David Morrow and I are doctoral candidates at the CUNY Graduate Center. We started working on this project about a year ago when we realized there’s just no good way to easily figure out how people are connected in philosophy. We asked this question while reading the American Pragmatists on the heels of our Quine/Sellars class with David Rosenthal. People talk about Quine and Sellars being *pragmatists*, but what does that mean really? More precisely, is there any direct link—say, a teacher-student line—back to figures like Peirce, James, and Dewey that would explain the approach that Quine and Sellars take? We could have found this out by digging through a few biographies, but we thought there should be a more immediate way to answer the question—and that approaching research this way might actually change the way we think about topics and look for sources.

We’re not historians of philosophy by trade. We’re metaethicists, in fact, and you can’t get much more contemporary than that. But we do think there’s huge value in understanding the origins of current views and that there’s no existing research tool that even approaches this kind of knowledge. With this goal in mind, we started thinking about where to get data and how to display it—and soon enough we set off planning The Phylosophy Project. (The name, incidentally, came from phylo, the Greek word for origins, which is exactly what we’re doing here: exploring the origins of recent philosophy.)

In the next month, we’ll be traveling around North America, gathering data for the project. Once we get back, we’ll start entering that data and making displays that can handle it gracefully. We expect to launch the site by late 2007, with possible beta testing earlier. The best way to stay updated on developments is to subscribe to our RSS feed, which is located at the bottom of the page. (If you don’t know what RSS is, check out some basic introductions at Wikipedia and XML.com.)

As the project moves along, we’ll accumulate lots of stuff: documents, interesting tidbits, observations on data, hard metadata stats, etc. That’s what this blog is for: a place to collect all of this together to keep users updated on what we’re doing and what we’ve found. It’s also another way (besides email, which you can find in the Contacts section) for you to tell us what you think about Phylo and how we can continue to improve it. It might even become (or link to) a discussion board where users can talk about more specific things they find in Phylo. It’s early in the project and a lot of things are still up in the air. As they become more definite, this is the place you’ll learn about them.