Historical Map of Philosophies

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This was made in conjunction with Sonnet-3.7, then rebuilt as a D3 force graph so the connections can be quantised. Each edge now carries a type (was this an influence, a teaching relationship, an outright rejection, a synthesis, a response, or a speculative cross-tradition parallel?) and a weight in the 0–1 range (line thickness encodes how load-bearing the relationship is). Each node is sized by its degree centrality: the more philosophers a thinker connects to in the graph, the larger their dot. Drag a node to pull it; scroll to zoom; hover for the philosopher’s central idea, dates, and in/out edge counts. The pill toggles above the graph let you isolate a single edge type or peel periods off one at a time.


Philosophy Timeline Color Key

  • ■ Ancient Philosophy
    Greek, Roman, early Chinese, Indian and other traditions (c. 600 BCE - 500 CE)
  • ■ Medieval Philosophy
    Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and other scholastic traditions (c. 500 - 1400 CE)
  • ■ Renaissance Philosophy
    Humanism, early modern thought, reformation (c. 1400 - 1600 CE)
  • ■ Early Modern Philosophy
    Rationalism, empiricism, enlightenment (c. 1600 - 1800 CE)
  • ■ Modern Philosophy
    Idealism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, early analytic (c. 1800 - 1900 CE)
  • ■ Contemporary Philosophy
    Analytic, continental, postmodern traditions (c. 1900 CE - present)
  • ■ Non-Western Traditions
    Distinctive Asian, African, Indigenous philosophical systems (across all periods)

Note: Philosophers categorised by their primary period of influence, though many worked across traditional boundaries.


Edge Type Key

  • — Influenced
    The default relation: A's ideas shaped B's, without being explicitly synthesised, taught, or refused (c. 0.3–0.7 weight).
  • — Taught
    A direct teacher–student relationship, or a documented mentorship (Socrates → Plato, Russell → Wittgenstein, Husserl → Heidegger).
  • — Synthesised
    B explicitly rebuilt or fused A's framework into something new (Aquinas synthesising Aristotle via Averroes; Marx inverting Hegel; Frege foundationally rebuilt by Russell).
  • – – Responded to
    B took A as an interlocutor without simply accepting or rejecting them (Hume waking Kant from his dogmatic slumber; Berkeley answering Locke).
  • - - Rejected
    An explicit refusal: Al-Ghazali against Avicenna, Schopenhauer against Hegel, Kierkegaard against the Hegelian system, Nozick against Rawls.
  • · · Cross-tradition parallel
    A speculative or structural resonance rather than documented influence (Zhuangzi and Heraclitus on flux; Nagarjuna and Sextus on skepticism; Laozi and Spinoza on monism). Weighted low on purpose.

Edge weights are an editorial judgement, not a metric. The intent is for relative thickness within the graph to track how load-bearing each connection is in the historical record. Future iterations could derive these from citation counts.

Edges
Periods

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