Hello, I’m Dr. Anadale, and in this video I’d like to share with you a great history
of philosophy visualization tool by the Turkish philosopher Deniz Önduygu.
On his website here, “The History of Philosophy Summarized and Visualized,” he links to
the tool, which I'll show you in a moment, and gives something of the history of its development.
It's based mainly upon his notes from Brian McGee's Story of Philosophy and Thomas Baldwin's
Contemporary Philosophy.
And it is really a preliminary tool; it's not meant to be a final or definitive word
on the history of philosophy, but it's very helpful for seeing in a convenient fashion
the connections between different thinkers.
(It looks like it began here as a wall chart with pen and ink marks.)
So if I scroll back up to the tool, I will open it here.
As we see it's a long list from northwest to southeast of different thinkers with their
dates, and different doctrines listed next to them.
Coming from each doctrine we find green lines indicating agreement with other thinkers and
doctrines and red lines indicating disagreement or refutation or contrast.
So to show you a bit of how the interaction works I'm going to scroll out.
We can take a look at the entire thing, it's massive, it starts all the way at Thales and
Anaximander up here at the top and goes all the way down at the bottom right to Chalmers,
Butler, Peter Singer, philosophers who are alive today and some of their doctrines and
lines of agreement and disagreement with them.
To show you how this works that I'm going to scroll out with my scroll wheel and drag
my way up to this part, to a philosopher that we teach quite frequently in the classroom, Descartes.
What we have listed here in this tool are nine different doctrines attributed to Descartes.
Let's take a look at the first one: “In mathematics we start from indubitable premises
and deduce irrefutable conclusions.”
We see two red lines coming out of this, indicating two philosophers in the past with whom this
is a claim that disagrees.
When we click on it, it zooms in to tell us that this is a contrast with Zeno of Elea,
who held that an impeccably logical argument can lead to a false conclusion, and also with
Timon of Philus.
If we click “show further connections” we get a second generation indication that
Timon agrees with Pyrrho on this question.
On the original doctrine we have a book mark.
If we click it, it tells us that this doctrine is coming from McGee's Story of Philosophy.
So if I click outside of the window I come back to Descartes.
Let's take a look at another doctrine: “I may not know my own nature or the nature of
things but that I exist is indubitable.”
We click on it; we find agreement and disagreement.
An agreement with Saint Augustine who held to doubt anything I must exist, and with Descartes’
successor George Berkeley: we know that we exist because we have direct awareness of
our being a subject of experiences.
And a red line disagreement with David Hume, who held that introspection reveals just a
bundle of sensations, the self as an experiencing subject is a fiction.
Let's try clicking further connections, and what we find here at the second generation
(zooming out a little bit) is that quite a few successive philosophers agree with Hume
on this question.
We find, judging from this tool, a great deal of agreement with Hume’s theory of the self
and not very much agreement with Descartes among the philosophers in this chart.
So to take just look at some of them: Fichte, we have experience of our existence not as
knowing subjects by introspection but as moral agents, or Husserl: our awareness is of objects
but not of ourselves.
His agreement with Hume might combine with Hume’s disagreement with Descartes to suggest
a contrast between Husserl and Descartes.
If I wanted to follow any of these down, if I want to know more let's say about Husserl’s
doctrine I can simply jump over to that.
I can find the source there is also McGee's Story of Philosophy.
Husserl agreeing not just with Hume but also with Sartre on this question.
And the bigger picture emerging out of this.
Clicking outside the window again to zoom out, back down to Descartes
Let's try this last one: there are two kinds of substance, mind which I am as a conscious
being, and matter.
It looks like some agreement a lot of disagreement on this.
When I click the doctrine I can see agreement ascribed to two doctrines of Plato, and disagreement
with everyone from Ockham down through Spinoza, Conway, Leibniz, Berkeley, and the rest.
This is helpful just on a purely visual level to see that this apparently is quite a controversial
claim on Descartes’ part that has been rejected by many of the major philosophers coming after him.
In different ways of course with each one; Berkeley and Spinoza disagree with Descartes
on the nature of substance in quite different manners.
So there's a great deal of potential I think here for clicking through the different doctrines
by different thinkers and following out the connections between them.
You can discover quite a bit about how things are structured in the history of philosophy.
Spinoza's denial of dualism looks like it has a great deal of agreement among successive
thinkers, including ones in the 20th century, disagreeing with some dualists from before
according to these notes from this tool.
So I think there's a tremendously useful tool for students of philosophy, especially if
you want to know something about a philosopher that you're approaching for the first time.
You might ask yourself, “what are the fundamental doctrines of Leibniz and how do they line
up with other thinkers?”
Notice not all the doctrines here have lines of connection so that's something important to notice.
So we can find out something about Hutchison and how Francis Hutchinson's moral theory
lines up with the theories of other thinkers in modern times and ancient times.
So that's my quick look at this data visualization tool.
I hope you find it useful. I'll put a link to it in the description below.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.
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