.info is one of the more popular generic top-level domains released in 2000. It is intended for “informative websites” and had roughly 5.2 million name registrations by April 2008.

One benefit of our new domain is the simplicity of browsing to

phylo.info/john_rawls

phylo.info/willard_van_orman_quine

phylo.info/donald_davidson

ABSTRACT.  Traditional representations of philosophy have tended to prize the role of reason in the discipline. These accounts focus exclusively on ideas and arguments as animating forces in the field. But anecdotal evidence and more rigorous sociological studies suggest there is more going on in philosophy. In this article, we present two hypotheses about social factors in the field: that social factors influence the development of philosophy, and that position of status and reputation—and thus social influence—will tend to be awarded to philosophers who offer rationally compelling arguments for their views. In order to test these hypotheses, we need a more comprehensive grasp on the field than traditional representations afford. In particular, we need more substantial data about various social connections between philosophers. This investigation belongs to a naturalized metaphilosophy, an empirical study of the discipline itself, and it offers prospects for a fuller and more reliable understanding of philosophy. 

 Download “Naturalized Metaphilosophy” (PDF)

At this point, the data is still tabular, but we’re making steady progress on our first visualization, which should be an institutional timeline. Charts, graphs, and network maps should follow in the coming months. We’ve also disabled account creation and data editing/uploading for the moment, until the rest of our initial, verified dataset has been entered.

After you’ve had a chance to play around a bit, drop us a line in the Feeback section of Phylo forum or via email (phylo@phylosophy.net) with your initial thoughts on site design and usability.

As usual, we’ll continue to post regular updates on the project to this blog.

To set the stage, we talked about a number of existing uses of Web 2.0 in philosophy, including conferences, publications, and research tools. Since there was a lot of interest in these links, I’ve pasted them below.

Conferences

• Online Philosophy Conference (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/
  online_philosophy_confere/)
• Second Life (http://secondlife.com/)

Publications

• Philosopher’s Imprint (http://www.philosophersimprint.org/)
  
• Philosophy Compass (http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/philosophy/)
  
• Online Papers in Philosophy (http://philosophy.jollyutter.net/opp/)
• The Institute for the Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org)

Research Tools

• Philosophy Journals Wiki (http://wikihost.org/wikis/philjinfo/wiki/start)
• Philosophy Jobs Wiki (http://wikihost.org/wikis/academe/wiki/philosophy)

Academic Genealogies

• Mathematics Genealogy Project (http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/)
• The Philosophy Family Tree (https://webspace.utexas.edu/deverj/personal/
  philtree/philtree.html)
• Australasian Family Tree (http://consc.net/tree.html)

As usual, these and more are available on our Links page above.

We got a number of good suggestions at the conference, including several contacts at other projects that should be especially helpful in the future.

The CUNY PhD Program in Philosophy ranked second among philosophy graduate programs nationally and first among aggregated philosophy and religion doctoral programs. The full rankings are available at http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/.

CUNY’s strong reputation makes it a good place for us to be developing a tool like Phylo. We’ve already gotten some great input from faculty members who are active in the field—presenting, publishing, editing—and I expect they’ll be able to offer many suggestions as we develop the displays and search functions of Phylo.

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.