Kaush-K

RhizoMap

A Plateaued History of Thought

View the complete Interactive Map at the bottom of the page

As we set sail on a philosophical quest, we are confronted by an endless ocean with infinite trails laid out by explorers from dim and distant times.


Which one of these trails should we embark our journey on?


On which of the giants’ shoulders should we stand to be able to uncover the island that we seek?

The utilitarian drive to index disciplines entailed a dispersion of philosophy into a set of arborescent bodies of knowledge with seemingly co-dependent tap-roots and centers of thought. While attempts to model a holistic ontology (an exhaustive organization of the domain) have been futile, converging categories have nevertheless emerged, splitting the discipline into branches based on their superficial differences. These categories range from the prominent Analytical-Continental divide and extend to modes of classification defined by region (Eastern-Western-African), religion (Buddhist-Christian-Hindu-Islamic), school (Aristotelian-Augustinian—Hegelian-Kantian-Platonist) and period in history.

Each of these modes of classification provides us a concrete

discourse and a set of common devices to navigate that discourse. These modes are common to every academic discipline and their presence often helps in better structuring the problems that the discipline seeks to address. However, their presence in Philosophy could limit the potential of the very concepts they are defined by. In practice, works in philosophy are known to carry traces of concepts that spread across and transcend its borders and sometimes reach realms that seem to lie outside it. Therefore, the presence of hierarchical categorization that is efficient in offering predetermined paths for knowledge-building across disciplines fails to serve its purpose when put to use in philosophy in that it limits the possible states of being that its concepts could potentially inhibit.


How then would we access bodies of knowledge in philosophy without a catalog to index them?

The Rhizo-Map Project offers an alternative model to hierarchical modes of organizing philosophy. At its core is a mapping of bodies of knowledge onto a single plane without any pre-existing connections. The project is built on top of an extensive semantic analysis on open-source philosophy datasets and webpages. The semantic data is then mapped onto a 2D-plane with the only driving principle being a proximity of those nodes that share a higher number of concepts.


With each node having an equal influence on every other node, the map converges to a decentralized state. Rhizo-Map is a system devoid of any center or order. As a thinker approaches the map, they are confronted not by indexed paths or chains of “influenced by/influences”, but by an openness to draw their own pathways. Unlike a hierarchical structure, Rhizo-Map has multiple points of entry and exit and a multiplicity of nodes to connect the end points. The map can be highly insightful for students or researchers who are pushing their intellectual borders and in need of an unbiased compass for their next journey.

NOTE: To limit the size of the map to comprehendible scales, groups of concepts have been reduced to nodes each corresponding to an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/