7 ms·

Structure of recent philosophy (2017)

105 points by lainon 8y ago

aisofteng 8y ago
>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.
- paulvorobyev 8y ago
  >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.
  - parForTheCourse 8y ago
    Socrates?
- FabHK 8y ago
  > 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.
nairboon 8y ago
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?
- netcan 8y ago
  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.
- FabHK 8y ago
  His "Open Society" is arguably his epistemology applied to political philosophy (just as falsifiabilism is his epistemology applied to philosophy of science).
LeeJMiller 8y ago
my buddy's friend makes $96 hourly on the internet. She has been with out artwork for five months however final month her charge emerge as $12747 really on foot on the internet for some hours. study greater on this net internet site... HERE.......www.moneytechs.com
dandare 8y ago
> 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.
- Emma_Goldman 8y ago
  Same. I don't really get it. The explanation is far too elliptical.
- olooney 8y ago
  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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neighbor_embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis [5]: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-on-the-output-of-t-sne https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  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...)
andrepd 8y ago
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?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bhritchie 8y ago
  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.
  - pvitz 8y ago
    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_Arithmetic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundations_of_Arithmeti...)
- n4r9 8y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Maudlin [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/
J253 8y ago
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.
yug_blop 8y ago
American pragmatism (Richard Rorty) got snuffed.
eseehausen 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

105 points by lainon 8y ago

>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.

paulvorobyev 8y ago
>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.
- parForTheCourse 8y ago
  Socrates?
FabHK 8y ago
> 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.

nairboon 8y ago

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?

netcan 8y ago
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.
FabHK 8y ago
His "Open Society" is arguably his epistemology applied to political philosophy (just as falsifiabilism is his epistemology applied to philosophy of science).

LeeJMiller 8y ago

my buddy's friend makes $96 hourly on the internet. She has been with out artwork for five months however final month her charge emerge as $12747 really on foot on the internet for some hours. study greater on this net internet site... HERE.......www.moneytechs.com

dandare 8y ago

> 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.

Emma_Goldman 8y ago
Same. I don't really get it. The explanation is far too elliptical.
olooney 8y ago
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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neighbor_embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis [5]: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-on-the-output-of-t-sne https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding
claudiawerner 8y ago
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...)

andrepd 8y ago

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?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bhritchie 8y ago
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.
- pvitz 8y ago
  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_Arithmetic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundations_of_Arithmeti...)
n4r9 8y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Maudlin [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/

J253 8y ago

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.

yug_blop 8y ago

American pragmatism (Richard Rorty) got snuffed.

eseehausen 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]