­ics. As physi­cist Sean Car­roll wrote on Twit­ter, “What strikes me about stunts like this is their fun­da­men­tal mean­ness. No attempt to intel­lec­tu­al­ly engage with ideas you dis­agree with; just trolling for the lulz.” McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal the­o­rist Jacob T. Levy expressed sim­i­lar reser­va­tions in an inter­view, notes The New York Times, say­ing

even some col­leagues who are not fans of iden­ti­ty-ori­ent­ed schol­ar­ship are look­ing at the hoax and say­ing ‘this is poten­tial­ly uneth­i­cal and doesn’t show what they think it is show­ing.’ Besides, he added, “We all rec­og­nized that this kind of thing could also be done in our dis­ci­plines if peo­ple were will­ing to ded­i­cate a year to do it.”

There­in lies anoth­er prob­lem with Sokal Squared. Hoax­es have been per­pet­u­at­ed by smart, ded­i­cat­ed forg­ers, con-artists, and pranksters in near­ly every field, show­ing up all sorts of experts as poten­tial dupes. The sin­gling out of cul­tur­al stud­ies for par­tic­u­lar ridicule—the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of stud­ies of race, gen­der, dis­abil­i­ty, etc. as “griev­ance studies”—reveals an aggriev­ed agen­da all its own, one that ignores the seri­ous prob­lems cor­rupt­ing oth­er dis­ci­plines (e.g. indus­try fund­ing in aca­d­e­m­ic sci­ences, or the gross overuse of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents as the main sub­jects of studies—groups that hard­ly rep­re­sent the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.)

Some, but not all, of the suc­cess­ful­ly-pub­lished hoax papers sound ludi­crous and ter­ri­ble. Some, in fact, do not, as Justin Wein­berg shows at Dai­ly Nous, and should not shame the edi­tors who pub­lished them. Some of the jour­nals have much high­er edi­to­r­i­al stan­dards than oth­ers. (An ear­ly hoax attempt by Boghoss­ian tar­get­ed an ill-reput­ed, pay-to-play pub­li­ca­tion.) The whole affair may speak to broad­er fail­ures in aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing that go beyond a tiny cor­ner of the human­i­ties. In part, those fail­ures may stem from a gen­er­al trend toward over­worked, under­paid, increas­ing­ly pre­car­i­ous schol­ars whose dis­ci­plines, and fund­ing, have been under relent­less polit­i­cal attack since at least the 1990s and who must keep grind­ing out pub­li­ca­tions, some­times of dubi­ous mer­it, as part of the over­all dri­ve toward sheer pro­duc­tiv­i­ty as the sole mea­sure of suc­cess.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Explains What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy & French Intel­lec­tu­als, and How They End Up Sup­port­ing Oppres­sive Pow­er Struc­tures

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The History of Philosophy Visualized in an Interactive Timeline

in Design, Philosophy | October 10th, 2018

The con­nec­tions we make between var­i­ous philoso­phers and philo­soph­i­cal schools are often con­nec­tions that have already been made for us by teach­ers and schol­ars on our paths through high­er edu­ca­tion. Many of us who have tak­en a phi­los­o­phy class or two leave it at that, con­tent we’ve got the gist of things and that spe­cial­ists can parse the details per­fect­ly well with­out us. But there are those curi­ous peo­ple who con­tin­ue to read abstruse and dif­fi­cult phi­los­o­phy after their intro class­es are over, for the sheer, per­verse joy of it, or from a burn­ing desire to under­stand truth, beau­ty, jus­tice, or what­ev­er.

And then there are those who embark on a thor­ough self-guid­ed tour of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal his­to­ry, attempt­ing, with­out the aid of uni­ver­si­ty depart­ments and fad­dish inter­pre­tive schemes, to weave the dis­parate strains of thought togeth­er. One such auto­di­dact and aca­d­e­m­ic out­sider, design­er Deniz Cem Önduygu of Istan­bul, has com­bined an ency­clo­pe­dic mind with a tal­ent for rig­or­ous out­line orga­ni­za­tion to pro­duce an inter­ac­tive time­line of the his­to­ry of philo­soph­i­cal ideas. It is “a pure­ly per­son­al project,” he writes, “that I’m doing in my own time, with my lim­it­ed knowl­edge, for myself.”

Önduygu shares the project not to show off his learn­ing but, more humbly, to “get feed­back and to make it acces­si­ble to those who are inter­est­ed.” It may be pre­cious few peo­ple who have both the time and incli­na­tion to teach them­selves the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, but if you are one of them, this incred­i­bly dense info­graph­ic is as good a place to start as any, and while it may appear intim­i­dat­ing at first glance, its menu in the upper right cor­ner allows users to zero in on spe­cif­ic thinkers and schools, and to con­fine them­selves to small­er, more man­age­able areas of the whole.

As for the time­line itself, “view­ers can zoom in and out,” notes Dai­ly Nous, “and see philoso­phers list­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, with ideas they’re asso­ci­at­ed with list­ed beneath them. These ideas, in turn, are con­nect­ed by green lines to sim­i­lar or sup­port­ing ideas else­where on the time­line, and con­nect­ed by red lines to oppos­ing or refut­ing ideas else­where on the time­line. If you hov­er your mouse cur­sor over a sin­gle idea, all but it and its con­nect­ed ideas fade. You can then click on the idea to bring those con­nect­ed ideas clos­er for ease of view­ing.”

The design­er admits this is a “nev­er-end­ing work in progress” and main­ly a source for remind­ing him­self of the main argu­ments of the philoso­phers he’s sur­veyed. The major sources for his time­line are “Bryan Magee’s The Sto­ry of Phi­los­o­phy and Thomas Baldwin’s Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy, along with oth­er works for spe­cif­ic philoso­phers and ideas.” But many of the con­nec­tions Önduygu draws in this exten­sive web of green and red are his own.

He explains his ratio­nale here, not­ing, “The lines here do not always depict a direct trans­fer between two peo­ple; I think of them as trac­ing the devel­op­ment of an idea through­out time with­in our col­lec­tive con­cep­tion.” Spend some more time with this impres­sive project at the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Sum­ma­rized & Visu­al­ized (the site works best in Chrome), and feel free to get in touch with its cre­ator with con­struc­tive crit­i­cism. He wel­comes feed­back and is open to oppos­ing ideas, as every life­long learn­er should be.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

150+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Talmud Is Finally Now Available Online

in Philosophy, Religion | September 26th, 2018

In South Korea, where I live, the Tal­mud is a best­seller. Just a few years ago the New York­er’s Ross Armud report­ed on the improb­a­ble pub­lish­ing suc­cess, in this small east Asian coun­try, of Judais­m’s “dense com­pi­la­tion of oral laws anno­tat­ed with rab­bini­cal dis­cus­sions, con­sist­ing of about two and a half mil­lion words.” Some of those words deal­ing with such press­ing ques­tions as, “If you find a cake with a pot­tery shard in it, can you keep it? Do you have to report the dis­cov­ery of a pile of fruit? What do you do if you find an item built into the wall of your house?”

The much short­er “Kore­an Tal­mud,” Armud writes, with its para­bles, apho­risms, and top­ics that run the gamut “from busi­ness ethics to sex advice,” makes a read­er feel like “the last play­er in a game of tele­phone.” But Joshua Foer, the sci­ence writer who co-found­ed Atlas Obscu­ra, might say that the Jew­ish Tal­mud has long left even Jew­ish read­ers in a sim­i­lar state of befud­dle­ment — if, indeed, they could find the text at all. Look­ing to get a han­dle on the Tal­mud him­self back in 2010, he found that, shock­ing­ly, the inter­net had almost noth­ing to offer him. And so he began work­ing, along­side an ex-Google engi­neer col­lab­o­ra­tor named Brett Lock­speis­er, to cor­rect that absence.

“Last year, after years of work and nego­ti­a­tions, Foer and Lock­speis­er final­ly suc­ceed­ed in their quest,” writes the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Noah Smith. “Through a non­prof­it they cre­at­ed called Sefaria, the men are bring­ing the Tal­mud online in mod­ern Eng­lish, and free of charge.” Sefari­a’s library, avail­able on the web as well as in app form, now includes a vari­ety of texts from Gen­e­sis and the Kab­bal­ah to phi­los­o­phy and mod­ern works — and of course the Tal­mud, the cen­ter­piece of the col­lec­tion, the rel­e­vant resources for which had not been in the pub­lic domain and thus required no small amount of nego­ti­a­tion to make free.

Sefari­a’s cre­ators have com­bined all this with a fea­ture called “source sheets,” which allow “any user on the site to com­pile and share a selec­tion of rel­e­vant texts, from Sefaria or out­side, sur­round­ing a giv­en issue or ques­tion.” (Smith points to the most pop­u­lar source sheet thus far, “Is One Per­mit­ted to Punch a White Suprema­cist in the Face?”) At about 160 mil­lion words with 1.7 mil­lion inter­tex­tu­al links and count­ing, the site has made a greater vol­ume of Jew­ish texts far more acces­si­ble than ever before. Read­ers, even non-Ortho­dox ones, have been dis­cov­er­ing them in Eng­lish, but if Sefaria wants to increase their traf­fic fur­ther still, they might con­sid­er upload­ing some Kore­an trans­la­tions as well.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Israel: A Free Online Course from NYU

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course

Intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture: A Free Yale Course

Har­vard Presents Two Free Online Cours­es on the Old Tes­ta­ment

Har­vard Launch­es a Free Online Course to Pro­mote Reli­gious Tol­er­ance & Under­stand­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Book about Women in Philosophy by Women in Philosophy: Help Crowdfund It

in Philosophy | September 24th, 2018

This past sum­mer, we high­light­ed the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Con­cise Con­cepts by Women Philoso­phers, a resource that aims to intro­duce “women philoso­phers who most­ly have been omit­ted from the philo­soph­i­cal canon despite their his­tor­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal influ­ence.” Now, in a sim­i­lar vein, comes a book being edit­ed by Rebec­ca Bux­ton (Oxford) and Lisa Whit­ing (Durham). The Philoso­pher Queens is essen­tial­ly “a book about women in phi­los­o­phy by women in phi­los­o­phy.” On this crowd­fund­ing page, Bux­ton and Whit­ing elab­o­rate:

For all the young women and girls sit­ting in phi­los­o­phy class won­der­ing where the women are, this is the book for you. This col­lec­tion of 21 chap­ters, each on a promi­nent woman in phi­los­o­phy, looks at the impact that women have had on the field through­out his­to­ry. From Hypa­tia to Angela Davis, The Philoso­pher Queens will be a guide to these badass women and how their amaz­ing ideas have changed the world.

This book is writ­ten both for new­com­ers to phi­los­o­phy, as well as all those pro­fes­sors who know that they could still learn a thing or two. This book is also for those many peo­ple who have told us that there are no great women philoso­phers. Please pledge, read this book and then feel free to get back to us.

The two of us are young women who have stud­ied and loved phi­los­o­phy for many years. This book is borne out of frus­tra­tion with the total lack of recog­ni­tion for women in phi­los­o­phy, not only its his­to­ry but its cur­rent teach­ing.

Each chap­ter is writ­ten by a woman work­ing in phi­los­o­phy today. Our chap­ters and con­tribut­ing authors include:

Hypa­tia by Lisa Whit­ing
Lallesh­wari by Shali­ni Sin­ha
Anne Con­way by Julia Bocherd­ing
Mary Astell by Simone Webb
Mary Woll­stonecraft by San­drine Bergès
Har­ri­et Tay­lor Mill by Helen McCabe
Chris­tine Ladd-Franklin by Sara Uck­el­man
Mary Anne Evans by Clare Carlisle
Edith Stein by Jae Het­ter­ley
Han­nah Arendt by Rebec­ca Bux­ton
Simone de Beau­voir by Kate Kirk­patrick
Iris Mur­doch by Fay Niker
Eliz­a­beth Anscombe by Han­nah Carn­e­gy-Arbuth­nott
Mary Warnock by Gulzaar Barn
Iris Mar­i­on Young by Desiree Lim
Ani­ta L Allen by Ilhan Dahir
Azizah Y. al-Hib­ri by Nima Dahir
… and more excit­ing chap­ters yet to be announced.

You can learn more about the project and give it some finan­cial sup­port here. The project so far has 184 back­ers and has received 27% of its desired fund­ing.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

The Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers Recov­ered by the New Project Vox Web­site

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

The Map of Phi­los­o­phy: See All of the Dis­ci­plines, Areas & Sub­di­vi­sions of Phi­los­o­phy Mapped in a Com­pre­hen­sive Video

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R. Crumb Illustrates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: Existentialism Meets Underground Comics

in Art, Literature, Philosophy | September 18th, 2018

Sartre’s nov­el Nau­sea intro­duced his philo­soph­i­cal view as a form of ill­ness to a WWII read­er­ship. “Nau­sea is exis­tence reveal­ing itself—and expe­ri­ence is not pleas­ant to see,” he wrote in his own sum­ma­ry of his first book, pub­lished in 1938. The novel’s drama­ti­za­tion of His­to­ri­an Roquentin’ s cri­sis presents a case of exis­ten­tial sick­ness as most­ly invol­un­tary.

Though pub­lished before his many Marx­ist books and essays, Nau­sea con­nects the malaise to a cer­tain class expe­ri­ence. “I have no trou­bles,” thinks Roquentin in Robert Crumb’s short adap­ta­tion of the book above, “I have mon­ey like a cap­i­tal­ist, no boss, no wife, no chil­dren; I exist, that’s all…. And that trou­ble is so vague, so meta­phys­i­cal that I am ashamed of it.” Nau­sea, in one sense, is bour­geoise alien­ation, while Roquentin’s con­ver­sa­tion part­ner, the Self-Taught Man, con­fess­es a naïve human­ist ide­al­ism.

The char­ac­ters alone, some crit­ics sug­gest, imbue the book with a sub­tle par­o­dy. As he lis­tens to the Self-Taught Man’s trou­bles and rumi­nates on his own, Crumb’s Roquentin grows more Sartre-like. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the Self-Taught Man takes on a Crumb-like demeanor and aspect. Their dia­logue moves briskly, the scene resem­bling My Din­ner with Andre with less ban­ter and more neu­ro­sis. Sartre’s tone lends itself well to Crumb’s obses­sive, tight­ly-com­posed pan­els.

Crumb’s lit­er­ary inter­pre­ta­tions have grav­i­tat­ed toward oth­er anx­ious writ­ers like Charles Bukows­ki and Franz Kaf­ka, as well as the mur­der and incest of the book of Gen­e­sis. The under­ground comics leg­end is right at home with Sartre­an dread and despair. Crumb became famous for Fritz the Cat, an ani­mat­ed film ver­sion of his raunchy hip­ster, what many called his gross­ly sex­ist and racist sex fan­tasies, and the draw­ing and slo­gan “Keep on Truckin’.” He was a fig­ure of 60s and 70s coun­ter­cul­ture, but that’s nev­er where he belonged.

Crumb was a Sartre­an pro­tag­o­nist , even when he “often por­trayed him­self in his work as naked… and pri­apic.” In an an inter­view with Crumb The Guardian describes him:

his words are depres­sive and lugubri­ous, and yet he appears mel­low, laugh­ing eas­i­ly through his exis­ten­tial nau­sea. The most ter­ri­ble sto­ries amuse him as much as they pain him. He tells me how a best friend killed him­self by swal­low­ing four bot­tles of paper cor­rec­tion flu­id, and he chor­tles. He talks of his own despair, and gig­gles. He admits that he could nev­er have imag­ined a life quite so fulfilled—with Aline, and his beloved daugh­ter Sophie, also a car­toon­ist, and suc­cess and money—and says he’s still mis­er­able as hell, and laughs.

He is a lit­tle Roquentin, a lit­tle bit Sartre, a lit­tle bit Self-Taught man, apply­ing to his read­ing of lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy an LSD-assist­ed, sex-pos­i­tive, and unavoid­ably con­tro­ver­sial and depres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty. See the full Crumb-illus­trat­ed Nau­sea here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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