Check this out, my cliterate haotics:
http://www.mindmeister.com/23290325/western-philosophy
For those familiar with particular philosophers and historical periods, how accurate or useful do you find this map?
Any glaring omissions or errors?
That is so good I sent it to my philosophy professor. The explanations are a bit brief, but if you're familiar with all the ideas it's perfect.
No omissions I was able to spot at first blush.
Machiavelli never said it was better to be feared than loved, he said it was safer (even then you're taking it out of context).
Yeah yeah it should note that "The Prince" was a satire taken seriously.
I don't think I've ever heard The Prince called satire.
Certainly not his core views, it was written for a very specific purpose (to get him a job), but I'm pretty sure it was still honest advice for the person it was written for.
Descartes made major contributions to the philosophy of science, this is probably worth mentioning.
Sartre.
Peirce (the other pragmatist and the least boring one IMO) might be good to add.
Transcendentalists, specifically Emerson, while not a glaring omission, could be counted as philosophers, and certainly made an impact on modern thinking, especially in the area of environmental ethics and philosophy.
No glaring omissions otherwise, though there were a few typographical errors you might want to correct.
Foucault is a fairly massive omission from the "Modernity II" section.
Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius are fairly important, yet missing from the Roman period.
Tertullian needs to be included among the Christians.
Apart from that, not bad I guess.
Quote from: Cain on December 10, 2010, 01:43:46 PM
Foucault is a fairly massive omission from the "Modernity II" section.
D'oh. I thought he was there.
Quote from: Cain on December 10, 2010, 01:43:46 PM
Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius are fairly important, yet missing from the Roman period.
Not if Epicureans and Stoics are a collective under Greeks. Though, I would argue that you should separate Hellenistic philosophers from the Greeks and put them there. Also, Cicero was a Skeptic much more than an Epicurean, by most readings. Also, he was much less influential than Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius.
Quote from: Cain on December 10, 2010, 01:43:46 PM
Tertullian needs to be included among the Christians.
Apart from that, not bad I guess.
I don't know much about him. Damn, Cain just schooled me in my own yard. :oops:
ETA: Fuck making sure everything was where I wanted it to be before I post. That's what edit is for, right? :argh!:
I hadn't looked under the Ancient Greeks yet, but I will say I disapprove of "schools" being included there, since there are no schools in modernity or the age of ideology, even though there could easily be. Individual philosophers or GTFO, that's my motto.
Requia, many Enlightenment age philosophers have suggested The Prince was a satire aimed at the Vatican. This makes sense for a number of reasons, the focus on Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli was a noted satirical playwright and Lorenzo II, to whom the book was dedicated, was gifted with the Duchy of Urbino because he hired his troops to the Pope in order to defeat Francesco Maria I della Rovere, its previous ruler, and the Pope then justified his control of it as part of the payment (thus further proving Machiavelli's point, that the Vatican easily puts aside Christian morality for "pagan" power politics when it suits it). However, his Discourses on Livy is an excellent piece of political philosophy and no-one has suggested it is a satire.
Quote from: Cain on December 10, 2010, 02:19:18 PM
I hadn't looked under the Ancient Greeks yet, but I will say I disapprove of "schools" being included there, since there are no schools in modernity or the age of ideology, even though there could easily be. Individual philosophers or GTFO, that's my motto.
I would agree, but I am loath to tell people how to organize their own projects. But, I fully support you doing so. :lulz:
Also, Jean Bodin should be under Renaissance philosophers, along with Hugo Grotius.
this is pretty cool! I like the neat concise summary of each idea. and the way it's organized helps group ideas together. Did you make this? Good work here.
Quote from: Cain on December 10, 2010, 02:19:18 PM
I hadn't looked under the Ancient Greeks yet, but I will say I disapprove of "schools" being included there, since there are no schools in modernity or the age of ideology, even though there could easily be. Individual philosophers or GTFO, that's my motto.
Requia, many Enlightenment age philosophers have suggested The Prince was a satire aimed at the Vatican. This makes sense for a number of reasons, the focus on Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli was a noted satirical playwright and Lorenzo II, to whom the book was dedicated, was gifted with the Duchy of Urbino because he hired his troops to the Pope in order to defeat Francesco Maria I della Rovere, its previous ruler, and the Pope then justified his control of it as part of the payment (thus further proving Machiavelli's point, that the Vatican easily puts aside Christian morality for "pagan" power politics when it suits it). However, his Discourses on Livy is an excellent piece of political philosophy and no-one has suggested it is a satire.
That I can kindof see, he really doesn't ever have good things to say about the church.
Quote from: Cramulus on December 10, 2010, 03:53:09 PM
Did you make this?
No. I should have been clearer in the OP...
It just seems like it could be very useful if it's accurate, and I certainly don't have the breadth of knowledge to be able to ascertain that. But it sounds as though it's pretty decent as far as super-condensed notes go. If people keep adding concise critiques, well, combined with this thread it could be quite a valuable resource. I have some criticisms to add myself, but I haven't had the time to double check and otherwise organize my thoughts about it.
Also, the mind map structure seems conducive to generating new ideas, and I can say this from experience as I've taken a number of classes that required them. There's something about mapping ideas that inherently change the way you think about them, almost always in a positive way, IMO.
Quote from: Requia ☣ on December 10, 2010, 05:47:50 PM
That I can kindof see, he really doesn't ever have good things to say about the church.
Well he was a Renaissance humanist...and while there were many monstrous leaders in Italy over the past hundred or so years since the Papacy had returned from Avignon, an usually high number of them were pets of the Church. The return meant the Church had re-established the Papal States and so was a player in Italian politics just as much as the Visconti, Sforza, Medici etc...yet they kept promoting the idea that they were above it all and only sought spiritual power.
Apart from what Cain pointed out, I would beef up the Modernity 2 section. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Jaspers make up a big chunk of phenomenology from the second half of the 20th century. Maybe Michel Henri as well, though I don't really know how important he's considered outside of la francophonie.
Also, I would consider Fichte important enough to the Germany Ideology movement to put him in there.
Almost forgot! Super important: Hannah Arendt.
One more thing: you're dissection of Habermas only includes his political work, without making any mention of his epistemology (which is super exciting!).
Otherwise it's not bad :)
I just fell onto this on stumbleupon :)
Oh wait-
Needs (well, I think so:) Dennett, Chalmers, Blackmore, Block, Damasio, Nagel, and, hell why not, Hofstadter.
I veto Chalmers, on the premise that philosophical zombies are the silliest shit I have ever encountered.
Quote from: Cain on December 22, 2010, 06:45:56 AM
I veto Chalmers, on the premise that philosophical zombies are the silliest shit I have ever encountered.
Yeah, holy shit is that stupid. I didn't even know about it till Yudowsky covered it in one of his sequences.
"People are walking around, exactly like us, down to the very molecular arrangements,
except they're not conscious."
:lulz:
While I also dispute Chalmers' claims, this is something of a misconstrual of his actual argument. He does not suppose (at least in this particular argument) that these zombies actually exist. His claim is that if it is possible in a purely conceptual sense for PZ's to exist, then qualia must exist, which, by his reasoning, means physicalism is false.
Also, being wrong does not preclude philosophers from being "important". Philosophers, disappointingly, do not have the same victory conditions as we do.