
Structure of recent philosophy (2017) - lainon
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/noichlm94/posts/structure-of-recent-philosophy-iii/
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eseehausen
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.

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aisofteng
>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
>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.

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J253
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.

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nairboon
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?

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

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andrepd
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?

~~~
naasking
Other people have given more detailed answers, but those tend to be less
accessible. Sometimes, questions are far more interesting and accessible, so
as an introduction, ponder the following: why is mathematics so effective at
describing the real world?

Perhaps its effectiveness means that reality is itself mathematical? Or
perhapd it means that math is actually physical? Or perhaps neither?

Hopefully you can see that exploring such a question is neither a mathematical
or a scientific endeavour, but it is firmly in the philosophical realm where
it should be.

~~~
chr1
But does this kind of pondering lead to any deeper insights, and are this kind
of questions proposed by philosophers or by physicists and mathematicians
themselves?

About this particular question i know Wigner's article, and i saw Feynman,
Tegmark, Arkani-Hamed, and lecturers in my univercity talking. But they all
were physicists, and all of them seem to be rather sceptical about the
philosophy's contribution to such questions (especially Feynman).

Was this question noticed by philosophers earlier than it was noticed by
physicists? Do you know about any books or talks about philosophy that would
help physicists to better appreciate the contribution of philosophy?

~~~
naasking
> But does this kind of pondering lead to any deeper insights

Depends what you mean by "this kind". If you mean nonempirical,
nonmathematical exploration, then absolutely. Relativity and Bell's theorem
both started as thought experiments concerned with metaphysical properties,
which then led to real experiments.

> are this kind of questions proposed by philosophers or by physicists and
> mathematicians themselves?

Hard to quantify, mainly because it's not clear how seriously scientists
actually take philosophical works, so the sample is biased (and there's
evidence they're largely disdainful of it).

Philosophers definitely read the works of scientists though, and they provide
important analyses of their underlying assumptions. When scientists themselves
also engage on this level, we see significant advances in foundations of
theories, like many worlds, Bohmian mechanics, quantum information theory, and
so on.

~~~
chr1
> and there's evidence they're largely disdainful of it

Maybe it's an immune reaction.

Scientists need to ask and answer to philosophical questions, to know where to
search, but they also need to be ready to easily dismiss their philosophical
theories to not spend too much time searching in a region with no solutions.

So this necessity of assigning low value to their own philosophical theories,
may be causing them to assign low value to the whole field.

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yug_blop
American pragmatism (Richard Rorty) got snuffed.

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dandare
> 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.

~~~
olooney
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_neigh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neighbor_embedding)

[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-...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-
on-the-output-of-t-sne)

[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)

