Thanks to the combination of summer and COVID quarantine, I’ve done more work than usual:

1. Aristippus, Benedetto Croce, Clive Bell, Walter Benjamin, Suzanne Langer, Monroe Beardsley, Morris Weitz, and Frank Sibley are added.
2. Benedict Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel got substantive revisions with a lot of new/edited sentences (12 and 20 respectively).
3. Sentences are added/edited for Plato, Aristotle (4), Thomas Hobbes, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume (6), Edmund Burke (2), Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (3), Arthur Schopenhauer (6), Charles Darwin, Søren Kierkegaard (2), Karl Marx, Charles Sanders Peirce (3), Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottlob Frege (3), Sigmund Freud, John Dewey (3), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman (2), Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfred Sellars, Paul Grice, John Jamieson Carswell Smart, Hilary Putnam (4), and Bernard Williams (4).
4. Dozens of new connections are drawn.

After much promising to myself and to you in previous posts, I finally started to work on increasing the amount of aesthetics content. I first studied Marcia Muelder Eaton’s Basic Issues in Aesthetics, which gave me an outline with nearly 30 new names to include as well as new sentences for the existing names. I decided to split the new philosophers into groups to be able to make smaller and more regular updates; this update has the first group. I did additional work on some of them using my old notes and books (from my university years when I was much more interested in art and its theory) and other sources. To illustrate why I’ve been wanting to work on aesthetics for a long time: There were 31 sentences tagged with “aesthetics” before this update, and now there are 101 of them (out of 1302 sentences from all branches in total). I’m hoping we will have a nice outline of the aesthetics literature when this series of updates ends.

 

 

Meanwhile, my attempts to concentrate on existing philosophers one by one to paint more accurate and richer pictures of them continue: I spent some time on Spinoza and then Hegel, and as a result, their influence became much more visible.

Now we can better distinguish that period of German idealism, with the ideas of Fichte-Schelling-Hegel sprouting through Hegel – and Schopenhauer’s disagreement with him.

 

In other news, Putnam has joined the club of philosophers who have red connections with themselves. I used to only have sentences from his second period on scientific realism (“internal realism”), now we have sentences exemplifying his first and third positions. I want to work more on this, but it’s a start.

 

The next updates will continue to include many names from aesthetics (including Stevenson, Mandelbaum, Gombrich, Wollheim, Danto, Dickie, etc.) along with important philosophers from other branches. And now that my promise about starting aesthetics is out of the way, I can start making new promises: I have many exciting interface upgrades on the way!

The usual reminder: You can browse the whole thing here.