2024 continues to be productive on the editorial side. Here’s what I’ve done since March:

• I’ve added Zeno of Citium, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Alvin Plantinga, Ned Block, Galen Strawson, and Graham Oppy.
• I’ve made substantive revisions with lots of new/edited sentences for David Hume (13), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (23), and Franz Brentano (7).
• I’ve added/edited sentences for Zeno of Elea (2), Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm (2), Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, John Locke (3), John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Charles Sanders Peirce (2), William James (3), Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl (4), George Edward Moore (2), Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein (5), Martin Heidegger (2), Carl Hempel (2), Gilbert Ryle, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Willard Van Orman Quine, Paul Grice, Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, Abraham Irving Melden, John Jamieson Carswell Smart (2), John Mackie (3), Hilary Putnam, Noam Chomsky, Jean Baudrillard, John Searle (2), Jerry Fodor, Thomas Nagel (3), Frank Jackson, David Lewis (2), John McDowell, Daniel Dennett, Nancy Cartwright, and James Ladyman.
• I’ve drawn 1352 new connections, making a total of 7441 (4423 positive, 3018 negative) connections between 1990 sentences from 182 philosophers.

 

Highlights

I started this project in 2014 using Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy as the main reference. In that book, Magee groups the Stoics in one section and talks about their ideas as a school, without focusing on each philosopher. So I did as Magee did and added them as a group in 2014:

As the project’s got bigger and richer over the years, this grouping has started to stick out, and has become an obstacle for possible updates. I’ve been planning to expand it into separate names for some time, and I finally did it by working on Zeno of Citium, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. (I still have figures to add such as Chrysippus, Cicero, and Seneca but it’s a good start.)

 

Another task I had been planning for a long time was to include some recent philosophy of religion. I started with Plantinga and Oppy, and additions to Mackie etc.

 

Similarly, I worked on two prominent figures in recent philosophy of mind whom I’d been planning to add for some time, Ned Block and Galen Strawson. I’ve always kinda liked Strawson’s Eddington-inspired panpsychism argument even though I’m a “Denier” (his term for illusionists).

 

Reading Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries was very productive for this project since it covers a wide range of topics with dedicated chapters mostly written from a historical perspective. (I especially enjoyed Amy Kind’s introduction and mind-body chapter, Walsh and Yoshimi’s phenomenology chapter, Yoo’s mental causation chapter, and Schroeder’s Wittgenstein chapter. It was a nice surprise to find out that Jeff Yoshimi has also done great work on visualizing philosophy and debates.) The book led to substantive revisions/additions in Brentano, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. There was a lot of discussion around behaviorism in multiple chapters, which resulted in many related updates including the addition of Skinner.

 

I read some Hume and Rousseau and made extensive revisions (13 and 23 sentences added/edited respectively).

 

After revising Hume, I spent some more time on causation and added sentences for Mill, Mackie, Cartwright, etc.

 

Since 2014 when I started this project, I’ve always felt sad when I had to add the year of death for a philosopher next to their birth year. Doing it for Dan Dennett was too hard for me and I postponed it for months. Here’s my personal remembrance of him.

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