I have a bit more time at the moment to do some reading and so I find myself knotted up with different types of philosophy. Given humankind has had a long time to think, they seem to have created a field of inordinate complexity – in order to get my arms around it, I decided to generate a map of the landscape. Someone has probably done this and taken months or years to do it, and when they finished (like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge) they would have to go back again and add the new bits.
So I chatted with my old friend Claude and generated a list, plugged it into a mindmapping tool “mindmeister” and it looked pretty good, but it wasn’t interactive. So I prevailed upon Claude to help me map the world of Philosophy in a D3 tree. Click the “Result” tab below and see the tree, you can click on the nodes to expand an collapse. I’ll probably update the input data as its very preliminary (171 different areas).
Observations:
- doing a tree is a bit silly because there is much overlap and competing viewpoints.
- I had to move Neo Platonism around a few different places – no place is perfect for many things.
- I’m not sure when something is just a set of ideas and when it is a philosophy. Plato (or perhaps in Socrate’s voice) defined it as “love of wisdom”. Implicit in this is openness and curiosity, not necessarily staking out some ground to have a new “…ism”. Of course “Prismism” is the meta-meta of them 🙂
- You can’t just ask Claude for a complete list. I needed to prompt it many times with specific fields to get them added, for example: the Kyoto School is in there but currently we don’t have individuals like Hegel, Heidegger, Loch etc. They may be a proponent of a branch of philosophy but they are NOT “a philosophy”.
- Embedding religion in is problematic – but hey…..
- Marxism is widely acknowledged as a philosophy but perhaps some other politics does not qualify. i.e “Green”, “Nuclear Disarmament”, “Fishers and Shooters”